Saul Bass,
one of the great American designers, right?
He was one of the first designers to go out to LA and really capitalize on the movie industry.
He created campaigns for movies where the posters,
the promotional elements for the movie, the advertisements,
and the credits for the movie,
the film credits that would
occur in the beginning and sometimes the end of the movie were all coordinated along a campaign line.
So, The Man with the Golden Arm was one of the first movies that he did
this for.
We used an image for a poster that was brought right into the movie,
was part of the initial title sequence,
same exact arm was used as a brand image.
Harmon Hoffman was one of my teachers in grad school.
It's my favorite poster,
many people's favorite poster for the William Tell opera.
The story of the archer shooting the arrow off the
top of his son's head in an effort to gain their freedom.
And so, the last name Tell,
T-E-L-L,
is penetrating the apple.
And the apple itself is very abstract.
It's almost undecipherable.
And yet, at the bottom, you see this curving form.
And what is that?
That's the head of the boy,
the head of his son.
The apple is on his head.
The arrow is entering the apple.
And the typography at the top, very small, very understated,
but really beautifully done, asymmetrical.
So, the last line that shows the date,
1963, is in perfect alignment with William Tell on the other side,
separated by an abstraction of the apple stem.
Iko Tanaka,
a great Japanese designer,
another beautiful modernist poster.
Incredible visual texture made up out of arrows, 1959.
The Dan-Ori Yoko,
1966.
Very beautiful stylized image, strong visual hierarchy,
leading right into the psychedelic work of Milton Glaser,
this Bob Dylan poster from 1966,
where his hair is like a rainbow.
His silhouette is an abstraction of positive and negative space.
Bonnie MacLean, this great psychedelic poster.
The art birds, the doors, so it's a concert poster.
Look at this typography.
It goes all the way back to Art Nouveau.
Think about those Art Nouveau
posters and how the typography in those posters work,
and then think about this.
So, this is an adaptation of the past,
going forward.
Beautiful images,
great colors,
secondary colors really, except for the blue.
Victor Moscosco,
Chambers Brothers, 1967.
Incredible colors.
Typography is almost unreadable.
Paul Rand's fabulous poster.
I actually have this poster in my house.
The Death Mass poster of 1969,
an anti-war poster,
where the juxtaposition of the skull image with the olive branch,
just so simple,
all made with cut paper.
Look how the skull breaks away from that black
piece of paper along the right side, lower right side.
There's that space of blue that exists in between.
He didn't have to do that,
right?
If maybe any of us were to do this,
we would have the skull and the olive branch and that's it.
But Rand includes this other part.
He shows us the
process of how the poster is being made.
Yoko Tanaka, again, 1981.
Great poster based on a grid structure.
Wolfgang Weingart,
1977.
The great Swiss-German designer.
He combined visual textures
with typography and abstract imagery in a way like no one else has really done before.
He was really challenging a lot of what was happening in so-called Swiss design.
The idea of minimalism,
packing the poster with as much information as possible,
letting the viewer find their way through it.
And yet, a pretty clear visual hierarchy.
When I look at this,
my eye goes right to that circular form.
It's just off the center on the left and then up to the typography.
So much great information in this piece.
Ingrid Druckre was another one of my teachers in graduate school.
Swiss-trained.
Actually was taught, I think, by Wolfgang Weingart.
Maybe.
I think so.
Maybe about the same time.
But she attended the same school that he taught at,
that he attended briefly.
You see the B that's stylized for Beethoven.
And if you look very carefully,
you can see all the letters from Beethoven.
April Greiman,
still alive, still working.
She's one of the great designers of the late 20th century.
This is one of her most famous posters.
Again, very complex with a lot of information on it.
And I believe this is actually 3D.
So if you look at through those glasses,
it has three-dimensional possibilities.
You can see it happening.
Another one of her posters.
Snow White and the Seven Pixels.
This is for a poster for an event
where she was a speaker.
And Corita Kent, one of my main influences,
1982.
We are either going to
become a community or we are going to die.
That's the quote at the bottom in handwriting.
And then this incredible form done with the primary colors in the black and the overlapping shapes that
produce the greens and the browns.
And it's such a vivid image,
but so abstract and so evocative.
Milton Glaser,
a great American designer,
again, recently passed away.
I love New York more than ever.
So this is his I love New York image,
which was just the I,
the heart, and Y adapted for 2001 or 9-11.
And you see the lower left-hand part of the heart has a little smudge in it.
It was like lower Manhattan.
Devastation that happened on that day.
Shepard Fairey, probably the most iconic poster that's happened in the last 20 years, 2008.
The image that's been adapted so many times become a meme.
Obama Hope poster,
one of my favorite images in the last 20 years.
And that's it.
That's a good overview of poster design.
Hopefully it'll give you a taste of what's been done over the last 100 and 120 years or so.
A little bit more than that, 140 years.
And maybe there's something here that inspires you that you can look into further.
Certainly, you might get some ideas for your own poster image from looking at some of these.
In this lesson, I gave you an overview of poster design.
In the next lesson,
I'll talk about the creative process and we'll do a little bit of sketching.