In
the last lesson,
we looked at the illusion of transparency.
In this lesson, I'll take you on a little tour of poster design.
Poster design goes all the way back to the 19th century,
over 100 years ago.
In
the earliest posters were called broadsides.
And here's a good example of a broadside.
Purely typographic,
and they were called broadsides because they were big pieces of paper and printed only on one side,
usually in one color.
They were used for advertising,
for promotion,
for announcements,
things like this,
or a mass meeting in Central Rink,
usually to call attention to themselves.
What's really interesting about the broadsides is that they really express the idea of whatever
their message was in strong bold typography.
And the lettering, the typefaces that they were used,
were very specific to their period.
They're called slab serifs,
sometimes called Egyptian typefaces.
As you can see,
they have really, really thick bottoms and tops,
very thick serifs, called slab serifs,
meant to call attention to themselves.
This was really the beginning of mass
advertising,
when products were being sold on a mass market with the Industrial Revolution.
In this case,
calling attention to something that was a mass meeting,
but very, very much about the period.
And they continued right into the 20th century.
Even to this day,
people still refer to posters,
oftentimes, as broadsides, especially when there's purely typographic like this.
They all had this specific look and feel.
Typography, they would go edge to edge,
very center-axes.
Maybe not a real clear sense of visual hierarchy,
although we'd all read the big type,
the thick type, the bold type first,
and then go on to the smaller type.
So a little of that macro-micro feeling,
or macro-micro relationship,
or perception that we think of when we think of modern-day posters.
This is 1871, but there are examples of broadsides that go farther back than that.
1890,
here we have a lithograph,
a poster printed to promote a particular idea,
a theatrophone.
I don't know what that is,
but clearly this woman is listening to something electronic.
And as you can see,
it's really reduced down to primary colors, red, yellow, blue.
Like a lot of the things at that time,
it really depended on kind of a primitive technology for printing,
and yet they were able to get such beautiful line resolution and such beautiful tonality.
Jules Charest was one of the leading poster designers of the time in France.
Probably my favorite poster designer of that era is Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
and this great poster showing this dramatic artist,
Jane Lavrelle,
1899.
And I love the way
the negative and positive space work here.
The dress, and her head, and her arms, and her hair, and her hat really span from top to bottom,
and they carve a space out of the center of the
composition that's really beautiful,
and they allow negative space on either side to become
very active parts of the composition.
Typography is very simple,
and yet its bevels are angled
in such a way to correspond to the angle of the body.
Look how the type moves from left
to right as it moves down.
Jane and Lavrelle are on two different planes.
They're staggered, much like the body is.
And so really thinking very carefully about the negative space and how
the typography relates to it.
Beautiful colors again,
mainly primary colors plus black and white.
Background color, which is a neutral.
Just very, very beautiful.
And Toulouse-Lautrec made many,
many, many posters, and he was also a painter and a draftsman,
did lots of things,
was well known in his time,
continues to be well known now.
His posters are absolutely beautiful.
The Bagersaffs were a couple of brothers in England,
and that wasn't their real name.
They adopted that name.
They were,
well, it was actually brothers-in-law,
and they promoted a kind of poster design that we sort of take for granted now
as something that would relate to, say, silkscreen,
which we're going to be seeing much,
much later on again in the history of posters.
This was made with stencils,
and it allowed them,
the brothers, to create these things in volume by using large paper stencils.
These are big posters.
I've seen this one in reality,
and it's quite big,
bigger than any poster we imagine nowadays,
maybe as big as the bus shelter poster in New York City.
1895, Don Quixote.
Two colors with a ground,
brown and black on a ground,
actually three colors as the head is a lighter color.
Typography is kind of
squeezed into the upper area of the negative space,
but such a beautiful composition,
very reduced down,
very simple means.
Now, the Bakersaffs weren't able to stay in business for very long.
They were painters.
They were looking for a way to capitalize on their skills and make some money,
but people at that time were really not interested in this level of minimalism.
That was yet to come.
This is another amazing poster done around the same time period in Scotland,
the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts.
This is really part of Art Nouveau,
and it moves on from those early posters,
which weren't so much a part of Art Nouveau,
but this definitely is,
where the imagery and the typography are all very carefully integrated.
Center axis,
beautiful colors,
stylized images,
a lot of imagery that relates to,
say, flowers or growing things,
and absolutely beautiful typography.
The way the typography is just drawn,
the S's and the L's and the J's,
just gorgeous, right?
Beautiful.
Look at the F on February.
Here's another Art Nouveau poster,
Henry Vandervilt.
This is an ad,
a poster promoting an egg product.
So the yellow makes sense.
The forms are also very
egg-like, and the shapes are just so amazing.
You have the very geometric typography at the top,
that merges with this very organic shape across the center.
And then the type at the bottom is
kind of a combination of the two,
a little bit of geometry,
a little bit of organic,
beautiful frame that goes all the way around.
Definitely one of my favorite posters of that time.
Another great Art Nouveau poster,
this one from the Vienna Secessionist Movement.
The specific typography that I've enlarged on the very right is just amazing, very geometric,
totally integrated with the imagery of the faces at the top and the patterns.
Very much about the spirit of that particular revolution,
moving away from anything related to pure representation,
very abstract,
similar to the Art Nouveau posters from the Glasgow School.
Oskar Kokoschka, another Art Nouveau poster,
this one very humanistic.
And again, look at that typography,
how beautiful that is.
Peter Behrens,
this is made in Germany,
and this is very industrial.
And I really look at this as kind of a bridge between Art
Nouveau and the modernism that was yet to come in the Bauhaus.
The logo,
which is that small black element kind of in the middle,
is also very simple and very beautiful.
AEG was a lamp company,
electronics company, producing lamps.
And look at that beautiful lamp that's within the poster in the center with the radiating circles coming off of it,
this beautiful gradation created by different sizes of circles.
The typography stacked together,
locked together in this really tight structure.
Absolutely beautiful.
And it looks like it's printed on a metallic
paper or with some kind of metallic ink.
Another poster,
again, promoting electric lights,
1912.
Lucien Bernhardt, very representational,
but at the same time,
look at that abstract use of positive and negative space.
Kind of goes back to the image of Jane Abrel,
where the form is defined
by the negative space that surrounds it.
And the image of the bulb actually overlaps the typography.
And you have the swash of the X coming down and going underneath the image
and integrating with that.
So it's such a beautiful integration of image and type.
Just gorgeous.
Strong visual hierarchy.
Your eyes go straight to that orange type at the very top,
and then down through the image,
right into the light bulb,
and then finally back to that typography that's in the middle.
Pete Zwart, I've talked about Zwart before,
one of my favorite designers,
big influence on me.
Total geometry.
Now look at the structure of this poster.
Two squares in each corner,
upper left, lower right.
Upper left is a logotype,
lower right, it's more typographic, and then the black
type spreads across that and integrates beautifully with it.
The negative space is very carefully controlled.
Still mostly background,
except for the insides of the letters,
the insides of the logo.
But negative space used to isolate the typography and to make the poster legible, readable,
and at the same time, really active, very dynamic.
Schmidt, this is from the Bauhaus.
And immediately, we see the angle.
And that's something we relate so much to when we think about the Bauhaus.
This is a poster for one of their own exhibitions.
And you can see the hand-drawn quality of the
lettering.
It looks geometric, but if you look very close,
there's hand-drawn indications.
So
geometric, yes, but also humanistic.
And looking in the upper right-hand corner,
how beautiful that is.
That little squiggle,
it looks almost like an abstraction of a human being who's sitting down.
Then the face that's right in the middle of the circle on the top,
upper left-hand area,
you see the Bauhaus face,
and that was part of their identity.
Another Bauhaus poster.
Now, these are mock-ups.
This one,
very much a mock-up.
Mock-up for a poster.
But look at the visual hierarchy.
This is Herbert Baer,
one of my favorite designers from that era.
Your eye goes right to the red square and then starts to move around from that.
And look how the negative space and the positive space are totally integrated with each other.
Everything is based on rectangles.
Everything's based on angles.
Very clear visual hierarchy.
It's absolutely beautiful to look at.
Primary colors, again, red, yellow, blue.
Here we have photography, 1927.
Another poster meant to publicize an exhibition.
A beautiful integration of type and image.
Photography,
perhaps for the first time, our very early
experience with photography and type integrated in this beautiful way.
Typography now playing on an angle opposite the angle of the hand and the arm.
The typography expressed both in orange type,
readable orange type, and then with the image of the printed type, the letterpress type.
It's backwards.
Beautiful image.
Paul Renner,
another poster for an exhibition.
The giant B,
strong visual hierarchy,
great use of positive and negative space, totally integrated.
Has the angle, but it also has the typography at the bottom.
It's very straight.
Look how the V of Bavarians goes straight down into that area.
Right off of the A,
V, E, R, N, S.
Right down into outlining the typography at the bottom.
Right down to Zurich.
What a beautiful little touch that is.
Another great example of photo and type integrated together.
John Hartfield,
a great propagandist.
All of his work was political,
and he really used these images to promote political causes.
Here, a poster for the German Communist Party, 1928.
Look at those fives and how the hand is a symbol for five.
The five fingers coming out,
right?
Almost reaching out to get you.
Life-size.
But of course, in a poster size,
it'd be much, much larger.
There that poster is on the wall,
much in the same way that posters here in New York City
are often used in multiples on construction fences.
So they knew that through repetition of the poster image,
which is all about repetition to begin with,
is about mass production of a single image.
But they see displayed this way,
and how the display takes on a whole different meaning when it's multiplied.
Brachenko,
Russian constructivist.
Poster promoting the airline.
Beautiful integration of type and image again.
The typography is very squared up.
Almost no circles except for the globe.
Beautiful rendering, simplified airplane.
Here,
this great information design poster designed by Lidia Namarova,
1928.
So complex.
And it's describing the history of the international trade union movement.
So it's a very complex subject.
I saw this thing in person at a show,
an exhibition of this kind of work,
and it was just amazing to look at it up close.
This one too, Elena Semenova.
Poster for the magazine,
The Industrial Leather Worker, 1930.
The depth here is so incredible.
Ilyitsky,
one of my favorite designers also,
did so much different work publicizing an exhibition.
Look at the typography and the image are totally integrated.
You've got the red band going up the left side,
but then the rest of the poster is like one big image.
The montage of the two faces blending together,
the USSR running across the forehead.
The typography that goes across the building foreground.
Typography down in the lower right corner that announces the date.
Another great poster design.
This one really constructivist based on an angle,
showing us a welder.
This is a mock-up. And Cassandra,
one of Paul Rand's favorite poster designers.
Beautiful image, a poster for a Paris newspaper, 1925.
You see how geometry plays such an important role in this work.
Another one of his posters for tennis.
Such strong visual hierarchy,
such great sort of illusion of depth in a single surface.
Herbert Matter.
Herbert Matter was one of my teachers when I was in grad school.
He was a great illustrator. He was a great illustrator. He was one of my teachers when I was in grad school.
He was quite old at the time.
These are posters that he created in the 1930s
to publicize skiing in Switzerland.
Look at the typography at the bottom.
It's angled to correspond to the angle of the lips,
the angle of the eyes,
and counter-angled to the angle of the head and the neck.
And then that small skier that's coming down the mountain
in a very abstract way.
Herbert Matter, like a lot of designers of his era,
were very conscious of these extreme scale changes.
Very dramatic, very surreal scale changes.
So extreme close-ups juxtaposed with extreme far away.
The lure of the national parks.
This is a national park poster made in 1934 in the United States.
Dorothy Waugh.
Look at that typography.
So modern, so beautiful.
All geometric,
juxtaposed with the image at the top.
These were silkscreened.
So very much like the Bakerstaffs with stencils,
they reduced the image down to three colors.
Actually just two, the blue and the green.
The white is really just the color of the paper.
Such an effective use of economy of means.
Another great poster for the WPA.
Herbert Baer, again coming from the Bauhaus.
Now he's working in 1949.
Primary colors,
that angle from the constructivists.
Picking right up where he left off with the Bauhaus,
except now working, I think, in the United States by this time.
Paul Rand's poster for the movie No Way Out.
Strong visual hierarchy.
Amazing typography right through the center.
And then look at the type setting as it moves down the left side.
All the bold and the light type are totally integrated.
And they're not stacked flush left,
flush right, center axis.
They're asymmetrical.
Joseph Mueller Brockman,
1954.
Again, that juxtaposition of scale.
Extreme close-ups of the hand kind of reaching out.
Such a powerful image juxtaposed with the image of the traffic down below.
Very small people, small bikers, small cars.
A typography coming straight down the side.
More type in the lower right-hand corner,
even smaller.
So from a distance,
you could imagine what this might have looked like.
This giant hand, right?
This is all you see from a distance.
And then you get up closer and you start to see there's people,
there are cars,
there's typography you can only read when you get up close.
So true macro-micro perception here.
Another one of his posters for Da Film.
Joseph Mueller Brockman, of course, is very famous for grids.
His book, Grid Systems for Graphic Designers,
is if you're going to design publications or anything having to do with sequential pages,
that's really the thing to look at.
And he talks about poster design in there, too.
The look at the structure of the type at the top,
the red type at the top,
the red type at the bottom,
and how that aligns with the F in film.
It's all hinged on that beautiful use of negative space.
The negative space here doesn't feel empty,
even though it is.
The majority of this poster is negative space,
yet we really focus on just those positive
elements,
the film.