… you know to expect a comedy movie.

你會預期看見喜劇電影。

If you see this — you know it's gonna be action.

如果你看到這個...你知道這會是動作電影。

Make the letters a little skinny — and boom.

把文字用得細一點，然後哇！

It's sci-fi.

是科幻電影。

You know this one's gonna have fast cars...

你知道這個會有飆車場面。

This one's gonna have Michael Cera…. … and this one's gonna be a rom-com.

這會有喜劇演員 Michael Cera，而這是浪漫愛情片。

You don't even need the music to know it.

你甚至不需要音樂就能知道。

But what about this?

但這個呢？

This typeface — Trajan – is probably one of the most popular movie poster fonts ever.

Trajan 字體大概是電影史上最受歡迎的電影海報字體了。

You can see it in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Double Jeopardy, Letters from Iwo Jima,

你在臥虎藏龍、 致命追緝令、來自硫磺島的信都看得到它。

It's everywhere.

它無所不在。

So how did it get there?

所以這是怎麼造成的呢？

I'm Yves Peters, I am a graphic designer who has been writing professionally about type and typography since about 10 years.

我是 Yves Peters，我是專門設計字型和字體快十年的平面設計師。

Yves has looked at a lot of posters.

Yves 看過很多海報。

And a few years ago, he started to notice a trend.

幾年前，他注意到一種趨勢。

I started clicking, clicking, clicking, and didn't know where I started because I ended up looking at about 16,000 posters.

我開始不停地按滑鼠，不知從何時開始的因為我最後大概看了 16,000 張海報 。

Yeah, well, I look at about 100 posters per month and I've been doing this series since 2006…

沒錯！我一個月大概看 100 張海報，我從 2006 年就一直這麼做。

It's a lot of posters every year.

每年算起來是很多張海報。

He noticed that the use of Trajan rose significantly in the last couple of decades.

他注意到近幾十年裡，使用 Trajan 字體的比例明顯提高。

But why?

但為什麼呢？

In 1989, designer Carol Twombly adapted inscriptions from Roman emperor Trajan's column into a digital typeface.

1989 年，設計師 Carol Twombly 根據羅馬皇帝的圖拉真凱旋柱改寫出數位字體。

It was made for Adobe, so it was a part of the software that a lot of people were starting to use to make posters.

這是為 Adobe 打造的，後來許多人開始用這個軟體來製作海報。

A couple years later, it made its movie poster debut here — for Héctor Babenco's At Play in the Fields of the Lord.

幾年之後，它登上了電影海報的處女秀，是導演 Héctor Babenco 的在上帝土地上嬉戲 。

After that, it was on The Bodyguard, and Scent of a Woman.

之後它又出現在終極保鑣、女人香的海報上。

Then it was on three 1993 box office hits.

之後又出現在 1993 年三部賣座電影上。

By 1994, it was everywhere.

到 1994 年時，它已隨處可見。

It's originally used for epic movies, movies about people that overcome difficulties, like the big war epics and so on.

它最初是運用在史詩片，是關於人們克服困境像是史詩戰爭片之類的。

But then you see gradually that it becomes the standard movie font.

但你漸漸發現它成了標準的電影字型。

It's like the Arial of movie posters.

就像是電影海報版的 Arial 字體。

So people need to churn out a poster really quickly, and they just pick Trajan.

所以人們必須迅速製作出大量海報時，他們就選 Trajan。

Eventually, that overuse started to change the kinds of movies that were used the typeface.

最終，過度使用造成不同類型電影使用專門字體的改變。

You don't see it as much on the big productions anymore.

你沒這麼頻繁地在賣座電影上看到它了。

It's become the typeface of horror movies, B-movies, and also the straight-to-video ones.

它成了恐怖片、B 級片和錄影帶電影的字體。

So you'll see that a lot of posters are for the lesser movies that want to pretend they are better than they actually are.

因此你會發現很多海報都是要假裝這些低成本電影比實際上還好看 。

The rise and fall of Trajan illustrates the downside of digital typeface.

Trajan 字體的興衰表明了數位字體的缺點。

The convenience of swapping fonts is a huge shift from the old movie poster days when hand-painted typefaces or "lettering" was an art that was specific to each movie.

轉換字型的便利性是舊電影海報時代為每部電影特別手繪或刻劃出字體藝術的巨大改變 。

So what you see behind me — this is more like the pre-blockbuster thing... pre-genres, pre-standard styles — and that's why you will be hard-pressed to find two that are similar.

所以你在我身後看到的 — 它們算是數位字體之前賣座大片的海報，之前的風格和之前的類型，這就是為何你很難找到海報之間的相似性。

That doesn't make today's genre-specific typography bad design.

這不代表如今特定類型的電影使用的字體是不好的。

These visual clichés make it possible to communicate tone and plot details to an audience incredibly efficiently.

這些視覺上的陳腔濫調能有效率地向觀眾傳達電影的基調和劇情細節的資訊。

And there's a certain art to that.

其中也有它們的藝術。

People get nostalgic about the old era of movie posters, when everything was still done by hand and still very unique.

人們會懷念舊時代的電影海報，因為當時一切都是手工的而且也是獨一無二的 。

But you could compare it to music, where some people say, "nothing good was produced since the Beatles."

但你也可以跟音樂做比較，有些人會說「披頭四之後再沒有好音樂了。」

But then there are people who say there's nothing good since Mozart.

但也有人說莫札特之後再沒有好音樂了。

Fair enough, but there's many other interesting things that are being produced now.

很公平。但我們依舊製作出很多有趣的事物。

There's just much more.

它們只會越來越多。

But there's still a lot of very good poster design happening.

而且如今還是會製作出很多很棒的電影海報。

It's just, you need to know where to look.

你只需要知道往哪裡看就好。