African Barbershop Sign vs Ghanaian Movie Poster
アフリカの理髪店看板 / ガーナ手描き映画ポスター
African Barbershop Sign comes from Signage and Display and Ghanaian Movie Poster from Regional Graphics. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
African Barbershop Sign
The hand-painted signboards of West African barbershops: numbered haircut samples in a grid, flat repeated faces sitting between product catalogue and portraiture.
Ghanaian Movie Poster
Ghana's hand-painted movie posters on flour-sack canvas, made for mobile cinema: unconstrained imagination reinterpreting Hollywood with exaggeration and local horror into a painting style like no other.
| African Barbershop Sign | Ghanaian Movie Poster | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1950s– | 1980s–2000s |
| Family | Signage and Display | Regional Graphics |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Grids of haircut samples / Flat repeated faces / Numbers and hand lettering / Enamel on plywood | Flour-sack canvas / Exaggerated violence and muscle / Free departure from the actual film / Hand-painted title lettering |
| Best used for | Showing the choices in pictures for customers who cannot read the text · Shopfront signage hand painted to survive sun and rain | Screening and show announcements that sell the exaggeration as the attraction · Product and event visuals that get their laugh from painted excess |
| Type | Number each cut and paint only the shop name large by hand | Titles sized letter by letter, lifted off the surface with outline and shadow |
| Composition | Grid of equal frames with every face drawn at the same angle | One chosen spectacle at the center, the rest pushed past the edge |
| Material | Enamel on plywood, few colors, black outlines holding it together | Enamel laid thick on sewn sacking, creases and seams left showing |
| Caution | Individualizing the faces as portraits breaks the catalogue function, and customers can no longer use the board to order. | Borrowing the exaggeration for laughs alone erases the exhibition need that produced it, and the picture ends up mocking somebody else's living. |