the Art of Hammer

I know you already reviewed this, but since I picked it up too I wanted to give it a quick review on ye olde blog.

I found this to be a wealth of inspiration. It got me really excited as a designer. I will definitely look to this when designing future Hellmouth records. I don't mean as in simply ripping it off, but for inspiration in regards to composition and typography. There's a real variety of style depicted here because it showcases posters from all over the world. Nine times out of ten the Japanese poster is going to be the best. That's just life. They experiment with jarring juxtapositions and interesting layering effects. But anyway, they don't show a lot of Japanese artwork in here as it's focusing mostly on the country of origin (England). I should look into getting a book on Japanese film posters, though... I should look that up...

I digress. This was a quality book. Cool intro with some insight into why they choose what they choose to cover in this volume. A great selection of posters. It's awesome to see how radically different posters can be as you jump from territory to territory:

There's definitely some thievery going on within the metal community. Thievery/homage...whatever you want to call it. I spied quite a few posters that have been directly lifted for album art. Whatever. It's cool shit.

Funny thing is I'm pretty sure I read an interview with a guy from Death Breath who said he doesn't know how to use Photoshop or anything and he did this old school cut'n'paste style. However, I thought I remember him saying he drew the main dude... maybe he didn't say that. Clearly he didn't draw it any more than Quorthorn drew that fucking goat for the first Bathory album.

There's also some design inspiration going on regarding other film posters. You can see where certain designers borrowed from other designers. It's all good.

I realized that the One Million Years B.C. poster is one of the sexiest fucking images I've ever seen. If you want to get me a birthday present then I'd like the horizontal quad, please. I'll hang it on the inside of my eyelids.

Awesome book. Highly recommended for designers, painters, film nerds, horror nerds, or any kind of nerd at all.