“There is nothing new under the sun”—when they wrote this in the Bible, I’m sure they weren’t thinking of graphic designers, but that’s definitely a profession it could apply to. Every new idea has some sort of precedent or echo from the past. Nothing in design is ever really original or new.

But that’s not so bad after all. Visual elements get reused because they have a certain power. They work. And we, the audience, also look for familiarity in things (even if something completely new was possible, we probably wouldn’t like it.). With each new project, the job of a designer is to strike the delicate balance of originality and familiarity.

When starting a new project, faced with a blank canvas, we rely on past experience. New work emerges in part through earlier work. Solutions that worked before could work again. No one (hopefully) sets out to make plagiarism, but as visual people, we are constantly in some kind of relationship with work by other designers—everything we see in books, online and around us on a daily basis. Judging by how hectic the design process can sometimes be (often it’s described as dancing tango with the client, but maybe a less elegant dance could also apply?), it’s impossible to plan or predict what ends up as final artwork. But we hope it’s something not quite seen before—a somewhat new combination of elements which makes it unique and memorable enough. And once the work is done, we can start searching for the inspiration which wasn’t known at the time.

One of the coolest books on my design bookshelf is The Anatomy of Design by Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic. The authors dissect fifty examples of graphic design (posters, packages, etc.), revealing their influences, or just similar things that happened in the past. It’s certainly an entertaining way to dig through design history. It’s also a way to establish that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. Everything is derived from what came before. Each artwork has its own visual baggage.

This book inspired me to try and do something similar with my own design work, so what follows is a dissection of the poster for Audition (1999), a disturbing Japanese thriller by Takashi Miike. The point of this exercise is to have fun and to highlight a bunch of great design(er)s in the process! Can you think of other examples as well? Let me know!

Let’s have a more detailed view of these 9 sections below! Each artwork is listed in the description (with credits where possible).

The Anatomy of a Movie Poster: Audition