There’s a design challenge that sounds simple and turns out to be brutal: take a film that runs two hours, contains hundreds of characters, and lives in the memory of millions of people, and reduce it to a single mark. Not a scene. Not a character. A mark.
Michal Krasnopolski has done this for dozens of films, and the results are some of the most thought-provoking graphic design you’ll find anywhere. But to understand why his work lands the way it does, it helps to understand the tradition he’s working within.
Saul Bass and the Idea of a Symbol
Saul Bass didn’t invent the movie poster. He invented the idea that a poster could be a symbol rather than an advertisement.
His 1955 poster for The Man with the Golden Arm bore no image of Frank Sinatra. It showed a jagged, disconnected arm on a white field and communicated the feeling of heroin addiction through a single abstract shape. Audiences had never seen anything like it.
Bass went on to design for Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest) and Kubrick (Spartacus), each poster built on the same principle: find the one thing the film is about, not what happens in it, and make that one thing into a shape. His stated philosophy: “Try to reach for a simple visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story.”
That sentence is still the clearest description of what the best minimalist poster artists do.
The Polish Poster School
Poland has spent 70 years treating the movie poster as an art form independent of the film’s marketing. Artists like Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Ciesłewicz produced posters that responded to films rather than described them: dreamlike, symbolic, deeply graphic. A Polish poster for Casablanca doesn’t look like Humphrey Bogart. It looks like an idea about longing.
This tradition matters because Michal Krasnopolski is Polish. His minimalism doesn’t come from Swiss international style or Bauhaus restraint. It comes from a culture where poster design has always been asked to carry the full weight of meaning.
Michal Krasnopolski: One Rule, Infinite Films
Krasnopolski’s constraint is precise enough to be a formula and flexible enough to produce surprising results every time: a circle, overlaid by two diagonal lines, inscribed in a square. Every single poster in his series uses exactly these elements and nothing else.
The circle becomes a planet, a lens, an eye, a target. The diagonals become a sword, a road, a flight path, a bullet’s trajectory. What makes this extraordinary isn’t the visual cleverness. It’s the act of reduction itself: the discipline of asking, for every film, if I could only say one thing about this, what would it be? The Pulp Fiction poster resolves to a gun barrel. The Empire Strikes Back becomes the suggestion of a mask. North by Northwest: a man against a grid, the entire paranoia of mid-century America compressed into geometry.
“The designs rigorously adhere to the same mold,” he has said. The rigidity of the mold is the whole point: it forces every film to be understood on equal terms. See more of his work at michalkrasnopolski.com and on Instagram.
Albert Exergian: One Object Per Series
Austrian designer Albert Exergian applied a similar approach to television: reduce an entire series to one symbolic object on a flat color field. Breaking Bad becomes a chemistry beaker. Mad Men becomes a glass of whiskey. The Wire becomes a red brick. Twin Peaks becomes a slice of cherry pie.
Where Krasnopolski uses a fixed geometric system across many films, Exergian finds a unique object for each show, and in doing so reveals what the show is really about. The cherry pie isn’t just something Agent Cooper eats. It’s the whole feeling of Americana-gone-wrong that makes Twin Peaks what it is.
Olly Moss: The Double Image
UK designer Olly Moss approaches minimalist posters from a different angle. His signature technique hides one recognizable silhouette inside another, creating a visual puzzle that rewards a second look. The shape of a figure contains another figure. A landscape contains a face. A symbol contains its opposite.
If Bass is about finding the symbol, and Krasnopolski is about enforcing the constraint, Moss is about the reward of looking carefully. His best posters have two readings: the immediate one, and the one you find after a moment of attention. The second is always the more meaningful one.
The A24 Moment
Something shifted in film marketing around 2015. A24, the studio behind Hereditary, Midsommar, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Past Lives, started commissioning posters that looked nothing like studio materials. No floating heads. No star names in 48-point type. Instead: single images, often uncomfortable, often graphic. The Hereditary poster is a house that, on close inspection, looks like a family. The Midsommar poster is a meadow of flowers that might also be a funeral pyre.
A24 didn’t invent minimalist poster design. They mainstreamed it, and demonstrated that there’s an audience who will seek out a film partly because its poster looks interesting. The poster as the first piece of the art, not just the advertisement for it. That’s the tradition Bass established in 1955. It took 60 years to go mainstream.
For more in this vein: Pete Majarich’s alternative movie posters take a different geometric approach with equally striking results.
Originally published August 15, 2023. Substantially updated June 2026.
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