InDesign document, with lettering and computer-abstracted landscapes
©2011 Charlene Brown
The project, which begins next week, will show the steps involved in designing art posters. Solving environmental problems will be the theme of this series.
The purpose of posters is to get people’s attention and deliver a clear, concise message. They are used for advertising events or products, spreading propaganda or protest, and can be motivational and inspirational, or even straight-up educational.
A poster in one of these categories is easily readable, with a straightforward quickly understood message, and no extraneous words or illustrations… much like this one on the left.
But sometimes posters are supposed to make you think, and are intended as art… Art posters are not easily read, may be ambiguous, and may contain all sorts of apparently extraneous stuff. The posters I put together next week will be art posters. They will be built on the landscape paintings shown here, all of which relate to environmental impacts such as disappearing ice and wildlife habitat.
A little historical info about posters: The modern poster dates back to 1870 when the printing industry perfected color lithography and made mass production possible. Popular poster printing styles have ranged from Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Cubism, and Art Deco to the more formal Bauhaus. In the case of art posters, the printing is not so formal, or even coherent, and is often hand-drawn.
The poster as an art form only began to be considered worthy of collection about a hundred years ago, when the Victoria & Albert began compiling their international collection of then-current and earlier, Industrial Revolution-derived examples. Though a Musée moderne de l’Affiche illustrée to preserve this important development in art was proposed in Paris in 1899, this didn’t come into being for many years. It is now the Musée de Publicité in the Louvre. More recently, many people have begun collecting and selling posters, and some famous posters have become quite valuable.
