Box art sucks

[Aerozord]

Now before someone mentions it I'm aware of the funtime adventure (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTu2XPjB9tk) video. But this isn't about how great the old stuff is, in fact its not even something so objective.

I was looking over the PS3 and Xbox games and realized, they are all the same. "Guy standing in front of bland background." If you are lucky you might get some other characters in the distance, or a background thats more than an abstraction of colors and shapes.

I mean where is the variety people. The whole point of box art is to make your product stand out on store shelves, which is hard to do when they all look the same.

[Bells]

on that department, if you google Japanese box art you still get much better (and weirder) stuff...

But its the same as with Movie posters... i mean, when was the last time you saw a good movie poster that wasn`t Blue in one corner, orange in the other and with some action-y coolish poses in the middle?

[Aerozord]

depends on how much you generalize "action-y". I mean visually there is a huge difference between a man with a gun and an exploding fighter jet. Atleast the box art for DVDs is still varied alot and you can even get an idea of genre from the box art alone.

[phil_]

But its the same as with Movie posters... i mean, when was the last time you saw a good movie poster that wasn`t Blue in one corner, orange in the other and with some action-y coolish poses in the middle?Life of Pi poster is a dude and a tiger in a life raft on a gray ocean. The Croods is the main cast squeezing into the foreground with a collection of impossible monster animals flying around the landscape behind them (though I think the squirrel monsters in the fore-most foreground are copy-pasted). Wreck It Ralph has one poster that's just Ralph's sprite-art face on a black background and another poster that's the cast hanging out in Sugar Rush. The blue-and-orange thing is getting phased out; even GI Joe 2 is blue-and-gray.

As for the original topic, you're looking over Xbox and PS3 games, Aero. If they're all about a guy doing ACTION, then they're all gonna have an ACTION guy on the cover. My collection of children's games for babies has no such trend.

[Bells]

Life of Pi poster is a dude and a tiger in a life raft on a gray ocean. The Croods is the main cast squeezing into the foreground with a collection of impossible monster animals flying around the landscape behind them (though I think the squirrel monsters in the fore-most foreground are copy-pasted). Wreck It Ralph has one poster that's just Ralph's sprite-art face on a black background and another poster that's the cast hanging out in Sugar Rush. The blue-and-orange thing is getting phased out; even GI Joe 2 is blue-and-gray.

As for the original topic, you're looking over Xbox and PS3 games, Aero. If they're all about a guy doing ACTION, then they're all gonna have an ACTION guy on the cover. My collection of children's games for babies has no such trend.

As for life of Pi, i don`t know which poster you saw... but no.

https://www.google.dk/search?q=life+of+pi+poster&hl=da&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=C4dcUY_lL-Gs4ATHvID4Aw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=989

Orange/Blue all the way.


As for the others... there is a second trend they fall in. its a formula: Weapon in Hand + Sparks + Flying Debris + cloudy background =

http://www.slashfilm.com/movie-poster-design-trend-hero-stands-weapon-in-hand-cloudy-background-flying-debris-sparks-flying/

[Kyanbu The Legend]

This has been going on since the 90s and maybe even longer then that. I'm not surprised, it seems the trend always continues until a new movie comes along and breaks the mold while selling tickets by the millions.

[phil_]

As for life of Pi, i don`t know which poster you saw... but no.

https://www.google.dk/search?q=life+of+pi+poster&hl=da&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=C4dcUY_lL-Gs4ATHvID4Aw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=989

Orange/Blue all the way.http://i.imgur.com/BJJJ4qJ.jpg

[POS Industries]

Orange tiger, boat, and clouds against blue ocean and sky. Also the title is in blue text with the rest of the text in a darker brown-orange shade.

That is literally "blue and orange: the movie poster" you've posted.

[Aerozord]

I dont see how its comparable. Ok so they are similar colors. They are still different objects

[POS Industries]

I dont see how its comparable. Ok so they are similar colors. They are still different objects
I don't think you understand the deal with orange and blue contrast and how it's fucking everywhere. It's not about what the objects are, it's the fact that it's become the easymode visual marketing tactic since the colors contrast in a way that makes the image "pop" more without being off-puttingly glaring.

But now this shit is all over the place. My department is just a sea of orange and blue because of it.

[Aerozord]

Which atleast makes sense as opposed to the exact same object in the exact same position with highly muted dull colors

[edit] I mean I can atleast distinguish at a glance the difference between two movie posters. I cant do that with video games because they dont 'pop' or have any real visual distinctiveness

[Locke cole]

...oh lord. Even the Monster Hunter 3U box art is a heavily armed dude staring out of the box.

[POS Industries]

Which atleast makes sense as opposed to the exact same object in the exact same position with highly muted dull colors

[edit] I mean I can atleast distinguish at a glance the difference between two movie posters. I cant do that with video games because they dont 'pop' or have any real visual distinctiveness
Yeah, that's true enough.

http://i.imgur.com/iXtwm9Z.jpg

[Marc v4.0]

Yeah, that's true enough.

http://i.imgur.com/iXtwm9Z.jpg

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4549162/Battlefield_3_Soldier_MP.png

[Revising Ocelot]

Chin down, eyes up!

[Magus]

I want to see a movement towards yellow and purple color contrasting in advertisement media. This will be the new marketing trend.

Red and green will never move out of the Christmas marketing season, unfortunately.

But yeah as Bells mentioned Japanese box art has been better in general going back to the beginning of the video games industry.

[Bells]

the polar opposite of Orange/Blue contrast would be Green/Purple

If you Hex convert Blues you get oranges and vice-versa. So if you shift the RGB spectrum to escape that, you end up with Purples and Greens

[Magus]

the polar opposite of Orange/Blue contrast would be Green/Purple

If you Hex convert Blues you get oranges and vice-versa. So if you shift the RGB spectrum to escape that, you end up with Purples and Greens

I was only thinking in traditional color wheel complementary color terms, not even into the RGB spectrum. You are science-ing this up here, man.

According to Wikipedia you want this then:


red and cyan
OR
green and magenta
OR
blue and yellow.

That last combo sounds boring but yeah it's gonna pop like blue and orange.

Anyway, apparently Christmas is a lie:

The incorrect belief that the complementary to green is red exists in popular culture. For example, it is presented in books of Bride M. Whelan where he alleges it to be supported by RYB color model. Indeed, red, yellow and blue represent a traditional set of "basic" color terms, not a functioning color theory. Furthermore, identity of traditional RYB's "red" with the modern understanding of this color term is not evident. Subsequent re-interpretations of old texts which used imprecise and mismatching definitions of "red", "blue" and "green" often increased the confusion.

[stefan]

First: that quote from wiki, magus? whoever wrote it is full of shit, and was probably rushing to land a "artists :smug:" burn without understanding even the slightest fucking thing about how color works. They reference goethe's color wheel and yet somehow fucking miss that the "purple" of goethe's wheel is literally a modern red (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe,_Farbenkreis_zur_Symbolisierung_des_me nschlichen_Geistes-_und_Seelenlebens,_1809.jpg) and his work isn't necessarily relevant to the discussion anyway because he was using much older definitions of the terms and also was basing his work off a different kind of color system.

which leads to another thing: anyone why tries to argue that RYB is "wrong" and RGB is "right," or vice versa, needs to get slapped. they're fucking different because they have different applications. Red-Yellow-Blue is the subtractive color system, because you remove color to get white and its based on how color works when reflected. RGB is additive, because you ADD colors to get white and its based on how color works when PROJECTED.

simple version: RYB is the law with printed or painted works, RGB is how it works when working on television and computer screens. the confusion (such as the wiki-editing fuckass cited above) comes from people, largely raised in the internet era, who grew up solely surrounded by the RGB system and additive color definition, and therefore are biased to see RYB as archaic when its simply a different application.


Also, the cyan/yellow/magenta thing is because of printers, and you've missed that in a proper printer it has two cartridges each for C and M (light and dark hues) as well as two cartridges solely for black. CMYK is purely a design thing.


also, lastly, holy shit get over yourselves about blue/orange. people use it because they're both ubiquitous colors in nature, it looks great, and it works in far more versatile situations than purple/yellow or any other complementary pair, mainly because orange is a whole lot closer to skintone than yellow.

Its almost as tiresome as listening to neophyte typography students trying to impress people by mocking helvetica.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

damn, stefan, who shat in your corn flakes this morning?

[stefan]

damn, stefan, who shat in your corn flakes this morning?

Do you know the sensation you get when someone is sitting near you, eating with their mouth open? That visceral, nauseous disgust when someone is chewing, lips smacking, little gasps of sucking air past the food, crunching and slobbering sounds as they shovel more into their face? Do you ever feel your hackles rise, feel complete primal anger born from the sound of their little snorts and gurgles as they hork down whatever food was placed in front of them?

That feeling is what I get whenever someone tries to go into a lecture about blue/orange.

There is an entire generation of pedants who would have never picked up on blue/orange contrast had Cracked not told them it was there, and now that they know it is they will not waste any time in telling literally everyone how HEY GUYS MOVIE POSTERS USE BLUE/ORANGE CONSTANTLY ISN'T THAT LAZY AND OVERUSED AMIRITE in some desperate, pathetic attempt to replace charisma and a personality with a spewing font of trivia, oozing forth like a burst zit, or an infected scab freshly torn open by a fall.

This is how the world ends, not in nuclear fire, but a pasty faced wiki editor frantically typing up a mention of color contrast as if he isn't the millionth person to mention it.

[Marc v4.0]

I think maybe you need to get a drink. Or drink less. One or the other, brah.

[Magus]

What you're saying, stefan, is that my high school art teacher was entirely correct? Score one for the educational system!

(No, I don't know how to do calculus. Shut up.)

[Aerozord]

What you're saying, stefan, is that my high school art teacher was entirely correct? Score one for the educational system!

(No, I don't know how to do calculus. Shut up.)

Well duh. You mix red and blue paint you get green. This isn't some complicated phenomenon. The real science in color theory is how the mind perceives these colors. You get some oddities with contrast that from an objective standpoint dont make sense but when run through the complicated network of the human brain the result is thus.

I dont remember them off hand, I think it had something to do with you not wanting to use the actual polar opposites of a color because instead of blending your mind just separates them.

Thats all just inductive reasoning though, I normally leave art theory to my friends that majored in it (and marketing cause on the college level those are connected).

[Aldurin]

Well duh. You mix red and blue paint you get green. This isn't some complicated phenomenon.

Is this legit or jest?

[POS Industries]

Hey Stefan, how about next you do a frothing rant about blowing shit hilariously out of proportion and insulting a bunch of people over something completely insignificant?

Or, preferably, don't do that and next time take some time to chill out and think about whether or not what you're about to post is an acceptible reaction to the thread.

[stefan]

Pro tip: if someone's response to a minor irritation is to go full Commodus, it may be prudent to assume they are being silly until proven otherwise.

[POS Industries]

Pro-tip: Don't go full Commodus over a minor irritation.