I recently finished rewatching Mad Men and in the last season Peggy has a poster in her office from the 2nd New York Film Festival that caught my eye. “What a cool poster!” I thought and as a rule, all cool posters turn out to be designed by the legendary Saul Bass. Wanting to peruse posters from other years of the festival I found a Film at Lincoln Center site that has them all and where you can also read a little history about them:

Original posters by renowned artists have been a yearly artistic signature of the New York Film Festival since the very beginning. Some of the talents who have contributed their work to NYFF since 1963 include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, Martin Scorsese, John Waters, Cindy Sherman, Pedro Almodóvar, Kara Walker, Nan Goldin, Jim Jarmusch, and David Byrne.

The layout of their page and the viewing experience left something to be desired, and I wanted to view them as more of a collage so I could take in more of them in at once. So I ended up making my own little site to display them in that fashion. It’s fun to see each artist’s unique take on designing for the same event. I admittedly have basic tastes but my personal favorites are the Saul Bass (1964), Andy Warhol (1967), and the Elinor Bunin (1986) posters.

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I prefer those posters over the more abstract ones, though I appreciate those artists trying novel approaches that are potentially less discernable and open to interpretation.

I guess I could’ve just made this in Figma but coding it was a good chance to experiment with the masonry layout. There will hopefully be cross-browser compatibility for CSS Grid Lanes (which I believe is only available in Safari right now) in the near future but for now I used Masonry, a JavaScript grid layout library.

New York Film Festival Posters is live at nyff.rbtnguyen.com (use subdomains!)