“The Da Vinci Code” font in book and movie titles

Contemplating life with my next wife, the French actress Audrey Tautou, got me thinking about fonts again. Typeface designs used in book titles and movies tend to be overwhelmingly big, bold, and sans serif, but some publishers and studios buck the trend, providing us with some typographic relief. For example the font used in the original hard cover version of The Da Vinci Code book is a big, bold gothic style font:

However, the studios went with a more elegant copperplate gothic font in both the movie poster – which features the lovely Ms. Tautou – and the new mass market paperback edition of the popular novel, featuring a stylistic rendering of the cap “A”:

The font used in the new rendition is similar to “Elan,” which I discovered by uploading the cropped movie poster GIF to WhatTheFont on www.myfonts.com. I like the design of the font. It’s a clean substantial design appropriate for a lofty message.

So I wondered how the title of a recent Oscar-winning movie would look like when rendered with the Elan font, with my own clumsily reworked version of the cap “A” and a similar gradient fill treatment as was done for The Da Vinci Code:

ORIGINAL MOVIE TITLE REVISED MOVIE TITLE

The Da Vinci Code may not be getting the best reviews from the critics, but this critic sure likes the font they use in the movie title! I hope to see more variations from the usual big, bold, sans serif fonts in the future.

Yours in font land,

–Bob Thomas

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Hanks signed on for Da Vinci Code Prequel
• Da Vinci Code (Movie)
• Tuesday Evening Open Thread
• Five Vertigo Comic Titles DC Need To Make Into Movies