When Vivek Mathur moved to New York City from India at age 18, he says he “had very little understanding of American culture, except maybe from movies.” Now 32, Mr. Mathur is a film-industry insider, shuttling between Los Angeles and New York for his graphic design studio, Indika Entertainment Advertising.

It’s a classic Hollywood story arc: The teenager who believed that coming to America meant that “you start from zero like everyone else and you can do whatever you want” has become a bona fide success story.

Indika is responsible for some of the most striking posters in recent film history. The company’s work includes the “Fahrenheit 9/11” image of Michael Moore holding hands with President Bush, Jim Carrey climbing a ladder into space for “Man on the Moon,” and Hugh Grant loping past a poster of Julia Roberts for “Notting Hill.”

Mr. Mathur and his crew usually begin their work before a film has been shot.

“We’ve been given cases where the director hadn’t even figured out what [he] was doing, but he wrote the script,” Mr. Mathur says with a laugh. “Sometimes your actors haven’t been cast yet.”

Other times, they have to do what he calls “Frankensteining” a poster: “‘The movie’s opening in 3 weeks,'” he says, imitating a panicked art director. “‘I need something out tomorrow. What will you do right now? Everything we’ve done isn’t working.'”

A poster design is usually coordinated with a marketing push in the press and tweaked before the film’s international release. For “Fahrenheit 9/11” an early poster asked “Controversy… What Controversy?” After the film opened successfully, a second round of graphics depicted Mr. Moore’s baseball-capped head looming over the White House. “Summer May Be Over,” the ad exclaimed, “But the Temperature Is Still Rising!”

Poster design is not just a matter of capturing the film’s tone or thinking up a creative visual summary of the plot. A phalanx of studio requirements come along with each assignment. Often, for example, the logo must be 400% of the size of “billing block,” the small-print credits at the bottom of every poster.

“There are certain conventions you have to follow,” Mr. Mathur explains. “[Actors] have likeness agreements… If X is a certain size, Y has to be a certain size, and Z has to be a certain size….There’s a lot of things you can avoid by not having anyone on your poster, but if you have one person on your poster, they sometimes trigger a bunch of other people.” On Indika’s poster for the Steven Soderbergh’s comedy “Ocean’s 11,” there are no faces depicted and the high-profile actors’ names are listed alphabetically. Julia Roberts’s comes last, preceded by the word “and,” which is a symbol of prestige detectible only to an insider. “If you get an ‘and’ in front of your name, that’s a wonderful thing,” he laughs. “It’s big business!” For “Ocean’s Twelve,” Indika reworked the theme.

During most of the film industry’s short history, studios used in-house design teams to produce trailers and print campaigns. But in recent years, a small group of specialized design houses have cropped up to add a forward-looking and refined sensibility to movie marketing. Indika’s competitors, who Mr. Mathur blithely claims to know little about, include Bemis Balkind, Art Machine, Crew Creative Advertising, and BLT & Associates.

One of the keys to Indika’s success, according to Mr. Mathur, was its decision to be based in New York. “It’s a fairly limited field of designers,” he says of Los Angeles. “Everybody sort of jumps from one firm to another, to another, and back. And so what ends up happening is that the same ideas get recycled again and again and again. One of the things that we present to L.A. – to Hollywood – is an edge.”

“We’re not the mainstream,” Mr. Mathur says. “We never were, we never pretended to be. So [being in New York] gives us space to do more interesting campaigns.”

Staying solely on the East Coast may have been a boon to the company’s design sensibility, but from a business standpoint it was exhausting. Mr. Math ur found himself trapped in almost a perpetual commute. “We’d fly out there sometimes every two weeks, every week. You have to go out there.”

So in 1999, Indika set up a small office in Hollywood mainly for the kind of “giving them what they want” production work that Mr. Mathur focuses on – the let’s-do-lunch with studio executives, the hand-holding as a movie’s release date neared. There are now 12 employees in Indika’s TriBeCa office and five in California.

Mr. Mathur serves as the company’s managing director and co-president. His mission, worded in the kind of management-speak he is fond of, is “making sure that clients get what they need in terms of the deadline, in terms of the creative process… making sure that we actually have clients…and making sure that finances work.” Essentially, he works with studio contacts to “giv[e] them what they’re looking for.”

While Mr. Mathur deals with the suits, his business partner James Verdesoto works his creative magic. Mr. Mathur calls him the company’s “fountainhead.” Sometimes, to please a studio, Mr. Mathur’s job is to rein in Mr. Verdesoto’s more extreme ideas. “In a lot of cases, James will have his ‘Eureka’ moment and I’ll be like ‘We can’t send that; it’s too edgy,'” Mr. Mathur says.

Mr. Verdesoto was the founding creative director at Miramax during the early 1990s, when the production company’s films epitomized the blend of commercial and cool that Indika’s design strives for now. He had been brought in when the company created its art department, and he designed the posters for “The Thin Blue Line” (1988), “My Left Foot” (1989), “The Piano” (1993), and “Pulp Fiction” (1994).

The two met during an internship while Mr. Mathur was a student at the New School, taking occasional classes at Parsons School of Design. They started working together “sort of as a joke,” he says, recalling the conversation as a casual one. “‘Hey, let’s start a company together. We’ll do commercial work like Miramax does but we’ll also do artistic work.'”

The pair’s list of contacts was builtin. “One of the things about Miramax at the time,” Mr. Mathur says, “is that there’s always a flow of people coming and going, and if you worked there you knew a lot of people. It was sort of like industry university.”

Their early work also reflected a built-in artistic credibility. Indika’s first projects were primarily for arty up-and-coming directors. The company designed the poster for Pedro Almodovar’s “Kika” and for actress Liv Ullmann’s directorial debut, the drama “Sofie.”

Indika is clearly about more than business for Mr. Mathur. He sees posters as the only legacy for some films. “Posters are not important in the marketing of a film,” he concedes. “They’re not as important as television, for example, which gets a lot more people.”

But in the end, print prevails over broadcast: “What posters do is they set up a creative tone for the film… and are the lasting record. Because you’re not going to watch every film over time, so ultimately what do you have? Fifteen years later, nobody’s gonna watch the film, and nobody has a trailer, because where do the trailers go?”

When asked if Indika designs posters with posterity in mind, however, Mr. Mathur brushes off the question. “We just try to do good work…You work 50 to 45 hours a week, you might as well do something great…You don’t have to, but why not?”