Role

One-Sheet Poster Design

CLIENT

The Criterion Collection / Janus Films
Art Directed by Eric Skillman

Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game from 1939 begins a special run at Film Forum with a new 4K restoration courtesy of Janus Films and I designed the new one-sheet poster! NO PRESSURE. 🤯 It’s only one of the greatest films ever made.

The design is meant to reference a combination of vintage card decks and board games, posters and playbills for stage shows, and covers of etiquette books. I thought it might be neat to also reference the graphic checkerboard floors and servant’s table featured in the iconic chateau set that Renoir surely meant to evoke the idea of a game board. I tried to keep things very high contrast and full of opposites and I had included a couple of variations that invert just in case a reversible poster might be in the cards and could look neat in multiples.

The mud/shadows around the edges dirtying the floor of the chateau are meant to represent the foreboding sense of what is to come and also reference how beautiful but sullied their world really is at the same time. For a few options, I tried to enclose sections of the type like they are in rooms and look like an overhead floor plan view of the chateau since closed off vignettes of acts take place within them in the film.

The type is over-the-top art deco or overwrought and a bit too stuck-in-the-past traditional and I tried to juxtapose the two since the film is so much about being stuck in the past and fighting the future that is very much banging on its door.

✨ The border queen strikes again. ✨

Many thanks to the incredible Eric Skillman at Criterion for thinking of me for this!