| I draw and design, purely as a hobby. And it can be tricky to know when enough is enough. I've ruined several good sketches because of my tendency to over-"design", adding too much details that just ends up ruining my works. That's part of the reason why I like what I feel are creative and elegantly "clean" promotional posters. And I often run into a problem with anime posters. In that they squash together characters randomly, resized some, added in some fluffs in Photoshop and called it a day. A lot of my favorite anime are guilty of this, especially this one friggin' poster:  Or you know, the classic over-"designed":  I mean, if it was just the concert band's setup for the concert (the one in the lower half), it'd be great. But then the large heads, and, uh, the clearly out of place pic of Hazuki praying... why? I find that lot of the show's promotional posters emphasizes the cute girls over the concert band idea that I can't really fault people's initial impression that it's just a bland "m'fing-tea-and-cakes" moe show. I think poster design is an interesting topic to discuss because while it won't really easily dissuade you, except in extreme cases, a great poster design can captivate you into watching an anime you might not have given a second thought otherwise. Especially since promotional posters are meant to sell the main idea or concept of the series/movies. So let's talk about that. Have you ever been captivated by great poster designs that it sold the show to you? Which posters? And what about them? I'll start. Exhibit A: I rarely praise Ghost in the Shell 1995 but damn, these posters should be and probably are iconic in their own rights. A picture worth a thousand words, I say. This is one of the most effective posters I've seen in anime. It gives you a general idea of what to expect and it's pretty damn gorgeous to boot, the left one especially. I know I said some things about overly-detailed but here there's no gaudiness to it and/or a grating mismatch of colors.   Exhibit B: Captivating imagery/motifs. They make you wonder "Why birds? Why those birds in particular?" I find that it hooks me.   Exhibit C: Gorgeous posters that avoids being lurid and retains a sense of elegance while still selling the core idea of the work. Take Sound! Euphonium's for example: the focus on cute girl(s) is toned down and the intruments are given more, well, focus. We see Kumiko's hard at practice, which is a large large part of the series. And if nothing else, these posters are really pretty to look at and effort seemed present on planning how and what to show with as little strokes as possible.   |
 You gave up your freedom of speech when you clicked Agree to the User Agreement This is not a public platform. My gaze is the measure of all things: I stopped considering "anime" a helpful tag Recommended Essays Exploring Actually Excellent World-Building |
| Posters don't really win me over, but I guess it also doesn't help that the images on MAL are pretty small, so you can't really get a good look at them. I need to see a trailer showcasing some scenes and character designs. Good music really helps too. |
This one easily. The one from Mahou Shoujo Site. Once I saw that key visual, I knew I had to watch the show. And, (not) surprisingly, he ended being the best character. |
IllyricusAug 31, 2018 1:45 PM
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| Y'know the other day I was just thinking, I should have picked up the Dog Days and Fractale posters that someone offered me a while back. I've now seen Fractale But yeah, sometimes I look at a poster and find a character cute enough like the art style enough to want to watch the show. I agree the "here's a bunch of characters' heads" style is sorta lame. But I haven't really thought much about this topic. |
| Avatar character is Gabriel from Gabriel DropOut. |
| every anime that's not a sequel to a show i like. other then the ones that i find random youtube videos on. |
| "among monsters and humans, there are only two types. Those who undergo suffering and spread it to others. And those who undergo suffering and avoid giving it to others." -Alice “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” David Hume “Evil is created when someone gives up on someone else. It appears when everyone gives up on someone as a lost cause and removes their path to salvation. Once they are cut off from everyone else, they become evil.” -Othinus  |
| Most of the posters you posted are ugly op The second poster would be the best here if they took out that awfully blurred praying girl bubble Ngnl 0's posters are what i call great posters |
| Most underated anime on mal: https://myanimelist.net/anime/4651/Yume_no_Crayon_Oukoku?q=Yume%20ni%20crayon |
Akerakai said: Most of the posters you posted are ugly op The second poster would be the best here if they took out that awfully blurred praying girl bubble This is going to be a very late reply but I don't think you read my post in full because I was criticizing about half (Edit: actually, just the first two) the posters I posted. --- I want to add the JoJo Part 5 poster here because it's just oozing with style:  |
EankiOct 26, 2018 9:13 PM
You gave up your freedom of speech when you clicked Agree to the User Agreement This is not a public platform. My gaze is the measure of all things: I stopped considering "anime" a helpful tag Recommended Essays Exploring Actually Excellent World-Building |
| Never watched a show because of the poster, but yeah, several times I ignored them because they were terrible. I almost did that with the Bunny Girl anime, though now I'm almost wishing I did. The mishmash of faces, or characters, is a good example of bad design. From the top of my head I can't even remember one time it worked save for the classic Star Wars posters (because the new ones are terrible, cheesy at best), the Nausicaa poster on MAL, and MAYBE the original Blade Runner one, but I may be biased here. That said, I'm a HUGE sucker for the Princess Mononoke japanese movie poster. It's so simple and yet may be my favorite one. I even have it on my wall. Actually, Ghibli posters overall are usually very pleasant to the eye.   The Tatami Galaxy and the first Kizumonogatari posters are pretty neat, too.   |
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I like Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal's poster a lot.  |
The only time a promo poster has recently ever really peaked my curiosity that I can think of is Sakasama no Patema, because it literally does so when you look at it. It get's you wondering what the story is, whether the image has any relevance or if it's just there to bait you in. Though I generally like clean posters with very minimal words/text, preferably just the title and sometimes without. Sadly, MAL uses a lot of the bad images of what they do have for their respective pages. |
| Keijo poster made me watch the anime. Cute girls in bikini ftw. |
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| I really like the Tenshi no Tamago poster they use on here. It's clean yet detailed and I just like Yoshitake Amano's style in general. |
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| Don't think I ever had a poster made me watch an anime I am a sucker for nice nature background settings even if its simplistic.          Some of the ones that I like that doesn't concentrate on nature      |
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 I thought this looked like the coolest shit ever back then, so I had to watch Psycho-Pass. |
| Who are you and why do you show your hostility towards a complete stranger whom you've not once spoken with before. Are you seriously asking to get blocked? Well, if that's what your intent is; to tempt me into throwing hands with someone as lowly and insignificant as you, then i may grant your wish provided you articulate yourself a bit better when trying to spite a person of my wavelength. |
| Every single poster of gurren lagann fits your category of "over"-designed. But they also look super cool. Nice thread BTW. I appreciate the effort put into it. |
no iconic Akira poster?  even that new running anime had a parody of this |
| I never look at promotional material. |
I remember that I started watching Nagi no Asukara right after I looked at its poster and character designs, so I guess you could say that the poster really did won me over.  Lucky for me, it actually became my favorite anime at the time and is still to this date. |
Higurashi Gou is the worst anime in existence. |
I don't recall many examples of watching a show solely due to its promo pics, but there are some really interesting indeed. I would lie for instance if I said that the promo pic of Bunny Girl didn't catch my attention. The pose and the coloring are intriguing: Another one I always liked, even before watching the movie, is Princess Arete's sketchy-styled poster:  Speaking of movie posters, they tend to be better from my observation. Some others have been mentioned already like Akira, Ghost in the Shell or various Ghibli films. Not much of a fan of Akage no Anne's featured pic, but then you have these:   And this one from the recap movie, it's so cute:  The entirety of the promotional art of Haibane Renmei and Serial Experiments Lain is gorgeous. The dull colors, the character expressions and etc. Really unique, oddly warm in one, unsettling in the other. I haven't watched Texhnolyze but I'm sold on the same basis. Like the OP, I'm not a fan of cramped posters, with too many characters in a narrow space. Except perhaps when I feel the poster intends to feel cramped. Welcome to the NHK! is a great example of this. Just the expression of Satou and the feeling that everything behind is either feeding or growing from his paranoia makes it work really well.  Also mentioned above but Yuru Camp's promo art is gorgeous. Definitely more than the usual for cutesy slice of life stuff, even above the standard of pastoral iyashikei. I think the main reason is how it takes advantage of space and perspective. There is a fair balance of focus between characters and background and they become part of each other. The solo pics are specially beautiful:   And so is this group pic in particular:  The other two, while cute, have better equivalents in the anime and don't capture quite as well what makes the promo art of this show so good: the relative position of the characters to their scenery. This pic from Non Non Biyori is similar to these two, but to me it works better because the characters are less evenly framed:  |
jal90Oct 27, 2018 4:17 AM
| not realy a promotional poster but when I was reading berserk, I had in on hold after 1 volume but upon seeing this masterpiece of an image, I decided"hey that looks cool as fuck" and I restarted reading(gosh unlike all of my life decision this was a good one)  |
| It was only with Made in Abyss that the promotional poster conviced me to watch the anime. I really like the color and the drawing of the background. And placing Reg and Riko in the middle of it made it perfect. |
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Yes, it happened to me when I first saw Clannad After Story's here on MAL: I had already heard of the word "Clannad" but I had no idea what it was about, its characters or anything but god, that poster. I felt incredibly sad/melancholic/so sorry for the girl even though I didn't know who she or the robot was. Of course, short after that I saw its rating, the very positive reviews, which also made me feel compelled me to watch Clannad in its entirety but I guess I would've never watched it (or rather being interested) if I hadn't seen that poster first. It happened once again with Ginga eiyuu densetsu, although the feels weren't near as strong as the ones I had with AF:  I simply liked this one because of the space-themed background but there was something else which I can't quite put my finger on. I first thought of the word "Epic" but not as in "awesome", rather "Epic" as in something big, important, a story that would involve and decide the fate of the whole universe. Well, those two were my picks. I decided to go for an "emotional" explanation instead of design details like you because I don't know anything about the latter. |
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| oh all the time. a lot of the anime i watch are solely based on their cover |
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I've always thought that the art for Pokemon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew is sick. The DVD case has bumps on it matching the outline of Lucario and the design of the cover, making it even more cool.  The poster for Your Lie in April has a tone that is up front, warm, inviting, and passionate, which helped draw me into the anime. It gives a sense that the girl in the middle is important in the anime.  In contrast, the poster for Tsuki ga Kirei is cool, empty, and distant. Some of the more prominent characters are in the foreground off to the side while the sky is featured in the centre, making the problems of the characters seem small relative to the rest of the world.  |
| I don't think there's even an anime where the promotional poster won me over. |
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| Seems that great looking posters have one or two huge targets while three or more targets grounped together, but their size dimensions are decreased. For two objects in focus, they can either be side-by-side or one in the foreground and the other in the background. Background color is a one solid color with objects topped on it like tree braches from a tree extended past the poster's dimensions or loose flowers floating in the sky backdrop. |
Eanki said: Post I love poster art, which is a dying industry, although I have rarely been impressed by anything I've seen in anime. The iconic Akira and Ghost in the Shell posters posted above are good, but I struggle to think of much else. The two Shigurui ones are decent;   Both convey the gorgeous blood and madness that was the series at its best. |
I really like the look of No Game No Life Zero poster, the details on Schwi, the background, it looks nice. |
MegaStrideOct 30, 2018 9:22 PM
| I actually collect some anime posters. My theater room has three of my favorites framed and displayed, all B2 size with custom frames: Galaxy Express 999 Movie Adieu Galaxy Express 999 Queen Millennia Movie   Oddly none of Adieu on the wall... They don't sell me on watching a movie but I find some quite artistically beautiful. |
CassieXKROct 30, 2018 10:26 PM
The megalo box promotional poster made me decide to watch it before I even knew anything about the show because of how badass it looked. |
  whats a signature |
I dunno, for some reason this one always blew my mind |
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