$237 million Avatar movie’s font is… Papyrus?
Is it really true that nobody came up with an original, illustrated title for James Cameron’s insanely expensive blockbuster movie? Let’s take a look at the title itself. This is from a screen capture taken from one of the HD trailers:
It’s got a nice glow effect with some color variations within the glyphs. I think it achieves that eco-spiritual, aboriginal feel well enough. The obvious font that looks like this is Papyrus, a font found on every Windows and Mac out there. Here’s a quick and dirty copy I made in Photoshop using that ubiquitous font (without going through the work of replicating the effects):
Hmm. Not really a match. The details are clearly different. They must have set aside some of that massive budget to hire a talented typographer to give Cameron’s film an original word mark. I wonder, though, if it were just thickened up a bit with the old “faux bold” text modifier:
Closer, but still not quite. But wait… They do both have random nicks and notches in the letters to help give it them a weathered, pitted effect. A closer comparison:
Everything lines up perfectly. Well that settles it. Avatar’s font is definitely Papyrus with some path distortions done in something like Illustrator. They did at least try to fool us by making the A’s unique from one another:
Still, I can’t help but be a little disappointed at this. Oh well. Fantastic movie otherwise.
Can u post that font? =)
not papyrus, but the real one of avatar =)
i love it
[...] the notches in the outlines by several people proved conclusive – see for example the graphic on Aaron Weyenberg’s blog. The face was also used in standard setting for subtitling the Na’vi language. So we’re [...]
As I outlined above, they have modified the paths for each of the glyphs for Papyrus in an attempt to make it look somewhat original. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to legally post a font like that.
I hate that font. I could not believe they used it…
Maybe the most overused font in the history, after Comic sans and Bauhaus…
I literally gagged when I saw the first trailer for Avatar and recognized the title font as Papyrus. I told my friends I was boycotting the movie because of this fact (of course this did not last, need to see this movie). You really would think that with the unlimited budget and the insane attention to detail that James Cameron has, they would have hired someone to design a custom, one-of-a-kind font. Is this not standard for big budget films? (i.e. Harry Potter, The Matrix, and not-so-big-budget Star Wars)
[...] The general consensus is that for such a large budget movie, more time, effort and money could have been spent to select a more suitable typeface for the posters and subtitles http://aaronweyenberg.com/402/avatar-movie-font-is-papyrus. [...]