A Y2K Love Story

Project Brief: create a film promotion website for a current screening of a film made before 2005.

Please take a look at the site a little bit before reading my post!

Choosing the film was the first and biggest step before embarking on this film promotion project. There are a few movies that have specifically made an impact including Memento (2000), Raise The Red Lantern (1994), Legally Blonde (2001), etc. But the one I chose was a stand-out for its light subject matter. After such serious times, I decided to choose the teen romance comedy, A Cinderella Story (2004).

A Cinderella Story has had a recent rise in fame online. As it was uploaded onto Netflix, people were either introduced to this movie for the first time or reintroduced after a long time.

When brainstorming the next idea, I went back to watching the movie and looking at different materials. This included looking at the original trailer. The trailer made a point to show the technology Sam and Austin used to speak to each other. This led to a decision to focus on y2k tech nostalgia.

There has been a big trend to return to the aesthetics of y2k. This is alongside the 60s/70s retro revival as well. This rise in y2k fashion trends has brought curiosity about other parts of the culture during the turn of the century.

To begin the building, I found the Headline typeface/font. This is a pixel font called LoRes 9 OT Wide Bold from Adobe Fonts. This embraces the pre-HD life of the early 2000’s tech era with a playful flair. A great match for body text was LL Good Headline Pro, with the fonts Medium, Regular & Italic. Typically, I am a stern enforcer in using 2 typefaces and 3 fonts. I went to four fonts this time to be able to emphasize texts in body texts well.

The promo for the movie included light blue and white. A variation of these colors was honored in this project, but an off-white was used alongside a less strained light blue for the sake of the eyes.

The AIM gif was the first part of the site that was completed, leading the aesthetics of the rest of the site to stem from it. The inspirations from early Windows XP expanded. Even though a Mac was what Austin used, the movie is mainly from Sam’s point of view, and she is the person “messaging” Austin back in the GIF. That is also why I chose a CRT monitor, because, as it was shown on my y2k tech page, Sam used a CRT monitor while Austin had an iMac G4. I wanted to honor both models of computers since they defined the era so well. Windows aesthetics dominated the site since we follow the movie from Sam’s point of view.

Following this Windows aesthetic is shown in the icon used for the folders, the blue window top, and the cream color as the background. This also stemmed from the original creation of the AIM gif. It has the site feel like it is one, under one umbrella and not a messy hodgepodge of appearance.

The AIM window, the folder icons and the blue window was made in Adobe Illustrator. It was exported at 72ppi for the pixelated look, to feel more like 2004. This was a creative choice. There are decisions made on this site that point to a general feeling of being in 2004, but with a better UI experience for the user vs actually coping all 2004 designs completely.

For the cast page, there were a collection of profiles, so it made sense to separate them. For the homepage, it was a great pairing with the gif and other images on the page.

Most of the information for the movie was easily found on IMDb and Wikipedia. However, the y2k tech page took hours to complete. It wasn’t just the code that made this happen. It was having to finding out what specific flip phone Sam and Austin used. I was looking through Samsung phones released from 2001 to 2003 with a fine-tooth comb, searching and nitpicking until the correct model was found. It was important for this to be done though, as Sam’s phone was a big part of the movie since it is the item she loses as she runs away from Austin while dressed as Cinderella. The phone is used in the folder/nav part of the site as well.

Overall, my design had the essence of the original promotion color scheme. Otherwise, it is a big departure from it. As the movie was current at its release, there was no reason to take this route. But this direction was appropriate for the current times.