Film Posters: How Trainspotting Became Hip

Think of the film Trainspotting and the chances are you won't think first of a scene from the film, but of its advertising. Gritty black-and-white photographs of five key actors from the film boxed on clean white backgrounds, numbered and captioned with their character names in orange.

For years after the film was released, you couldn't escape the look that the campaign defined: everyone from clothing and computer companies to clubs appropriated the image and used it to advertise their own products, all wanting to associate themselves with the film's iconic status, all hoping that a bit of its critical, commercial and cult success would rub off on them. Five years on, Odeon cinemas were still using the design on their customised packets of jelly babies, and some students still have fading reproductions of the original on their walls.

Somehow a film about heroin addiction has become not only one of the best marketed films in living memory but has provided the 20th century with one of its most enduring cultural images.

When design company Stylorouge first accepted the brief there was some nervousness about the potentially controversial nature of the film, but it being a Danny Boyle project, the buzz was already enormous. Like most people who read Irvine Welsh's original groundbreaking book, Stylorouge's Rob O'Connor and Mark Blamire laughed aloud while finding much of it monumentally distasteful.

As is typical of Stylorouge's approach to campaign development, everyone on the team discussed ideas for the poster in initial brainstorming meetings, although the number of people who went on to work on the project was limited for practical reasons. The campaign became O'Connor and Blamire's baby.

Keen to tap into the disenfranchised tone of the book, they first imagined a poster that would convey a grubby sense of danger, as though one would catch something if one went near it. Other early ideas included a re-creation of the scene where Renton plunges into the toilet, dismissed because the ensuing watery image would be too abstract.