I’ve always believed that, even if you work exclusively on websites, sourcing inspiration from things such as posters, stickers, books can be far more useful than just browsing the millions of identical CSS galleries. It can also be a great way of calming down if you’re feeling stressed out by work, just take 5 minutes to get inspired!

Let’s take a quick look at the hugely successful Dark Knight. These posters aim to convey dark things, dark feelings, evil feelings, towards both the Joker and Batman, since they’re both very dark characters:

What makes this so successful? The composition is well done, the Joker looks great and it’s very very dark looking, which is perfect for the film.

A similar design to the previous one, with the central character taking up the center of the image, and, once again, at an angle which suggests power and possibly evil. Dark too, especially burning the infamous logo into a building in a violent fashion, which is far better than just the logo.

Much more action packed than the others, but still a powerful shot, particularly good is the “extreme” upwards view. Perhaps less dark (although still very dark) than the others?

This final image is one of the older, and cleverer posters. The dark is, in my eyes, super-emphasized by the use of the logo, in blood, forming a sinister looking face which relates to that of the Joker.

OK, so they’re not going to help design like that are they? No, but, they clear an over-burdened mind, they allow the creative bit to stop thinking and stand back for a bit, watching, learning. Sometimes a little bit of something totally irrelevant helps :)

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