Tasogare Otome’s massive bishoujo imagery has moved out of the Shinjuku Alta, and taking its place, some unartistic Sword Art Online marketing has arrived instead – filling the area with a potent aura of generic.
The selection of billboard artwork certainly is not bad, it’s merely not ideal – being even less attractive than the Tasogare Otome spot, and incidentally, that one was criticized for not being as appealing as the Nisemonogatari little sister who lit up the area before it. The Shinjuku Alta seems to be getting less pleasing a sight as seasons pass – yet admittedly, that’s all relative in the end, but simultaneously still so true.
Focusing on the billboard image, the contrasting strips are splendid – the white may not seem the best choice in broad daylight, yet this enormous signage lights up at night, and that certainly makes for quite a vivid display. Yet not so wonderful, one must wonder whether it is the white stripes, or the portion of landscape, however the color arrangement isn’t visually rewarding. The white is grand in terms of visibility – although when it comes to actual usage as seen here, it’s not the most lovely since the contrast is only mainly serving the protagonist.
Black obviously stands out on white, but the heroine seems to simply partially blend in for evident reasons – and then somewhat complement the landscape as per orange on blue. Either way however, the fact that the character designs are not particularly fantastic to begin with is not doing the image any favors.
Further, the bottom corner typography is fairly bland – being merely slapped atop the entire thing, and not working too well with the obscuring landscape and heroine. On that note, the Nisemonogatari imouto billboard makes quite a superb example of typographic style and layout for case in point.
Now if whomever would have merely settled for an upscaled artwork of the loli, they wouldn’t have had any issues.
Aug 8, 2012 @ 6:06 CDT
man i wish i was in japan