Jurassic Park posters

Jurassic Park’s film poster was designer by John Alvin according to his wife’s book, The Art of John Alvin. Although John Alvin included the t-rex logo designed by Chip Kidd from the original book cover design for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, he put his own design spin on it by changing the typeface, colors, and shape to bring the elements together more cohesively. This iconic graphic continues to be reused throughout all three Jurassic Park film poster designs as well as the Jurassic World film posters with some changes to keep it fresh and fit each movie.

This 1993 film poster simply features the flat graphic and text, keeping the poster details to a minimum. This minimalism also keeps the movie scenes as a complete mystery to the viewers rather than showing a shot of how the dinosaurs will appear in the film. This mystery makes the movie more alluring to the viewer but still gets the idea of this movie being about dinosaurs across to them.

In 1997, Jurassic Park: The Lost World film poster used nearly the same exact design as the first movie, but with a rocky texture and cracks throughout the iconic graphic logo. However, there was a limited production of lenticular film posters to promote the movie that would shift from this design to showing a t-rex breaking through that rocky graphic with an open mouth towards the viewer. Using this lenticular shifting poster worked as a jump scare tactic for the viewers as they walked by it. These types of posters tend to be limited in production because they tend to be more expensive to produce and ship as they are quite fragile.

Lenticular printing brings movement to traditionally flat film poster. It allows the audience to directly interact with the poster as they can purposely change their viewing angle to see the different images being displayed, prolonging the viewers time looking at the poster. This effect is achieved with the help of a lenticule, a lens with corrugated surface in tiny arches. The lenticule is laid over an interlaced image where the corrugation changes which strips of the image are visible depending on the viewing angle. 

Since the releases of the films, there has been an alternative lenticular poster design for the original Jurassic Park movie officially licensed by Universal Studios in 2021. This redesign by Marc Schoenbach pays homage to the designs from both of these mentioned film posters and combines them into one essentially. Marc keeps the flat iconic graphic from the first Jurassic Park poster and has a giant t-rex head crash through it, sending parts of the graphic flying in every direction just like Jurassic Park: The Lost World’s lenticular poster.