Meet the man behind ‘Minimal Bollywood Posters’, Akshar Pathak.
He is not only keeping the trend of making Bollywood posters alive but has reinvented the art to suit today’s sensibilities. Film posters are an integral tool used to publicise films. From hand-painted posters in the past, to the motion posters of today, Bollywood posters have undergone many transformations over the years. While minimalism has never been Bollywood’s forte, new-age graphic designer Akshar Pathak uses it as his USP. He focuses on the central theme or motif of a film to design these piquant posters.
Akshar: The main idea in every poster is to have a joke or have something that people can relate to. If a person is going for a movie or if you’re going for a movie or anyone else… there’s always one thing that you come out with the movie, one thought that have in your head or one thing you’ll remember forever so the whole point was to just capture that one thought or one moment and that idea into one graphic and just present it to the people, and that’s what it is, nothing else.
Log on to www.minimalbollywood.com and explore Bollywood through the eyes of this 23-year old graphic designer for whom designing Bollywood posters is a hobby and it’s something that he stumbled upon by chance.
Akshar: None of this was actually planned, it’s very “one evening I am just sitting I have nothing to do at home so I am surfing stuff on the internet” and I came across these posters by Ibraheem Youssef and also I saw a few posters on Behance which had superheroes but superheroes were shown in a very minimal way so there were about 6 of those posters and I saw those and I thought “this can be done to Bollywood posters as well”. And that’s how I started it.
Using social media to publicise his art, Akshar hit bull’s eye when he was roped in by Mira Nair to design posters for her 2013 film ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’. That’s not all, film maker Subhash Ghai commissioned him to design posters for 15 films. As for his personal favourites ‘Mr. India’ and ‘Sholay’ top the list.
Akshar: My favourite would be the ‘Mr India’ one. So it’s a blank poster where there’s the hero and there’s a red strip in the middle where you can see him. Besides that I really like the poster of ‘Sholay’, also because the guy I had shown is pretty insignificant in the movie so he has about like no dialogues. So it’s just a poster of that guy sitting on top of the hill.