Style combination · Contrasts
Ghanaian Movie Poster × Nollywood Video Jacket
Its painted neighbour: Ghanaian video clubs had sign painters hand-paint posters for many of the same Nigerian films, alongside Hollywood, Hong Kong and Indian ones. Swap the cut-out photographs for brushwork on flour sacks to move from one to the other.
Mix them and make something Ghanaian Movie Poster Nollywood Video Jacket
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Ghanaian Movie Poster Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster
- Type from Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Colour from Nollywood Video Jacket
- Form from Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Composition from Nollywood Video Jacket
- Surface from Ghanaian Movie Poster
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Nollywood Video Jacket avoids painterly brushwork: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Ghanaian Movie Poster
Square
Bungee Shade, standing in for Sign-painter shaded and drop-shadowed letters
Text · Nollywood Video Jacket
The cover and poster art of Nigeria's home-video boom, from Living in Bondage (1992) on. Jackets for cassettes, then VCDs and DVDs, and posters were printed in offset for the marketers of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba. They are made from photographs, not paintings: stars cut out, often roughly, from key scenes and crowded over a busy ground in loud colour under a heavy, outlined title. Gore and melodrama sell by exaggeration; the blurb does the rest. A quieter strand (State of Emergency, Rattlesnake) told the story 'in minimal doses', and festival-bound films now favour minimalist posters.
Archivo; Nollywood Video Jacket used Heavy display titles, in capitals or upper and lower case, filled in yellow, red or orange and outlined or shadowed in a contrasting colour and Plain sans-serif capitals for the cast list, part number, production company and format badges
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Nollywood Video Jacket, with a counter-accent from Ghanaian Movie Poster. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Ghanaian Movie Poster Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster
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#0f0b0aground · 36% -
#ece6daink · 14% -
#ff7a1aaccent · 18% -
#1e6fd9accent · 14% -
#f7d117accent · 10% -
#c1121faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #0f0b0a;
--ink: #ece6da;
--accent-1: #ff7a1a;
--accent-2: #1e6fd9;
--accent-3: #f7d117;
--accent-4: #c1121f;
--font-display: "Bungee Shade", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Nollywood Video Jacket & Film Poster: These jackets show real, named Nigerian actors, so do not reproduce a real actor's likeness or a film's poster in commercial work without rights, and never present a generated image as an original Nollywood poster. Some of the occult-horror films the style sold were made to spread the belief that children can be possessed by evil spirits: End of the Wicked, produced by the preacher Helen Ukpabio, is the best known, and her views have been blamed for the stigmatising and abandonment of children accused of witchcraft. Borrow the montage, colour and type, not the demonising of 'witches', children or traditional religion, and do not use the style as a generic 'chaotic African' backdrop.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Ghanaian Movie Poster
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · Share dream logic and monstrous hybrids; use Surrealist juxtaposition to frame Ghana-style painted figures in an editorial layout.
- Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster Pairs well · Combine Ghana's lurid invented scenes with Bollywood's glossy star portraits for a painted, maximalist film identity.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Minimalist film posters reduce a story to one symbol while Ghanaian posters cram in everything; reach for the latter when a brief needs maximal spectacle.
- Afrobeat Sleeve Art Pairs well · Another West African painted vernacular with bodies crowding the frame; borrow its looming heads for a sleeve's front and Afrobeat's strips for the back.
- Ghanaian Funeral Poster & Banner Contrasts · They share the walls of Ghanaian towns, but the movie poster is painted by hand on flour sacks with invented, lurid scenes, while the funeral poster is typeset on a computer around a real photograph; set one painted, exaggerated figure against a funeral poster's sober portrait for a deliberate clash of registers.
- Matatu & Nganya Art Contrasts · Both are commissioned African street art built on looming painted heads, but Ghana's posters are gestural sign-painter enamel on flour sacks that invent gore and muscle for a film, while the nganya's stars are smooth, airbrushed likenesses fitted to a glossy vehicle body.
- Kinshasa Popular Painting Contrasts · Same sign-painter roots, opposite use of words: Ghanaian posters letter only a film title to sell a lurid scene, while Kinshasa paintings fill the scene with commentary to be read.
- Pulp Magazine Cover Contrasts · A painted-sensational neighbour: the pulp painting is an original reproduced by offset under a printed masthead, while the Ghanaian poster is painted directly on the final surface.
With Nollywood Video Jacket
- Hand-Painted Bollywood Poster Pairs well · Both float star heads in a melodramatic montage; borrow Bombay's hand-drawn 3D title logo to give the photographic collage a stronger centre.
- Onitsha Market Pamphlets Pairs well · The same market print culture of eastern Nigeria, a literary rather than a visual ancestor: Okome hears the pamphlets' blurbs in Domitilla's jacket. Borrow the pamphlet's long moralising title and breathless blurb for the back of the jacket, not its letterpress look.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · Festival-bound New Nollywood posters turned to one image, open space and quiet type; use that restraint to show what the crowded jacket gives up.
- Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular Pairs well · Old Nollywood stills already live on as reaction memes; set a cut-out star under meme captions for nostalgic, knowing social posts.
- YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face') Contrasts · Both sell a video with cut-out photographs of real faces in loud colour, but the Nollywood jacket crowds the whole cast, a blurb and credits onto the sheet; the thumbnail keeps one face, one prop and a few words, because it has to read at phone size.