Movie posters are one of my favorite forms of communication design. They evoke a range of emotions—scary, heartfelt, epic, ironic or fun. Good ones capture the spirit and story of the film. And obviously, promote and motivate people to invest a few hours of their time.

Most people decide to see a movie for one of three reasons: they read a favorable review, get a recommendation at a cocktail party, or find the trailer interesting enough to see the film.

But unless you’re at the theater, you really don’t encounter movie posters these days. Today’s posters are primarily experienced as small “postage stamp” sized images that pop up in search results or on websites. Even the need for VHS and DVD cover art is long gone or waning.

Still, many posters are works of art. They are beautifully crafted, typographically stunning and—in some cases—become iconic.

While browsing this year’s Best Picture nominations on [oscar.com](https://oscar.go.com/), a few posters really stood out as exceptional. And I wondered, if the Academy decided to give an Oscar for Best Poster, who would they pick?

Since the Academy reaches out for votes, I thought I would too. I polled 100 fellow VSAers to pick their favorite, and the top results were amazingly close.

**Parasite**—27%
**Joker**—26%
**Ford v Ferrari**—18%
**1917**—16%
**Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood**—7%
**JoJo Rabbit**—5%
**Marriage Story**—1%
**Little Women**—0%
**The Irishman**—0%

Personally, six posters stood out… 

**Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood is perfect.** It nailed the genre and was quintessential Quentin. Can’t get better than stars, cars and the City of Angels illustrated with ink and gouache-like technique.

**1917 nailed it.** Bold Futura serves as the window into the cinematic action this poster promises. The numerals intentionally mask the scenery into narrow, confining spaces that gives a sense of the claustrophobic and limited vantages of trench warfare. The colorful gradation in the skyline is dramatic and the running soldiers convey the tension.

**Joker is the perfect balance of sadness and triumph.** There is tremendous depth in this poster. The image and typography is both bold and distressed. And all the color, and thus focus, is on the Joker. Well done. 

**Ford v Ferrari is visually stunning.** Like Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, this poster is inspired by the era and race. Albeit a bit more modern. The white space, reduction of color and the restraint of the typography harkens back to midcentury 24 Hours of Le Mans poster design. 

**JoJo Rabbit is disturbingly funny.** All the design elements are clearly inspired by Second World War propaganda posters. The collage of the cast is well done and just a hint of color is a nice finishing touch.

**Parasite is the most intriguing.** Whose legs are those? Why are their eyes blocked out? Is that a teepee? It makes me want to see the film… Plus, I love one-point perspective photography. Everything looks so formal. (One detail that may have been overlooked: the shadows. They suggest different times of day, which means it’s probably a composite of 10 images.)

I feel like these missed the mark from a design perspective… 

**Marriage Story is gimmicky.** Isn’t that Kylo Ren? It seems more like a graphic treatment than a real communication device. And I feel like I’ve seen it before. 

**Little Women is really boring.** It’s too bad because the film is exceptional. The photography makes the cast look like Madame Tussauds wax figures and the typography is a bit goth for my taste. 

**The Irishman is painfully sleepy.** I’m not surprised, I fell asleep after the first 90 min of the film. 

My vote? Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. If you want to learn how artist Steve Chorney created the hand-painted art for the poster, check out [this article](https://www.motionpictures.org/2019/08/artist-steve-chorney-on-crafting-once-upon-a-time-in-hollywoods-poster-more/).

The end.

And the Oscar for Best Poster goes to…

And-the-oscar

In most organizations, the number of marketers and communicators far outpace the size and resources of their colleagues on the brand team. At the same time, those businesses recognize that brand is essential to the direction and alignment of their organization, and that everyone plays a role in contributing to the success of the brand. And beyond the walls of an enterprise, agencies and business partners also “touch” the brand and influence how it’s experienced. Internal brand leaders and their functions—the “keepers of the flame”—increasingly face a decentralized, distributed and often disjointed world that they need to manage. A systems approach to brand management has become the answer to the need for guidance and consistency while serving the realities of scale, adaptability and distributed brand decision-making.

Brand guidelines haven’t changed much over the past 50 years. Typically, they consist of assets and standards—a comprehensive set of do’s and don’ts that govern the use of the company's proprietary visual and verbal assets. Certainly, many brand guides have made the leap to digital brand centers, asset management systems or even public websites, but it’s rare when they actually account for how people learn and work today.

It’s time for a change in how we approach branding systems — one that centers branding as an intuitive, adaptable framework rather than a static set of rules. The following three target areas optimize the relationship between the brand management system and the people who use it, ultimately creating a modernized brand management approach ready for a fast-paced market. 

An effective brand system takes more than providing access to a robust set of guidelines. Your entire organization needs to develop and reinforce better brand practitioner skills—and the critical thinking needed to interpret rules and adapt assets.

How much effort should go into upskilling employees? The biggest factor is the desired level of expertise and fluency. Malcolm Gladwell famously said it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, which translates to about nine years (around four hours a day, five days a week). No business needs an entire organization of brand experts, but all employees need to learn the skills to perform well enough for their own purposes—think 10 to 20 hours of training each year. This is the right commitment to brand training for acquiring the needed amount of brand fluency.

In a large organization, brand practitioners and marketers can number in the hundreds. Brand users and “brand dependents” can number in the thousands, with connections and needs shared between them often going unseen. This makes consistency an enormous challenge. For disciplined brand governance, businesses should be investing in tools, not just guidelines and assets.

An automated, systems-based tool provides constraints. Think of these tools as a means of “rigid flexibility.” With preprogrammed choices like color, typography, format and hierarchy, virtually anyone can build the right asset and do so efficiently. This ensures fewer mistakes and is less expensive than human intervention.

Most of our own work in this area resides in building digital design systems. These are fundamentally code and pattern libraries that greatly reduce the amount of effort to build and deploy, and that increase the consistency and efficiency of teams. 

Two notable examples worth learning from:

[TimesTalks](https://www.basedesign.com/work/the-new-york-times-know-whats-now-know-whats-next) – A quote about the system from Mirek Nisenbaum: “A bespoke digital tool allows The New York Times’ design team to easily implement an established graphic language, explore the entire range of color and type and maintain consistency from event to event. This beats a static graphic guideline.” 

[Walker Expanded](https://walkerart.org/magazine/walker-expanded) – This was a brilliant “hack” by the museum back in the day, and a great example of automation. The typeface has all the right choices of words, patterns and colors embedded. It’s hard to mess it up. And still rewarding to use. 

The primary implication of automation and systemization of brand expression is less “guideline” training and more “tool” training. For groups like a social media team, who work at accelerated speed and responsiveness, an automated tool embedded in the creative process is a powerful enabler of disciplined brand management.


Big, distributed and automated brand systems still have to account for the human factor. Like all the major digital and societal shifts underway in how people consume, navigate and share information, brand guidance needs to fit new expectations and habits among users to be effective.

A few tips that help to ensure users see themselves as part of the brand system:
- Make it two-way: systems need to support conversation—expert to user, user to expert, and user to user  
- Open it up: systems need to be easy to access, easy to change and easy to support a complete range of users—known and unknown
- Leverage tutorials: video is the ideal medium for engagement, knowledge transfer and modeling skills
- Appeal to all: the user interface and range of content needs to appeal to the expert and novice—“insiders” and generalists can each find information relevant to their needs and interests

However a brand system is designed, distributed and managed, it's crucial to treat it as a living organism. The more rigid a brand is for its users, the more static and "expected" the experience becomes for its broader stakeholder audiences. Build it with logic and structure, certainly. But also envision how it will evolve and be interpreted over time and through different media and moments. With skilled practitioners, digital access and automation, and human-centered guidance, you can build a system that is truly future-proofed.


Managing brand in a decentralized, democratized world

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CMO Sarah Lent and CCO Curt Schreiber were recently invited onto the [Workbook Radio](https://www.workbook.com/blog/radio) podcast to discuss how brands and artists can break into the rapidly emerging technology of NFTs.

Workbook Radio host and producer Jacqueline Lopez leads the discussion around the creative origins of NFTs, how VSA approached the space and the incentives for companies and creators to dive into NFT production. 

Part one and two of this two-part episode are out now, [click here to listen](https://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/workbookradio).


Sarah Lent and Curt Schreiber Appear on Workbook Radio

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VSA's Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was selected to participate in the Design Museum of Chicago's latest exhibit, "The Correct Time." Curt was tasked with designing a clock face that challenges how we will design and think about time into the future. His work appeared alongside 23 other designers' pieces—one for each hour of the day—as part of an extension of Barbara Koenen's 1989 work "The Correct Time." Koenen's original piece collected 720 donated broken clocks, one for each minute in 12 hours. Afterall, a broken clock is right twice a day. 

The exhibit is free and open to the public until October 3, 2022 at the Design Museum of Chicago. [To learn more, click here](https://www.designchicago.org/the-correct-time). 

And check out the following reviews and press mentions of the exhibit:
- [3rd Coast Review: Hundreds of Clocks Show the Beauty and Absurdity of Time in New Design Museum Exhibit](https://thirdcoastreview.com/2022/08/13/review-clocks-design-museum-exhibit/)
- [Newcity: It’s About Time: A Review of The Correct Time at the Design Museum of Chicago](https://design.newcity.com/2022/08/17/its-about-time-a-review-of-the-correct-time-at-the-design-museum-of-chicago/)

This is an interactive entry—go ahead and give the number on Curt's piece a call!

"The Correct Time"

Curt Schreiber Featured in Design Museum of Chicago Exhibit "The Correct Time"

Headshot of Curt Schreiber alongside Design Museum of Chicago banner

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VSA CCO Curt Schreiber was recently interviewed by Little Black Book’s Ben Conway. The article, “Chasing the Big and Sweating the Small,” explores Curt’s design origins, as well as the founding principles of VSA Partners. Curt shares what he’s learned about design and running a business during 30 years at VSA, including how our purpose to design a better human experience has guided the company’s transition from a boutique design agency to a brand-led customer experience agency. 

Here's an excerpt from Curt: 

“Early on, virtually all of the VSA staff were designers. As designers, we wrote the proposals, managed the projects, delivered the production files—and designed as well. As we grew, the opportunities required greater and more specialized skill sets. We hired strategists, developers, project managers, video editors, and content managers. We also opened offices on the east and west coasts to access more talent and better serve clients. 

The design practice has always been integral to VSA’s DNA. Today, we consider ourselves a brand and strategy agency, and our capabilities have expanded far beyond what we started out with. But it all still comes down to design—just a different concept of what ‘design’ looks like. VSA’s purpose is to ‘design for a better human experience.’ So whether you’re a strategist, developer, or producer, every person in the company has a valuable role in design.”

[Check out the article here](https://www.lbbonline.com/news/chasing-the-big-and-sweating-the-small-with-curt-schreiber) for the full interview.

Chasing the Big and Sweating the Small with Curt Schreiber

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VSA Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber joins a select group of agency and industry experts who will choose the winners of this year’s [REGGIE Awards](https://www.reggieawards.org/). For 40 years, these awards have been a highly anticipated annual showcase from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the U.S. advertising industry’s oldest and largest trade association. The awards recognize campaigns that combine strategy, originality, execution, results and business objectives. Last year’s best-of-show award was taken home by Mischief @ No Fixed Address for its work on the beauty brand eos. 

“It’s always fun to see and reward great creative work that builds true business value,” Curt said. “My experience with the REGGIE Awards will be all that much richer because the criteria so closely mirror VSA’s ethos of combining strategy, design and measurement.” 

REGGIE Award categories span experiential, digital/social media, sponsorship, influencer, brand purpose, content, B2B and age-specific campaigns. Gold, silver and bronze winners are selected in addition to the best-of-show Super REGGIE, which is drawn from the gold winners. All winners will be revealed at the REGGIE Awards Gala on April 27, 2023 at the ANA Brand Masters Conference in Bonita Springs, Florida.

VSA celebrated its 40th anniversary in November 2022. Longtime clients include Google, Nike and IBM, and VSA has offices in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. VSA belongs to the international family of unified and independent agencies led by Meet The People.


Curt Schreiber appointed juror for 2023 REGGIE Awards by the Association of National Advertisers

Headshot of Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber

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VSA Partners Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber recently sat down with Ricardo Esteves at DesignRush to discuss how the digital era changed advertising and branding. 

Ricardo and Curt discussed the changing role of traditional branding and advertising, how to be a great desiginer, the biggest trends in advertising and branding, and how AI will impact marketing. 

[Read the full article](https://spotlight.designrush.com/interviews/vsa-curt-schreiber-digital-era), and thanks to [DesignRush](https://www.designrush.com/agency/logo-branding/brand-strategy) for the feature! 

Photo by AIGA.


Curt Schreiber interviewed by DesignRush

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Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was recently featured in SmartBrief with his piece, “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Luxury Brands.” 

His piece explores how B2B marketers can tap into the same tactics used by high-end consumer goods to create stronger brands and relationships. 

Read the intro below, or click [here](https://corp.smartbrief.com/original/2023/08/what-b2b-marketers-can-learn-from-luxury-brands) to read the full article. 

Consumer marketing tactics are frequently regarded as irrelevant by business-to-business sales operations. B2B, after all, is all about thoroughly educating customers and forming deep sales relationships. And it typically has a longer sales cycle than applies to most consumer marketing.

But there is one category of consumer products that faces very similar challenges to the B2B space and may provide a roadmap for how to create more demand: luxury.

Luxury products are outliers in the consumer marketing realm. Just like B2B products, they too require significant differentiation and relationship-building. However, unlike many B2B organizations, marketers in the category heighten this relationship with strong brand-building and enhanced customer experiences—not just to acquire new customers, but to turn people into super fans who purchase repeatedly and consistently advocate for these products.

I believe these tactics can offer a wealth of opportunity to B2B marketers.

#### High-funnel personalization
A personalized touch is a hallmark of both luxury and B2B. Both types of buyers want to be recognized by name and expect special treatment. Whereas B2B often relies on the salesperson to personalize interactions, luxury starts this journey of meeting personal needs much higher in the funnel.

Highly specialized and personalized communications from the start go a long way toward establishing a transaction further down the line. In many ways, it takes the pressure off the salesperson of having to build the relationship from a cold start, warming the customer with a sense that the company as a whole understands them and their needs. But more importantly, it claims some of the loyalty for the brand itself.

#### Mystique that transforms the buyer
From the earliest marketing interactions, successful luxury elevates the perception of being a part of something bigger than one’s self—something that sets you apart from the masses. Whether it’s a cologne with a slightly odd smell or an interior with an unexpected combination of styles, or even a handbag that might be perceived as gaudy, luxury products demand your attention and impart that attention on the buyers themselves. It essentially changes the conversation from “Should I buy this?” to “How can I live without it?” The customer arrives asking the salesperson not how you fit into their life, but rather how they fit into your world.

B2B can easily employ similar tactics. From adding unexpected, custom-feeling design elements to your product to upgrading packaging for a luxury feel to inviting your customers to an exclusive event, B2B marketers have a wide range of opportunities to enhance the look, feel or other memorable element of either the product or the marketing. The result is a vibrant and enjoyable product experience that helps buyers justify their choice, motivates other employees using the product, and boosts their reputation among their peers.

Click [here](https://corp.smartbrief.com/original/2023/08/what-b2b-marketers-can-learn-from-luxury-brands) to continue reading. 

What B2B marketers can learn from luxury brands

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Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was recently a guest on the podcast “Prodity: Product by Design,” hosted by Kyle Evans. 

On the show, Curt and Kyle discuss the power of constraints and negative space in design, the importance and power of reconceptualizing brand identity during periods of business transition, and how to create multistakeholder design in the modern world. 

“Product by Design” features interviews with founders, leaders and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses. 

You can listen to the show on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/26lHCsLyc00yVnPveMniEn?si=73fd0b924a824804) and [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/prodity-product-by-design/id1506983636?i=1000630359336), or [click here to learn more about Prodity: Product by Design](https://share.transistor.fm/s/c9272691).

Curt Schreiber is guest on ‘Prodity: Product by Design’ podcast 

Curt Schreiber was recently interviewed on the podcast “Bonanza Growth: Innovation, Strategy and UX for SaaS,” hosted by Behrad Mirafshar. 

Behrad and Curt dove deep on how to transition from a graphic designer to creative director, how Curt has seen brands shift in response to emerging technologies, the complexity of stakeholder design and how to build a strong brand experience. 

The Bonanza Growth podcast features hands-on knowledge from experts on UX design, design thinking and product innovation. 

[Click here to listen to the show](https://open.spotify.com/episode/4A9divgXIPOlsRF8e0rIJe?si=Sg2_kPCNQha9E2YHHlIdlg). 


Curt Schreiber is guest on ‘Bonanza Growth’ podcast

VSA Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was recently a guest on Greg Kihlström’s podcast, “The Agile Brand.” In this episode, Curt and Greg explore the benefits of stakeholder design and how organizations can implement it into their own business practices. 

Stakeholder design emphasizes the importance of optimizing outcomes for multiple stakeholders, which could be shareholders, employees, customers or even outside groups, like nonprofits or social justice organizations. Curt has previously worked with Jon Iwata and the Yale Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management on “The New Brief,” which gathered 60 business leaders, designers and strategic thinkers to develop new ideas and processes for stakeholder design. 

Curt outlines why stakeholder design has become critical to success and innovation. First, CEOs today face ever-increasing pressure to meet the needs of multiple groups but often feel underprepared to lead in this landscape. Stakeholder design can help manage optimal outcomes for these sometimes opposing demands, and support CEOs as they respond to these new expectations. 

It also yields more creative solutions that drive growth. Stakeholder design naturally involves a greater set of constraints, which Curt explains are essential for encouraging outside-the-box design thinking. Its practice involves breaking down siloed departments and cross-collaboration that can spark innovative thinking. 

[Listen to the full podcast](https://open.spotify.com/episode/35LajDDHAHbvYxpMcNuXxu?si=FvjTIBnvQLSWx3ADjuQIlg) to hear more from Curt about how businesses can implement stakeholder design, the value of horizontal thinking over vertical thinking and why stakeholder design can help you bring value to more people than ever before. 


Curt Schreiber

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