UPDATED (January 9) Design for Movies SE

Question

I'm Kurtis, a new product designer at Stack Exchange. First off, congratulations, your site is beginning the process of moving out of beta to a fully-graduated site!

Graduation and Your Site Design

Graduation comes with a few perks. We have already begun work on your site's design, which will give you your own unique theme that reflects your topic and culture. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.

Once the design goes up, you will receive a link in the footer of other sites in the network, along with the ability to migrate content to and from other sites — and the notoriety of a public launch that says, "Congratulations, you finally made it!"

Design Concept

As we did research for the site, we found recurring themes in the questions that helped us in the overall design direction. One was the question of "can you help me identify this movie or show?" and the other theme had to do with the question of the creator's intended meaning to a scene, plot point, or creative direction. We wanted to capture the spirit of this intrigue in the design. Enter Saul Bass...

Saul Bass (and friends) movie poster mood board

Saul Bass is known for his genius ability to take a production and distill its essence into a simple movie poster image or title sequence. His work has been inspiring designers like Ollie Moss to design minimalistic movie posters for the past 40 years. We wanted to capture the grit and impact of these movie poster in the design. And since the site topic covers both movies and TV, we created a filmstrip of illustrations representing scenes from the wide range of shows and films discussed on the site.

Illustrations

In the illustrations we wanted to capture memorable moments from various genres of movies and TV shows. The scenes needed to be so iconic that they were recognizable at a small size. We've got a good start here, but are looking for the community's suggestions on a few additions. Here's where you can help us—What are some memorable iconic movie or tv scenes that we should add? We're looking for a range that spans the popular to the more obscure.

These scenes are a nod to the "can you identify this movie or show?" questions. By the way, can you identify the movies and TV shows in the image above?

Color Scheme

The color scheme has a retro vibe with a touch of "digitally remastered to it's original optical vibrance." We used red as the dominant color because of it's association with movies, but also because it represents the passion of the human experience so often captured in television and film.

Logo

Because the site covers the topics of both movies and television shows, we wanted to use a non-medium specific icon. The logo also needed to be scalable to small sizes. We landed on a single piece of popcorn. While popcorn is a favorite snack for movie-goers and couch potatoes, the icon also represents one small moment in the bucket. It is the single frame of film, or that one scene or memorable character.

The style of the graphic is minimalist, unique, and clean (with just a touch of grit.) It is a merging of modern and retro styles.

We matched the rounded popcorn icon up with a strong, bold font, and we think the juxtaposition of organic beside geometric shapes works nicely. The popcorn also plays the part of an ampersand in the logo.

The circle around the logo represents a spotlight.

Swag

Overall Site Design

Please click to see full-resolution version.

We believe the design captures the mood we were going for and would love to hear your feedback. If there are no major design changes, we're hoping to launch the site soon!

Thank you for for making this such a great community!

---

EDIT

Thank you for all of your input. We've made some changes based on the community's initial feedback.

Logo

There were enough people who weren't in love with the logo execution of the single piece of popcorn that we decided to revisit the design. We know that we won't be able to please everyone, but at the same time, we want you to feel good about the site and the community you've worked to build.

We explored a few different directions and landed on the execution below for the following reasons:

• A box of popcorn is much more recognizable than the single piece.
• This concept still focuses on the consumption side of movies and TV shows.
• It works as a standalone icon and will scale to a small size.
• It's fun.

T-shirt

It seems everyone like the illustrations (and we do too.) so we've updated the T-shirt design to include them. We will update which snapshots are included once we've completed them.

illustrations

So many suggested snapshots on the community wiki! The hard part will be narrowing things down. We'll do our best to create a balance between genres as we finish all of the site assets and work toward launching the site in the very near future!

Answer 1

This Community Wiki answer is for everyone to add their own possible suggestions for other cool little image snapshots of famous movies and TV shows in addition to the ones already presented in the question.

• As a big fan of James Bond, he might also deserve a presence there, being quite an iconic part of cinema for the last 50 years. Maybe a snapshot of the classic "shooting into the barrel" pose or something the like.

• Butch and Sundance still from the final moment of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

• King Kong atop the Empire State Building

• ET flying bike

• As a way to get both movie and TV with one thing (and since we already have the "other star-thing"), Star Trek might also be an idea, don't know a fitting motive though, maybe just the classic Enterprise in space or someone in the transporter getting "beamed". Additional ideas for Star Trek: Kirk in his captain's chair, Kirk fighting a Gorn, Kirk holding a Tribble, Spock giving the live long and prosper sign, Sulu wielding a fencing foil, or Captain Picard as Locutus of Borg.

• Crocket and Tubbs posing in front of the black Ferrari with the Miami skyline in the background.

• The Simpsons on the couch (fortunately easy to recognize by their silhouettes).

• Tony Soprano (maybe the diner scene looking straight into the camera).

• Silhouette of Don Draper from Mad Men sitting on his chair (from the intro).

• The Dancing scene from Twin Peaks with Agent Cooper, the man from another place and Laura Palmer.

• Al Bundy sitting on his sofa with a hand in his pants.

• 2001, maybe the monolith at the Dawn of Man, or the closup of Bowman's face behind the helmet while floating in HAL's core, or just HAL's iconic red "eye".

• Shining (Here's Johnny scene)

• Hannibal lecter's introduction scene with his mask.

• Snake Plissken in any characteristic pose (maybe too obscure? But at least I didn't choose Napoleon Wilson ;-)).

• The gang from Reservoir Dogs, or the characteristic camera shot out of the opened car trunk, or Uma Thurman and John Travolta dancing, The Bride in her yellow jumpsuit from Kill Bill vol. 1, The Bear Jew from Inglorious Basterds.

• The Man with no Name in his poncho or the showdown of the trio in the Good, the bad and the ugly.

• Jon Voigt and Dustin Hoffman walking the streets in Midnight Cowboy.

• The chariot race in Ben Hur.

• Willem Dafoe (or whoever it was) on his knees in Platoon.

• Tom Cruise hanging from the ceiling of the IMF computer.

• The Blues Brothers (easily silhouette-able due to their monochromatic outfit in the first place).

• Rocky on top of the Philadelphia Museum steps.

• Richard Gere in Navy uniform carrying Debra Winger on his arms.

• The 6 Friends posing around the fountain from the intro.

• Freddy Krueger claws

• Superman flying or kissing Lois.

• jason voorhees or Scream movie mask

• dirty dancing famous move

• For more horror, you could go with Nosferatu, or if you want to go even more esoteric horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, widely regarded as the first true horror film.

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Devil's Tower)

• Something involving Charlie Chaplin, particularly his Tramp character. Chaplin is one of the most widely recognizable figures in cinema history, arguably one of the first true film stars.

• Something from a Wes Anderson film, Rushmore may be the easiest to work with here, followed by The Royal Tenenbaums.

• Something from a Disney and/or Pixar film.

  • Lion King scene where Rafiki introduces Simba
  • Buzz or Woody from toy story
  • or some fairy-tale like Cinderella shoe.

• A good source for popular/"good" movies is Wikipedia

  • The stairs from Battleship Potemkin
  • Something from Bicycle Thieves
  • The stairs from Vertigo
  • Casablanca is missing
  • For India (how can be not have a Bollywood entry) I suggest Lagaan, although it may be hard to come up with an iconic image - I suggest this
  • From Germany M makes for a nice image
  • For the UK The Third Man seems to be the favorite: It would give us Orson Welles
  • For France Les Enfants du Paradis : Use this image

• For Bollywood (India), a better representative will be record-breaking DDLJ, by iconic train scene or field.

• Pikachu (Pokémon) or Teletubbies.

• Or Death Note or Naruto from the anime section.

• The Seventh Seal for Bergmann and Sweden, which gives us at least two iconic images: The dance and Death.

• The Delorean from Back to the Future

• Neo evading bullets in Matrix

• The outline of the flying "Serenity" from Firefly

• A polaroid picture from Memento

• Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny (or both). Perhaps the latter could be chewing on a carrot?

• Mia Wallace smoking (Pulp Fiction)

Answer 2

Well, first of all, Thank you very much for making this possible and driving graduation forward!

The overall design idea seems very good to me.

• As a huge fan of orange, I personally love the general color scheme.
• The Saul Bass idea is pretty good since I am personally more in favourite of rather minimalistic/streamlined and less "playful" designs.
• Those little pictures and their inclusion in the title bar are a great idea and I think those you have already present a broad spectrum of famous stuff (though, I'm sure there could be countless cool examples one could come up with, and I don't know one or two from them but you can't know everything).

Now of course, no design review without a little critique:

• The popcorn thingy as a logo just seems a little too obscure to me. While the idea of using it for ampersand is neat, I think a single item of popcorn is too hard to decipher and not too representative of the matter (I wouldn't have known what it is right away hadn't you told me, I thought it's some kind of cloud). I would have personally loved a bit more extensive use of stylized clapperboards or film strips, maybe also as a logo.
• The little things (accept background, vote arrows, favourite star) seem on the other hand quite generic (but I've seen that elsewhere already in new design, maybe it's just the common approach now). This is in itself not a bad idea and I prefer it over too playful a thing, but maybe something like a stylized clapperboard or a film strip could be used as an accept background instead of just a rounded rect.
• As someone rather averted to identification questions and skeptical of their place on the site (and a community who's in general divided over the matter) I was a bit shocked when I read it was taken as input for the design process (though, I see that's entirely our own fault). But thankfully enough it doesn't have any direct major representation in the site design, which makes this an entirely academic concern.

But except for the popcorn, those are really just minor problems to me (and I might be the only one having them), neither am I to dictate your job to you. As a designer, you know what you're doing and overall I'm very glad for this fascinating design. I'm looking forward to seeing the site in full shape in the near future. Thanks again.

Answer 3

Regarding the upvote and downvote buttons, could they be thumbs up and thumbs down icons? I rather like the idea, stemming from the days of At The Movies, where Siskel and Ebert started their notorious review process of giving a movie either a thumbs up or down. It's iconic enough to have even been used in movie adverts.

"Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs WAY up!"

Not a huge deal in the end, just an idea of providing a nod to the critique side of film as well.

This goes along with Napoleon Wilson's note of some of the iconography being a bit generic, so I'm presenting idea to make it less so while still being relevant to the M&TV idea.

Answer 4

It is so nice to see the design work you have done, it looks great - thank you!

Like many I suspect we won't want to emphasize the Identify-This questions of the site - they are viewed as a necessary evil by many (but not by all), but like @NapoleanWilson comments, the Saul Bass theme is a very positive outcome from that input.

The illustrations are spot-on. I can't identify one of them (the guy with the baseball cap on), but they are recognizably iconic views from classic and recent movies and TV shows.

My first reaction to the popcorn was likewise (to @NapoleanWilson) negative - I didn't instinctively make the connection to popcorn when I saw the graphic, but actually it is growing on me.

Answer 5

32 upvote to a meta question, as i always expected graduation is always a hot topic.

Anyways with the design, i will want to represent my views in two-part (Inspired with MattD's suggestion:-

Thumbs Up:

• This little ID posters (Came by the idea of representing evil ID's) but the outcome is great. They are just repeating, better add more.

• Oscars, this evil fellows always though that it will be tricky and copyright issue etc but the outcome is great. I love Oscar trophies.

• Colour theme . I always wanted the theme to be less dark and eye-friendly. Which it is.

• Swags are cool.

Thumbs Down:

• Popcorn bothers me too.
• There is no movie-reel and clapperboard. We here also cover the film-technique, directorial decisions etc too which is more presented by clapperboard then popcorn.
• Orange is bit dark.

Overall i love the design and will welcome this design just expressed my view no hard intents. @Kurtis Beavers: nice work.