The Design of “Batman: The Animated Series”

You don’t need to go back and watch this, it is a 1990’s children’s show

That said, the design of the show is needlessly brilliant. Kids in the 90’s didn’t know what Art Deco and Film Noir were, they probably hadn’t seen the Max Fleisher Superman shorts from the 1940’s. They would have consumed “Transformers”-tier garbage and liked it. We can see this because future series didn’t spend all of this careful time and energy on clever design. Why is every television in Gotham City black-and-white? Because the right thing to do with one’s life is to build and produce as careful and beautiful a thing as one can get away with.

The book in the link is long out of print and copies are expensive. It’s a beautifully designed object itself and scrolling through it misses how bleeds and spreads and such are used in the actual artifact. That said it’s worth a look on a large iPad screen if you have one around.