"Movie Poster Font" Copyright?

[Justin Anderson]

I'm designing a website for commercial use and I'm considering using the Movie Poster font for all of the buttons. Does anyone know if there's a copyright on that? How would I find out?


thanks,
-J

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Where is the font from? That makes a lot of difference. Linotype has no "Movie Poster" font in their library, Adobe does I think... But their site is down right now for a scheduled maintenance deal. You could always go over to the typophile.com forums and see what people have to say there.

In general, if you or your client buys the font from one of the bigger type libraries, then you're usually OK to use it. However, some fonts do have additional provisions, some even carry royalty restrictions so be sure to read up on what you're doing. When you're talking about a "Move Poster" font, I'm assuming you mean the thin sans-serif lettering used these days for all the names and other info usually found at the bottom. If that's the case, there's a few different sources for this font out there and all are essentially the same, but vary in price (I even think there is a free one or two) and license conditions.

You might also be able to get away with some of the common free ones included with many PC/Mac systems these days. Just stretch them vertically a bit... News Gothic, Century Gothic, Eurostile and the like come to mind for this.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

There's this one that appears to be free...

[Justin Anderson]

There's this one that appears to be free...

sweet. I'll check. Thanks.

[Zak Forsman]

a friend of mine designs major studio theatrical release posters for a living. according to her, there is no real standard, but Univers 39 Thin Ultra Condensed is the most common. and it's what i used in the mock-up poster for my upcoming feature, although mine differs in that i didn't use "small caps" for the attributes... $24 at fonts.com

[Manfred Lopez]

I always end up doing my own on Photoshop. I have far greater control that way. The first step is to build up a basic alphabet by stretching and molding a ready-made font. Then, you paste all letters right next to each other on 3 or 4 long strips. Last, you assemble each line of words for the poster (or your website) on new strips, while saving the original ones as a reference alphabet. The completed phrases in the new strips then get squashed together into a single layer and pasted wherever you want them. This actually resembles how type used to be put together in printing presses in the old days...

Oh yea, all this to save yourself the 24 bucks... (and any copyright provisions since you made it yourself).

[PaulClements]

I always end up doing my own on Photoshop. I have far greater control that way. The first step is to build up a basic alphabet by stretching and molding a ready-made font. Then, you paste all letters right next to each other on 3 or 4 long strips. Last, you assemble each line of words for the poster (or your website) on new strips, while saving the original ones as a reference alphabet. The completed phrases in the new strips then get squashed together into a single layer and pasted wherever you want them. This actually resembles how type used to be put together in printing presses in the old days...

Oh yea, all this to save yourself the 24 bucks... (and any copyright provisions since you made it yourself).

Only problem with that is if you should ever want to blow up a large poster of it the text will antialias badly. But if you know you are only ever doing it as a mockup for 72dpi for the web, or are prepared to redesign it later then it's an ok way to work.

There are actually hundreds of Fonts you can use to do this. Some designed specifically and others that squash down. You'd be better of using the ones designed specifically as squashing a font can cause jagged edges at low resolution on screen sometimes (Anyone who's tried squashing Machine, which is the red logo font, to 30% height at a small size ought to recognise this problem).

Zak's Univers shout is a very good one and I haven't got time to look for others at the moment but if I remember I will chuck a few more in.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Only problem with that is if you should ever want to blow up a large poster of it the text will antialias badly. But if you know you are only ever doing it as a mockup for 72dpi for the web, or are prepared to redesign it later then it's an ok way to work.

Just do the initial design at large format 3'x4' poster size and 600dpi to start with. ;)

Even with changing fonts, as long as you keep the original vecor forms reflecting all the transformations and don't rasterize you're fine. You'll have far more trouble scaling up the raster artwork used in a poster than the type.

[Manfred Lopez]

Yes, the text in photoshop doesn't get "digitized" until you flatten the layers, so your movie text will scale to any resolution. Also, I alwas start my posters at maximum size (huge file), and when their done, then I scale them down to all the sizes that I need. Otherwise it just doesn't feel like a real poster if it is not a huge file with huge hi-rez pictures.

[Martin Drew]

Easier done in Illustrator, much greater control of vectors there.

M