“We wanted the poster to present the stark, elemental power of Herzog’s films, and at the same time to include something of the director’s own enigmatic personality and mythology,” says Jeremy Mende, art director and copywriter on the project. “The films selected for the series presented the often-mad struggle of man against the unforgiving vastness and impersonality of the world,” he says. “We chose the horizon to represent this vast, unyielding force and selected film stills that suggested the smallness of man against this backdrop.” Over those images, lists of adjectives were written—words such as conquistador, soldier, baron and mystic—meant to purposefully confuse descriptions of Herzog’s main characters with descriptions of Herzog himself. At first glance the typography appears to be digitally generated, and most people will assume that it is. But up close, idiosyncrasies of hand-drawn letterforms become apparent, revealing an obsessive attempt to recreate “the perfect” that Herzog likewise obsessively seeks to capture in his films. by Romy Ashby