The Most Iconic Film Posters Ever Designed

The Most Iconic Film Posters Ever Designed

The Most Iconic Film Posters Ever Designed | 98types Studio
🎬 Film Art Prints from £3 · Buy 3 Get 1 FREE · Same-Day Dispatch Camden  ·  Browse All Films
JAWS SPIELBERG · 1975 PSYCHO HITCHCOCK · 1960 ALIEN SCOTT · 1979 VERTIGO HITCHCOCK · SAUL BASS · 1958 METROPOLIS FRITZ LANG · 1927 PULP FICTION TARANTINO · 1994 THE SHINING STAR WARS SILENCE DEMME · 1991 APOCALYPSE NOW COPPOLA · 1979 BLADE RUNNER SCOTT · 1982 The Most Iconic Film Posters Ever Designed Jaws · Vertigo · Metropolis · Alien · Psycho · Pulp Fiction · The Shining · Star Wars & more THE MOST ICONIC FILM POSTERS EVER DESIGNED — A GUIDE TO CINEMA'S GREATEST ART 98Types Studio · Camden Market London · Museum-grade film prints from £3 · Buy 3 get 1 FREE

🎬 The Most Iconic Film Posters Ever Designed

From Saul Bass to Drew Struzan — 13 posters that defined the art form. With confirmed film art prints from £3 at 98types, Camden Market.

A great film poster does something no trailer can: it communicates the entire emotional experience of a film in a single still image. The best of them work as standalone works of graphic art, independently of the films they represent. They have their own visual logic, their own emotional truth, their own design intelligence. This guide covers the thirteen most iconic film posters ever made — why each one works, who designed it, and what it changed. Every film with a confirmed print at 98types Studio is linked directly.

✎ About 98types film art prints: All 98types film prints are on 260gsm museum-grade satin paper with archive pigment inks that do not fade. Buy 3 get 1 free. Same-day first class dispatch from Market Hall, Camden Lock Place, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AL. Prints are available from A6 to A3, from £3. For films not currently listed, use the custom print option.
🎨 Design Principles

What Makes a Film Poster Iconic?

Before the list, a framework. These are the six qualities shared by every poster on this page — the design principles that separate a forgettable marketing image from a piece of permanent visual culture.

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Instant Communication
A great film poster must communicate the film's tone and genre in under two seconds. Before text is read, the visual must tell you whether this is a horror, a romance or a sci-fi epic.
⚡
Visual Intelligence
The greatest posters show something that cannot be shown in a scene — an emotion, a concept, a moral. Vertigo's spiral is not in the film. The Alien egg is not what audiences feared. Both are truer than any scene could be.
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Memorable Simplicity
Every iconic poster reduces its idea to the absolute minimum. Jaws: shark + swimmer. Alien: egg + tagline. The Shining: face + yellow + black. Complexity destroys memorability.
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The Right Colour
Saul Bass chose yellow for The Shining. Gold for Vertigo. The Alien team chose total black. These colour decisions are as important as the imagery. Colour works on the nervous system before the brain is involved.
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The Hidden Meaning
The greatest posters contain a second layer of meaning — the Dalí skull in Silence of the Lambs, the military imagery in Apocalypse Now, the spiral vortex in Vertigo. Discovery rewards the attentive viewer.
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Designed for Its Time
The Metropolis poster is Art Deco. The Psycho poster is Modernist. Pulp Fiction is retro pulp. Every great poster absorbs the design language of its era — and then transcends it.
🎪 The 13 Most Iconic

The Posters

Ranked by design influence — their impact on cinema marketing, visual culture and graphic design history. Films with confirmed art print products at 98types are linked directly.

01
Metropolis (1927)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Design: Heinz Schulz-Neudamm · Art Deco illustration
The rarest and most valuable film poster in existence — one of only four copies of the original German release poster. In 2005, actor Leonardo DiCaprio bought one privately for $690,000. Fritz Lang's science-fiction epic about a dystopian city of machines set the visual grammar of the genre for a century. The poster itself is a masterwork of Art Deco design: the robot Maria in gold and silver against a geometric cityscape, combining the Bauhaus industrial aesthetic with the operatic scale of the film. It is, quite simply, the most beautiful film poster ever made.
Why it changed everything:
Schulz-Neudamm's design proved that a film poster could function as a standalone work of art, independent of the film it promoted. The image communicates the entire world of the movie in a single frame — the machine-woman, the towers, the electricity, the modernist terror of industrial society. Every science-fiction poster made since 1927 owes something to this one.
Metropolis film art print 98types
Metropolis260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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02
Vertigo (1958)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Design: Saul Bass · Geometric spiral / lithography
Saul Bass was the greatest film poster designer who ever lived, and Vertigo is his masterpiece. The hypnotic spiral — golden on a black field, two figures falling into its vortex — is simultaneously an image of psychological obsession, falling in love, and the dizzying terror of heights. Bass was the first designer to understand that a film poster should not show scenes from the film: it should communicate the film's emotional experience. He succeeded so completely with Vertigo that the spiral became a visual synonym for the film's meaning.
The Saul Bass revolution:
Bass (1920–1996) was the designer who elevated film marketing to art. His posters for Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Exodus were equally groundbreaking. But Vertigo — chosen as the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound critics in 2012 — required and received the greatest poster. The Vertigo spiral is the most copied graphic design element in cinema history.
Vertigo film art print 98types
Vertigo260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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03
Psycho (1960)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Design: Saul Bass · Bold typographic stripes / B&W photography
The Psycho poster is a masterclass in withholding information. Janet Leigh in lingerie, horizontal slashes of black and white, Hitchcock's portrait-photograph face pointing at the title — a design that communicates panic and voyeurism without showing a single scene from the film. Saul Bass was also responsible for the title sequence and storyboarding the shower scene. The poster launched the practice of keeping film plots secret — Hitchcock famously refused to let audiences enter theatres after the film had started.
Available as a museum-grade art print at 98types:
The Psycho poster is available at 98types from £3 — one of Hitchcock's most requested prints. The dark typographic design that Bass created in 1960 reads as powerfully on a modern wall as it did on a 1960 marquee. Alfred Hitchcock directed 53 films. Psycho has the most iconic poster of any of them.
Psycho film art print 98types
Psycho260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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04
Jaws (1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Design: Roger Kastel · Oil painting illustration
Roger Kastel's Jaws illustration was painted for Peter Benchley's original novel and adopted directly for Spielberg's film. It is one of the most immediately legible images in cinema history: a vast shark ascending toward a tiny swimmer, with the entire ocean visible in a single frame. The image communicates scale, speed, vulnerability and doom in one glance. It was the film that invented the summer blockbuster and the poster that showed how a single image could sell 500 million cinema tickets.
The image that defined a genre:
Kastel painted the image with the shark impossibly enlarged relative to the swimmer — the anatomical inaccuracy is part of the terror. Real sharks are not that large. The poster's shark is a nightmare made visible. Jaws made $472 million in its first release and remains one of the ten highest-grossing films in history adjusted for inflation. Its poster has never stopped being reproduced.
Jaws film art print 98types
Jaws260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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05
Star Wars (1977)
Directed by George Lucas
Design: Tom Jung · Drew Struzan (variant) · Illustrated epic
Tom Jung's original Star Wars poster — Luke Skywalker with lightsaber raised, Leia at his side, Vader looming above, X-wings blazing, with a golden-orange sky over a binary sunset — introduced the concept of mythological scale in film marketing. It told you everything: hero, villain, princess, starship, epic. Jung's design set the template for every blockbuster poster that followed. Drew Struzan later refined the approach across the sequels, but Jung's original remains the archetype.
The blockbuster poster template:
Every Marvel poster, every summer blockbuster character montage, every golden sky with heroes silhouetted against it can be traced back to Tom Jung's Star Wars design. It is the most imitated film poster composition in history. Available in the 98types science fiction and all-movies collections.
Star Wars film art print 98types
Star Wars260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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06
Alien (1979)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Design: Philip Gips / Steve Frankfurt · Minimalism + tagline
"In space, no one can hear you scream." Eight words and a single cracked egg against an endless black field. The Alien poster is one of the most restrainedly brilliant in cinema history — it shows nothing of the alien, nothing of the crew, nothing of the terror. Just the egg, the fracture of light, the darkness, and the tagline. The knowledge that something is inside the egg makes the image more frightening than any depiction of the creature could have been.
The art of not showing everything:
Ridley Scott has produced some of the most visually extraordinary films ever made — Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator — and correspondingly some of the most striking posters. The Alien poster proved that negative space, restraint, and a perfect tagline could out-perform any monster image. Available in the 98types horror collection.
Alien film art print 98types
Alien260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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07
The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Design: Saul Bass · Bold yellow / black typography
Saul Bass's third appearance in this list — and his most stripped-back. The Shining poster is golden yellow, with Jack Nicholson's face emerging from the typeface itself, the 'I' of 'SHINING' formed from his staring eyes. The yellow-and-black palette was a deliberate departure from conventional horror red — Kubrick and Bass chose the colour of sunshine and summer to make the darkness inside the Overlook Hotel feel more dissonant. It is the only film poster that makes yellow frightening.
Stanley Kubrick's personal involvement:
Kubrick was famously involved in every aspect of his films, including the poster designs. His collaboration with Bass on The Shining produced one of the two or three most recognisable horror posters in cinema history. Available in the 98types horror collection — The Shining is one of the most-requested prints in the studio.
The Shining film art print 98types
The Shining260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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08
Blade Runner (1982)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Design: John Alvin · Neo-noir illustration
John Alvin's Blade Runner poster captures a visual grammar that had never existed before 1982 — neon rain, retro-futurist architecture, flying cars in an infinite night city. The image is part science-fiction, part film noir, part Orientalist dystopia. It invented the aesthetic of cyberpunk before cyberpunk had been named. The poster is simultaneously beautiful and oppressive: a city of impossible scale, a figure that is both detective and prey.
The founding image of cyberpunk:
Blade Runner was a commercial failure in 1982 and became a cultural touchstone over the following forty years. Its poster followed the same trajectory — the neon rain city image has become one of the most reproduced film poster aesthetics in history. Available in the 98types science fiction and drama collections.
Blade Runner film art print 98types
Blade Runner260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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09
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Design: James Verdesoto · Retro pulp-magazine aesthetic
James Verdesoto's Pulp Fiction poster is the most reproduced film poster in student accommodation history. Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace, reclining on a bed with a cigarette and a paperback, surrounded by retro pulp-magazine typography — the image captures the film's entire aesthetic in a single frame: 1950s sensibility, 1970s sexuality, 1990s self-awareness. The lurid red, black and white palette was deliberately derived from the cheap pulp magazines that gave the film its title.
The collector's poster:
Verdesoto won a Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award for this design and Entertainment Weekly named it one of the best film posters ever made. The retro pastiche approach — deliberately evoking the aesthetic of the films Tarantino references — became the template for a generation of movie poster design. Browse Pulp Fiction art prints in the 98types drama collection.
Pulp Fiction film art print 98types
Pulp Fiction260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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10
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Design: Dawn Baillie · Death's-head hawkmoth / skull composite
The death's-head hawkmoth at the centre of The Silence of the Lambs poster contains one of the most remarkable concealed images in design history: the skull pattern on the moth's back is composed of nude female figures — a composition derived from Salvador Dalí's 1951 photograph In Voluptas Mors. The image communicates predation, entomology, death, feminism and the male gaze in a single icon. It is one of the most intellectually dense film poster designs ever created.
The most hidden image in film poster design:
The Dalí reference was intentional — the production designer deliberately referenced the surrealist image to add a layer of meaning to the poster that most viewers would sense without being able to articulate. The Silence of the Lambs won all five major Academy Awards in 1992 — one of only three films in history to achieve this. Available in the 98types horror and drama collections.
The Silence of the Lambs film art print 98types
The Silence of the Lambs260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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11
Goodfellas (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Design: 98types Studio design
The Goodfellas poster problem: how do you make a gangster film look both glamorous and dangerous? The solution used across multiple international releases was to use the texture of the film itself — the gold and black palette that echoes both the glamour of the mob lifestyle and the noir darkness of its consequences. Ray Liotta's face. Robert De Niro's face. Joe Pesci's face. The three actors who define three different relationships with violence, presented in a visual grammar borrowed from crime fiction book covers.
Available as a museum-grade art print at 98types:
The Goodfellas print at 98types is one of the most-requested Scorsese products in the studio. A dark, cinematic art print on 260gsm museum-grade satin paper — the print that Scorsese would approve of, at the quality a film of this stature deserves.
Goodfellas film art print 98types
Goodfellas260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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12
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Design: 98types Studio design
Six men in black suits and white shirts, walking in slow motion toward the camera, ties loosened, cigarettes burning — the Reservoir Dogs image is one of the most imitated group compositions in film poster history. The suits (bought from a Men's Wearhouse for $6 each because the production had no budget) became the film's defining visual identity. The poster works because the composition is borrowed from a hundred crime-novel covers and recontextualised — it tells you everything about the aesthetic while showing nothing about the plot.
Available as a museum-grade art print at 98types:
Tarantino's debut is available as a confirmed product at 98types — a cult cinema print on 260gsm museum-grade satin paper. The Reservoir Dogs print is among the most-requested cult film prints at the Camden Market studio.
Reservoir Dogs film art print 98types
Reservoir Dogs260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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13
Trainspotting (1996)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Design: 98types Studio design
The Trainspotting poster made counter-culture mainstream. Ewan McGregor's face, the Choose Life typography, the ensemble of characters staring out at you with equal measures of defiance and despair — the image captured a generation's alienation and made it look glamorous, which is precisely what the film itself did. The typographic approach, using the 'Choose Life' slogan as a design element, turned political satire into visual shorthand.
Available as a museum-grade art print at 98types:
Trainspotting is one of the most important British films ever made, and its poster is the most recognised British film poster of the 1990s. The 98types Trainspotting print is available from £3 on 260gsm museum-grade satin paper.
Trainspotting film art print 98types
Trainspotting260gsm satin · A6–A3 · From £3
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✎ The Designers

The Four Greatest Film Poster Designers

Every poster on this list was created by one of four designers, or directly in their tradition. Understanding their work is understanding the visual grammar of cinema.

Saul Bass
1920 – 1996
The greatest film poster designer in history. His work for Vertigo, Psycho, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm and The Shining redefined what film marketing could be. He also designed title sequences — including North by Northwest and Schindler's List. Kubrick, Hitchcock and Scorsese all sought him out specifically.
Key works: Vertigo · Psycho · The Man with the Golden Arm · The Shining · Anatomy of a Murder
Drew Struzan
1947 – present
The artist who defined blockbuster cinema for thirty years. His illustrated poster style — warm, painterly, compositionally complex — defined Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, E.T. and the Harry Potter series. Struzan retired in 2008 but returned for The Force Awakens at the personal request of Harrison Ford.
Key works: Star Wars (all) · Indiana Jones · Back to the Future · Harry Potter · The Thing
James Verdesoto
active 1980s – 2000s
New York-based designer responsible for some of the most memorable 1990s film posters: Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Seven. His Pulp Fiction design won multiple Key Art Awards and was named one of the best film posters ever made by Entertainment Weekly.
Key works: Pulp Fiction · The English Patient · Seven
John Alvin
1948 – 2008
Designer of Blade Runner, E.T., The Color Purple, Blazing Saddles and Beauty and the Beast. His illustrated style — atmospheric, warm-toned, painterly — was the counterpoint to Struzan's more commercial approach. Blade Runner is his masterwork.
Key works: Blade Runner · E.T. · The Color Purple · Blazing Saddles · Young Frankenstein

🎬 Shop Iconic Film Art Prints at 98types

Psycho · Goodfellas · Reservoir Dogs · Trainspotting · The Big Lebowski · Beetlejuice · Ghostbusters & more. From £3 · Buy 3 get 1 FREE · 260gsm museum-grade satin paper · Same-day dispatch from Market Hall, Camden Lock Place, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AL. Can’t find a title? Custom print option.

Browse All Films →

FAQ — Iconic Film Posters & Art Prints

Who is considered the greatest film poster designer of all time?

Saul Bass (1920–1996) is almost universally considered the greatest film poster designer in history. His work for Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest), Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm), and Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) produced some of the most recognisable images in cinema. Bass was also responsible for title sequences, including North by Northwest (1959) and Schindler’s List (1993). His design philosophy — that a poster should communicate emotional experience rather than show scenes from the film — remains the foundation of serious film poster design.

What makes the Jaws poster so iconic?

Roger Kastel’s Jaws poster works because it achieves perfect visual communication in a single image: the enormous ascending shark and the tiny swimmer above communicate scale, speed, vulnerability and inevitable doom in one glance. The shark is anatomically impossible — deliberately enlarged beyond reality — which makes it a nightmare rather than a nature photograph. The image was painted for Peter Benchley’s original novel and adopted directly for Spielberg’s film. Jaws invented the summer blockbuster and its poster defined how blockbuster films would be marketed for the following fifty years.

What is the most valuable film poster ever sold?

The Fritz Lang Metropolis (1927) poster designed by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm is the rarest and most valuable film poster in existence. Only four copies of the original German release poster are known to exist. In 2005, actor Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly purchased one privately for $690,000. The Art Deco illustration of the robot Maria against a geometric cityscape is also considered the most artistically significant film poster ever created.

Which film posters are confirmed as art prints at 98types?

Confirmed individual product pages at 98types include Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990), Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino, 1992), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), The Big Lebowski (Coen Brothers, 1998), Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988), Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984), The King of Comedy (Scorsese, 1982), Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) and more. The Horror collection includes The Shining, Alien, Halloween and others. For any title not listed, use the custom print option. All from £3.

What is the most copied film poster design ever?

Saul Bass’s spiral design for Vertigo (1958) is the most copied graphic design element in film poster history. Tom Jung’s Star Wars composition (1977) — hero, villain, love interest, in a golden-sky montage — is the most imitated poster composition, reproduced in some form in almost every blockbuster marketing campaign since 1977. The Alien tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” is the most imitated film marketing tagline. The Jaws image is the most imitated single film illustration.

Also read: Top 10 Horror Movie Posters Every Collector Needs · Pulp Fiction Art Prints · Browse Horror Films · All Movies

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