The creative brief was to redesign the marketing pieces for the movie Arrival. The resulting work is a cohesive ad campaign that better communicates the themes of the movie. The solution was found in a decluttering of the campaign’s visuals, allowing the viewer to be drawn into the meditations on human experience that are laid out in Arrival. It pulls the viewer in with questions that can only be answered by going to watch the movie.

The original poster for this 2016 science-fiction movie is formulaic and crowded. Characters are stacked on top of each other and helicopters zoom off to a menacing space-ship in the distance. The poster leans into the action but doesn’t reflect the pensive and introspective nature of the movie. In the redesign, I thought carefully about how to capture the intrigue but also the underlying thesis of the film involving memory and time. What could I strip away while maintaining the intrigue of this movie?

Through sketches and experiments, the solution I came to was to utilize the unique shape of the alien space-ship as a repeating motif. Most of the movie is desaturated, in dim shades of blue and gray. Orange is the exception and pierces through the fog of the movie. I utilized this orange highlight as a key to the visual rebranding of the movie. In creating the repeated cutouts on the orange background, our eyes are continually trying to assess background and foreground. They can take in the shapes as positive space and negative space.

The pensive image of Amy Adams with the looming form of the space-ship in the background was the right tone for this poster. I edited it with adjustment layers, and the reticulation filter to give it a grainy quality. So that the orange layer isn’t too flat, I utilized masking layers and blending modes to add texture. Finding strong typefaces were key to communicating the sci-fi genre of Arrival. Utopian is an all-caps sans serif that provided the bold simplicity needed for the movie title while also imparting an other-world feeling. It has removed stems and bars from some characters, which has the effect of communicating a futurism to the viewer.

In translating the ad campaign to web, I had to solve some user-experience challenges. Most notably, the orange color works well for a poster in print but would be an overwhelming visual experience for the user navigating to a landing page. The solution I came to was to flip the color scheme: have a soft gray for the background and utilize the orange as a feature that draws the user to interact with the page. The navigation bar features orange text, encouraging the user to click on new pages on the site.

The title of the movie repeats this glowing orange and carries through the texture from the poster. I removed the background and isolated the profile of Amy Adams and the space-ship shape. They mirror each other in the positions they occupy on the web page, two objects that reflect each other across the diagonal. The final result is an intriguing web page that has stripped back the unnecessary while maintaining key visuals of the ad campaign.

Creating the designs for the banner ad and the streaming thumbnail was an exercise in reducing visual information to its key components. I reorganized the type and images to feel balanced within the specific ratios of their containers. For the web banner, it made sense to stack the stars’ names in the top left and then counterweight them with the premiere date in the bottom right.

For the streaming thumbnail, simplicity and visual power were the most important considerations. I stripped everything away except for the title, the orange and the oval shapes containing the photo of Amy Adams. The power of that bright orange is clear when put up against all the other thumbnails on the streaming site.

The billboards for the Arrival Ad Campaign feature the images utilized across the marketing assets. Only the title of the movie features the glowing orange and brings the viewer’s attention to it. The first billboard has the recognizable layout of the landing page, yet the elements have been rearranged to maintain balance on this new aspect ratio. The second billboard plays with layout: it features strips of visual information on either side of the movie title, inviting the eye to move across the space of the billboard.