Robert Downey Sr’s Putney Swope is a classic piece of cinema, which is often credited as having helped give birth to American independent film. It is a claim that holds weight because while there may have been other filmmaking pushes toward independence from this period, few are remembered today like Putney Swope. This poster for the film is one of my personal favourites and worth sharing. Those who follow my poster of the week entries will not be surprised to hear that a sense of space is a compositional aesthetic I respond to very heavily. With so much negative space, it increases the importance of the featured graphic detail in a way busier designs need not concern themselves with. The Putney Swope poster is strangely shocking, amusing and above all, graphically compelling. Beautiful simplicity executed with perfection.
