The tone of the font.

One of the things I look forward to when I start watching a movie are the opening credits, in fact often times it's the first thing we do see. 

That is why it's so important, it sets the tone of what the viewer is about to see, the font should encompass the movie as a whole. 

I can't tell you how many times I've seen a lazy font tacked onto a movie and how much it ruins it for me, it might have had a nice song on but the font's are too ugly for me to fully enjoy it.

So when I saw the opening credits to this: 

It blew my mind, and I was so happy that someone was still taking to consideration the types of font they were using that I didn't care if I didn't like the show, my faith was restored. It also sets the tone so well. 

Now the font they used was ITC Benguiat:

Compared to most fonts ITC Benguiat is actually a fairly recent one, It was created by Ed Benguiat and released by the International Typeface Corporation (hence ITC) in 1978. It was also loosely based on the typeface used in the Art Noucaeu period, which looks like this:  

Quite the jump. 

Ed Benguiat interestingly enough used to be a well known Jazz Percussionist when asked why the career change he said: 

"I’m really a musician, a jazz percussionist. One day I went to the musician’s union to pay dues and I saw all these old people who were playing bar mitzvahs and Greek weddings. It occurred to me that one day that’s going to be me, so I decided to become an illustrator."

The font began to pop up on the book covers in and the 80s and 90s most of which were the wonderful Stephen King covers.

and even on "The Smiths" 1987 album "Strange ways, here we come." 

Fonts now are made digitally, back in the day, Title sequences were still made manually with a projector and camera. So when they were making the font for Stranger Things, the designers decided to do first try it manually so they could get the gritty feel to it, and later incorporate it into the final product.

It makes me so happy to hear that designers in a age of digital design are using old methods to (re)create something new.

Good & Bad Design.

Good Design 

The image its very simple yet impactful, the space is occupied with a flat shape of the earth and the eyes focuses on the two forms of windows and subjects. The color hue of the space contrasts with the box so we can clearly the product: FedEx.

It tells us what FedEx does: they deliver your mail across the globe. With the two people handing it to each other from two parts of the world, with little effort means that FedEx delivers fast.
It's interesting to me that the texture of of bricks make it look almost like a building, I think it's a wall.

Bad Design

While the first uses less to tell a lot, this uses a lot but it says less. the message is the same: "we deliver fast" with a sprinting robot and blurry landscape behind him to give it the feel that they are FAST, and it even gives it an illusion of motion in a print medium.

The reason it falls flat is that the robot is computer animated and we can clearly tell, it takes me out of the ad and just tells me that it looks fake, the blur around him kind of looks like a last minute photoshop edit. it's done poorly. The lines are there to draw our eyes but sadly there isn't much to see.

Prints.

A few prints that I thought were well-done. 

A anti-rape campaign.
The two page spread glued together and when the reader forcefully opens it, it says:

"If you have to use force, it's rape."