Posters have been used to promote products from shoes to soap to typewriters to tires. They have been employed in the service of war, peace, and propaganda, as well as theater and musical performance. Today, we can view posters for current movies, along with bus shelter and billboard posters. Posters are an expression of economic, social, and cultural life, competing for our attention in the cluttered urban landscapes of modern life.

Graphic designers are in a unique position to spread messages to the masses, and posters are often their medium of choice. CalArts faculty member and graphic designer Caryn Aono says, “I recall Tibor Kalman saying many years ago that the poster was the most desirable format designers liked to work in—big, multiples, though not sequential like a book, and maximum impact—but it is a format designers rarely get to work in.”

Love affair
Designers seem to make posters because they love them—in the face of many other options, including online, broadcast, and other print vehicles—for disseminating their messages. Michal Johnson, creative director of the London-based design firm Johnson Banks agrees. “I’ve thought for a while that the call for posters has been declining. We still do quite a few, but then, I’ve always loved posters and will do almost anything to make sure that posters are included in a project.”

In the service of causes, posters can be compelling advocates. Placed in public environments, posters can be very effective in speaking directly to lots of people. High-impact graphics, usually with a single metaphorical image coupled with minimal type, tend to stop passersby and draw them into the world of a particular cause. Most poster designers admit that it is not enough to do a great job on the creative; a poster must be placed well to fully do its work.

Location, location
In Europe, there are more official placement locations, with standardized sizes, to accommodate and even encourage the display of posters. In the U.S. we tend to associate posters with big cities like New York, where pedestrian traffic allows for visibility and effective urban communication. Major U.S. cities are often settings for guerilla-style wild postings, usually illegal postering on construction barricades, traffic light switching boxes, and telephone poles.

As creative director Stephen Doyle of New York’s Doyle Partners says, “Posters are part of the social dialog of any civilized town.” Yet he concedes, “T-shirts are America’s alternative to the poster, especially to political posters. It is sad and it is tragic, but more and more Americans are big enough to have full-size posters mounted on their bodies.”

Despite their identification with print, posters are now often delivered online. AIGA’s recent “Get Out The Vote” series of posters for the 2004 U.S. presidential election was designed by members, each representing a local AIGA chapter. This venture found its forum mostly online. The website www. anotherposterforpeace.org is another online public display, in this case for antiwar posters. Once again, advancing technology is affecting the art and delivery of posters. Interestingly, we find that the content is much the same as in the past.

A persistent medium
Be it in the physical or the online environment, posters can be very effective, and of course, offer great visuals for public consumption. Los Angeles designer Riley Swift says the medium has staying power. “With so much media [out there] today, I think posters are a very relevant art form. Posters stand out as static statements in a culture of moving images … a minority that stands out against the majority, especially if they utilize a reproduction process besides four-color offset printing.”

Screenprinting can be used to great advantage in posters, particularly for designs with large blocks of rich color. Letterpress for smaller-format pieces lends a hand-hewn beauty to posters. Whatever the printing method, the main goals for the poster designer remain visibility and clarity. Attention must be given to refining the message to the simplest and most elemental visual expression of the idea—single image, few words, and high impact colors still work best.

Posters are mirrors and visual records of our culture. Los Angeles designer Victoria Lam sums it up when she says, “It may be one of the few democratic forums left.” Beyond their many noble roles, posters are simply beautiful and collectible objects.