Superb pared-back, Bauhaus-esque Stephen King posters

Horror and sci-fi are genres that often conjure up a certain visual aesthetic: one that’s typically dark and complex. Their winding and strange narratives tend not to lend themselves to graphic, Swiss-style simplicity – or at least so we thought, until we saw the work designer Daniel Reed has created, inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series. Taking cues from mid-century Swiss graphic design and the Bauhaus school, the posters take the numbers from within Stephen’s texts as their starting point.

“Throughout the books a pattern of numbers emerges (9 – 19 – 199 – 1919 – 1999) the main focus being the number 19,” Daniel explains. “I decided to use these numbers to create a series of posters (one for each book). The numbers acted as the starting point in order to construct the margins, grid, image area and type sizes of the poster.”

Once these specifics were settled on, Daniel then looked at the illustrations, which are similarly tied to the content they promote. “The illustrations on the posters came from moments within the books which held significant value to the storyline and could be represented visually,” says Daniel. “The colours were chosen to reflect the emotion and landscape of each book.”