What Makes Vixen Box Covers Look So Good? We Asked a Graphic Designer

Some things look just so very enticing.

A slice of watermelon on a hot, sultry day. A freshly painted room. A newly made bed, complete with overstuffed pillows and luxurious comforter. A tall glass of soda, with bubbles fizzing over the edge.

The cover art for Vixen movies has the same effect. You almost can’t help but stare . . . and buy . . . and watch. (Check out any edition of AE Pulse and you’ll find Lansky-directed movies in nearly all the bestselling DVD spots.) In fact, all box covers from the brands started by director Greg Lansky (Blacked, Tushy, and more) have that bewitching, appealing look.

But what’s behind that signature visual sheen? What exactly makes a Vixen cover so eye-catching? We wanted to know the reasons, so we went to an expert: one of our very own Adult Empire graphic designers, Dee. She broke down the aspects that make Vixen box covers look so good. By extension, she encapsulated some of those ineffable qualities that give Lansky’s movies themselves such an abiding appeal.

Porn meets fashion

Dee has worked for Adult Empire for nearly five years, designing everything from site banners to major promotional pages. She likes porn’s trend toward a cleaner, more modern look. She attributes the appeal of Vixen’s graphic design to a combination of savvy instincts, a consistent vision, and subtle evocation of the visual idioms of fashion photography. Put another way, imagine if Victoria’s Secret or Vogue melded their glossy visuals with pornography. Take, for instance, the cover for Natural Beauties Vol. 3, which Dee points to as a particularly strong example from the brand:

“It’s styled like a fashion magazine cover,” Dee says. “The picture is boxed in [the black borders surrounding the Eva Lovia picture], the ‘Vixen’ name is presented at the top like a magazine title,  and the size and placement of the text are similar to what you would see on a magazine. Even the tiny ‘Vol. 3’ below the Vixen logo is used in a way that suggests the edition number of a magazine. Eva Lovia is posed and dressed like a fashion model.” The cover’s primary pic also relies on in-camera effects rather than Photoshop trickery: according to Dee, that vivid red was likely an on-set color and not an editorial addition after the fact. Dee sees this overall effect as “moving toward the modern fashion look to engage a younger audience.”

Influences and other brands

If you’re seeking proof that Vixen (and the other Lansky brands) evoke a fashion-mag feel, look no further than the covers of Paper Magazine, which produced the famous “Break the Internet” Kim Kardashian shoot in 2014, around the same time Blacked was introduced on DVD. Compare an array of Paper Mag editions to your favorite Vixen and Tushy covers to see the parallels. In this way, Lansky invites us to view the movie not as just another porn movie but instead as something that comes from a world of upscale luxury and glamour.

Other brands have also evoked this same modernist vibe in their box covers, ranging from AGW Entertainment to Jules Jordan Video. Even subtleties like typeface can help contribute to this overall effect. HardX, for example, uses the famous modernist Helvetica font (a typeface so pervasive that it was subject to its own documentary).

Lansky isn’t resting on his laurels, though. Dee points out that his newer labels, such as Blacked Raw, opt for a somewhat different aesthetic. “Blacked Raw covers look more like selfies,” Dee says, pointing to the more casual posing and the slightly overexposed look.

Check out Vixen’s movies for yourself here.