notes from pula, and what an arena does to a poster.

There is a moment before a screening in Pula when the lights go down and you become aware of the stone above you. The Arena was built in the first century. It has held gladiators, markets, sieges, and for the last seventy years, a film festival. You sit in it, and the scale of the thing does something to your expectations before a single frame appears.

We went to Pula this summer to watch films, meet people, and see what was moving. We came back thinking about size.

Most of our work is now judged at the size of a thumbnail. A key art we spend weeks on — composition weighed frame by frame, typography drawn and redrawn, a palette narrowed until only the necessary colours survive — meets its audience at 180 pixels wide, in a scrolling grid, next to forty other titles. That is the real test, and we design for it deliberately. Silhouette before detail. One idea, legible in a second. A title treatment that survives being shrunk to the height of a fingernail.

Then you sit in a Roman amphitheatre and watch The Odyssey open on a screen the size of a building, under an open sky, with the whole arena going quiet at the same moment, and you remember the other end of the scale.

Both are true. That is the part people miss.

A poster is not one object. It is a system that has to hold at every size it will ever be seen — the thumbnail, the phone screen, the six-sheet at a bus stop, the print someone actually hangs on a wall. The compositions that survive that range are the ones built on structure rather than decoration. A strong silhouette reads at any size. A cluttered one reads at none of them.

When we reworked the key art for Fury’s tenth anniversary, we stripped it to two colours and a shape. A tank and its crew as a single black form against flat red, the title knocked out through the middle of it. That decision was not about minimalism as a style. It was about a composition that holds whether you meet it on a phone or across a room.

Pula sharpened that. In the Arena there is nowhere for weak work to hide. The venue is not a neutral container — it is two millennia of built drama, and a film has to earn its place inside it. Watching it happen is a useful correction for anyone who spends their days optimising for platforms.

We also came to talk. Festivals are where the actual conversations happen — with directors between screenings, with producers who have a film finished and no idea how to present it, with people whose work we have admired from a distance. Several of those conversations are still going, and some of them will become projects. That is the unglamorous reason to be in the room: campaigns start as conversations long before they start as briefs.

Anell Limited works mostly remotely, across time zones, with teams we may never meet in person. It works well. But there is information in a festival that does not survive a video call — what a room does when a film lands, what people talk about in the queue afterwards, which posters along the seafront made anyone stop walking.

We design for the scroll because that is where films are found now. Pula is a reminder of what they are found for.