This is an exhibition about how designers see. How Posters Work shows the ways dozens of designers from around the world have used the principles of composition, perception, and storytelling to convey ideas and solicit sensations. Some works focus our attention on a single message, while others send the eye on a meandering journey. Graphic designers use form, color, image, and language to seek out simplicity and complexity, flatness and depth, singular moments and stories that unfold. Some designers strive for maximum clarity, while others challenge the viewer to uncover a hidden message. How Posters Work features over 125 pieces from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection, dating from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.
Why posters? Over the last century, posters have served both as utilitarian communication and as design discourse. Today, posters still appear on city streets, but they are no longer a dominant form of mass communication. As posters circulate through both print and social media, they continue to be a crucial medium for inventing and sharing new visual languages. How Posters Work uses the medium of the poster to explore principles of visual thinking that extend to many forms of design, including branding, packaging, book covers, websites, and motion graphics.
Focus the Eye
Many posters have a clear and obvious point of focus. In each of the posters shown here, a familiar object dominates the composition (a typewriter, a glass of water, an empty plate of food). The designers use line, color, contrast, and placement to emphasize these dominant objects.
Notice that none of these posters is completely symmetrical, even though each one has a strong focal point. Pushing the main object off-center or adding diagonal elements creates a sense of drama.
“The eye is attracted by the dark disc and has no way of escaping.” —Bruno Munari, 1966
Bruno Munari’s 1966 essay “Posters with a Central Image” pokes fun at the commonplace design solution of putting a big circle in the middle of a poster. Designers today continue to use this compositional device, either as an easy and effective design solution or as a point of creative departure.
During World War II, civilian and military spotters learned to distinguish enemy aircraft from allied planes. This poster shows the alphabet of silhouettes that spotters learned to recognize. A military emblem dominates the center.
This poster shines a spotlight on a plate of chicken bones, pulling drama from mundane circumstances. The arresting headline heightens the emotional intensity.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), defenders of the democratically elected Spanish Republic promoted the importance of health and hygiene. The canted water glass defies gravity and creates dynamism.
Swiss designers in the 1950s and 1960s used gridded layouts, sans-serif typefaces, and stark images. Italian designer Bruno Munari may have had this famous poster in mind when he mentioned "phonograph records" in his essay "Posters with a Central Image" (1966).
Gift of Arthur Cohen and Daryl Otte in memory of Bill Moggridge
light
communication
graphic design
advertising
exhibition
earth
political
science
propaganda
promotional poster
exhibition poster
globe
atomic
engineering
Cold War
lightbulb
focus
General Dynamics gave Nitsche an unusual design challenge: to convince a fearful public that atomic energy could be used for the benefit of society through research and technological advancement, without revealing the details of their top-secret projects. His poster campaign, Atoms for Peace, melds influences from modernist art with scientific imagery to evoke a dynamic, innovative, and peaceful future.
Gift of Arthur Cohen and Daryl Otte in memory of Bill Moggridge
circles
graphic design
advertising
promotion
airplanes
commercial poster
atomic
storytelling
focus
cyrillic
Erik Nitsche had an unusual design challenge at General Dynamics: to convince a fearful public that atomic energy could be used for the benefit of society through research and technological advancement, without revealing the details of their top-secret projects. His poster campaign, Atoms for Peace, melds influences from modernist art with scientific imagery to evoke a dynamic, innovative, and peaceful future.
Gift of Arthur Cohen and Daryl Otte in memory of Bill Moggridge
collectors
communication
graphic design
advertising
curves
waves
abstraction
information
night
sky
stars
advertisement
constellations
corporate
focus
Erik Nitsche had an unusual design challenge at General Dynamics: to convince a fearful public that atomic energy could be used for the benefit of society through research and technological advancement, without revealing the details of their top-secret projects. His poster campaign, Atoms for Peace, melds influences from modernist art with scientific imagery to evoke a dynamic, innovative, and peaceful future.
A circular void dominates this poster for a concert by Future Islands. The blurred edges of the empty center turn the white of the paper into a ravenous, almost destructive source of light.
Overwhelm the Eye
Some designers seek to lead the eye on a restless journey. The psychedelic posters of the 1960s employ swirling lines, repeating forms, and competing colors to keep the viewer’s eye in motion.
Artist and designer Josef Albers studied how colors interact. Two colors that have sharply different hues but are similar in value (light and dark) are said to “vibrate.”Psychedelic posters were inspired in part by his studies.
Designers in the twenty-first century—inspired by doodles, graffiti, mass media, and automated drawing processes—have created warped and layered spaces.
Schraivogel, a Swiss graphic designer, is known for his astonishing posters for cultural institutions, each one resulting from intensive visual exploration. The linear patterns that radiate from the words “Cinema Afrika” resemble topographic lines on a map. Concentric lines engulf this edgeless, borderless landscape, leaving planes and boundaries uncertain.
In this series of posters, waves of linear distress engulf core typographic forms. Schuurman uses software tools in an unexpected way to produce an optical overload. The letterforms have no clear center point, dissolving both inward and outward to congest the field of vision.
Every letter is a visual image, yet readers rarely stop to notice the physical presence of text. Indeed, well-designed type can become invisible, playing a supporting role to content. In posters, however, typography often becomes an assertive visual element that we see as well as read.
While sketching concepts for the poster, Bierut saw that “light” and “years” are both five-letter words, so he decided to run the two words through each other. The layers of text have been digitally manipulated to resemble projected light.
This is one in a series of posters designed by M/M (Paris) to promote the experimental films of Sarah Morris. Each film and its corresponding poster explores a city or architectural landscape. Points of a Line documents the daily maintenance of two architectural masterworks: Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Drawings of objects and architectural elements merge with lettering to frame the photograph behind them.
This poster reprises the eclectic typography of nineteenth-century commercial printing. The bright, screenprinted colors bring to life the deliberately static, centered layout.
Overlap
Overlapping two or more elements is a simple way to simulate depth. By partially blocking one shape with another, designers produce an imaginary space between figure and ground. This effect can be achieved by pasting one piece of paper on top of another, or by creating shapes that appear to occupy separate planes because their edges align.
This classic poster by Rand—based on the cover of a book—creates a rudimentary sensation of depth as the black letters float in front of white ones. Why do we accept this illusion? Similar effects occur in our perception of the physical world, where our visual system assures us that partially hidden objects exist in their entirety. The brain reconnects the interrupted letters because their visible edges align.
This composition references the incidental collages of torn posters that may be found layered on the street. We perceive two planes (two sheets of paper) because the lines of text that seem to be printed on each one align visually.
To design this poster for the music house Salzhaus in Winterthur, Switzerland, the designer focused on the venue’s name. The narrow, geometric letterforms allowed him to “distort, warp, and disassemble” the text. Layered over each other, the letterforms read as a vibrant, abstract composition as much as a linear rendering of a word.
Assault the Surface
Burning, bending, or ripping an image points to the artifice of the work. Such techniques create mental friction as we acknowledge the image as both surface and representation. These works often call attention to edges, borders, and backgrounds in order to reveal how design actively frames our attenti
The red shirt of the vampire’s victim bleeds out to color the surrounding square. Playing with the relationship between figure and ground, the designer has converted the neutral background (the red square) into an active figure (the square appears to be bleeding).
In his 1961 ad campaign for Otto Preminger’s film Exodus, Bass creates a poster-within-a-poster that is consumed from below by yellow flames. Bass applies similar imagery to the film’s title sequence, in which a yellow flame flickers along the bottom of a black screen, mingling with the stark white typography before engulfing the full frame.
The text appears to have pulled apart by physical force or by a photomechanical process.
Cut and Paste
Combining fragments into a new whole is a basic technique of graphic design. Before the digital era, designers pasted diverse elements (halftone photographs, high-contrast prints, strips of typeset text) onto boards called paste-ups. Digital software turned this production method into simple key commands, allowing designers to endlessly recompose blocks of image and text.
Designers deliberately violate the seamless integrity of a photograph in order to highlight the constructed nature of the graphic image and to depict emotional, physical, or social upheaval. Fragments of images become like words in a story, subject to rearrangement for dramatic effect. Gaps become as important as points of connection.
Simplify
Designers often simplify an image in order to focus attention on a message or product. Stark silhouettes of objects became a hallmark of modern poster design. In the 1960s and 1970s, Polish designers created remarkable film posters that advertised popular American films, yet performed outside the conventional language of Hollywood promotion. Working with available materials, Polish designers drew on personal experience to tell the story of the films. Poignant details bring these minimal illustrations to life.
Widmer, a Swiss-born designer, trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich and launched his career in France in 1953. He founded Visuel Design in 1970 with his wife, Nicole. His exhibition posters for the Centre de création industrielle pair Helvetica typography with abstracted graphic forms depicting industrial design objects. Gradients and soft edges bring warmth and humor to these modernist masterworks.
A black light bulb is not an obvious solution for promoting a lighting expo. The thin band of colors around its edge makes this dark star seem to glow.
Red lips capture the sensuality of the title character in the film Midnight Cowboy, a male prostitute who inhabits the raw edges of society. The cowboy hat hides his eyes, blocking emotional connection.
When the creature in King Kong makes eye contact with the viewer, his gaze is both ominous and endearing.
Tell A Story
Many posters tell stories. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories often begin by telling us where we are and who the protagonist is. The story also establishes a point of view. Will we see events through the eyes of the protagonist, or from the outside view of an omniscient narrator?
When telling a story with just one image, designers choose a single point in a narrative to suggest the larger story, and they choose details that illuminate the situation and setting.
Someone Talked! pulls us in closer, bringing us eye to eye with a sailor who is about to disappear forever into the deep. The designer has focused our attention on a single human experience—and he holds us responsible for the event we are witnessing.
The younger children don’t know that evil hovers above them, but the older boy is on the cusp of understanding. He is the point-of-view character in the scene, and we are expected to identify with his situation. Like him, we must “grow up” and take responsibility for the more naive people around us. As war propaganda, the poster promotes US involvement in World War II, which many citizens did not support.
A Careless Word depicts a lifeboat loaded with distressed and wounded sailors pulling away from a burning ship. As viewers, we put ourselves in the boat with the sailors, seeing the devastation from their perspective.
Pagowksi designed this poster for the Polish distribution of Roman Polanski’s legendary 1968 horror film, Rosemary’s Baby (based on the novel by Ira Levin). This moment of intimacy between Rosemary and her demon child is only ever implied in the film.
This image of a cracked mannequin or statue with a realistically-rendered face sums up the banal horror of Bryan Forbes’s 1975 film The Stepford Wives (based on the novel by Ira Levin). Rather than depict an actual scene from the film, the designer chose to represent its inner psychology.
To amplify means to boost the intensity of a signal. Designers amplify messages by scrawling, stenciling, enlarging, underlining, slanting, angling, or framing texts. Lowercase letters can seem calm and conversational, while uppercase letters can project anger, agitation, or authority. Listen to the posters in this room; many of them are shouting at you.
Words make sounds inside your head, and so can pictures. We use our faces to communicate with other people and with ourselves. Smiling can make you feel happier, even when you have nothing warm or funny to smile about. Graphic designers use images of screaming mouths to trigger visceral responses in viewers. A scream can be loud even when you can’t hear it.
According to Chantry, this poster became part of long-term political street art in Seattle. It was reprinted numerous times and wheat-pasted during the Reagan era.
Museum purchase from Friends of Drawings & Prints Fund
graphic design
theater poster
performance
promotional poster
faces
amplify
mouth
screaming
This poster depicts a scene from Alban Berg’s atonal opera Wozzeck. The title character stabs the mother of his child and throws the bloodied weapon into a lake. He later drowns while trying to retrieve the knife. The illustration unites Wozzeck’s cries with the currents of the bloodied water and the blood-red moon above.
Say Two Things at Once
During World War II, the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) used phrases such as “loose lips sink ships” to discourage idle talk about ship movements that might expose naval forces to attack. A Careless Word depicts a lifeboat loaded with distressed and wounded sailors pulling away from a burning ship. As viewers, we put ourselves in the boat with the sailors, seeing the devastation from their perspective. Someone Talked! pulls us in closer, bringing us eye to eye with a sailor who is about to disappear forever into the deep. The designer has focused our attention on a single human experience—and he holds us responsible for the event we are witnessing.
In 1987, the US Food and Drug Administration approved AZT for the treatment of AIDS. Because the drug was both toxic and ineffective, many AIDS activists demanded that drug companies develop alternative treatments. This self-published poster compares AZT to Coca-Cola, condemning the drug as a consumer product that profits from the misery of AIDS patients.
Comparing President George H. W. Bush to the Marlboro Man, this poster critiques the administration’s emphasis on military spending and its neglect of healthcare research and reform.
Studies published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1992 showed that animal characters appearing in cigarette ads appeal strongly to children. Many activists petitioned retailers to stop posting images of “Joe Camel.” Minkler’s poster conflates the camel’s nose with human genitalia, reflecting a popular view at the time that Joe Camel’s portrait was a deliberate form of subliminal suggestion.
Founded in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of women artists who draw attention to the status of women and people of color in the art world. Their posters use irony and double entendre to bring crisp humor to hard-hitting statistics and commentary.
Influenced by modern art and design, Hillmann designed 130 richly interpretive film posters between 1953 and 1974. His striking, metaphoric posters were commissioned by Neue Filmkunst, a leading distributor of independent films in Germany. This poster equating Hitler with Humpty Dumpty makes fun of the monstrous leader and his ultimate downfall.
Górka, a leading participant in the Polish School of Poster Art, was a master of visual metaphor. Bob Fosse’s 1972 film, Cabaret, is set in a German nightclub during Hitler’s rise. In Górka’s visual pun, a strange cast of body parts converges to create a single disturbing image.
Communicate with Scale
Shifts in scale are signals of depth. Larger objects appear closer to the viewer and smaller ones appear farther away. Designers often exaggerate scale differences in order to amplify the illusion of depth. Designers also use shifts in scale abstractly, to create visual tension among elements, and symbolically, to suggest narrative relationships.
Glaser’s distinctive use of illustration and humor has had a global impact since the 1950s. This surrealist-inspired poster demonstrates Glaser’s strong training in classical drawing as well as his quirky wit.
This poster celebrates a summer party organized by the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. The enlarged detail of a watermelon slice becomes a flat graphic element, rendered in the spirit of pop.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
graphic design
scale
film poster
promotional poster
campaigns
youth
tires
advertisement
advocacy
wheels
safety
diagonal
overlap
The careening car in Müller-Brockmann’s 1953 poster, Schützt das Kind! (Protect the Child!), is too big to fit within the frame of the poster. It rushes toward the fleeing pedestrian, its enormous size creating a palpable sense of speed and danger.
These posters use scale for narrative purpose rather than abstract effect. The large heads establish a point-of-view character, while the smaller elements suggest thoughts, memories, and actions.
Vertical and horizontal lines are everywhere. Vertical trees and the horizontal ground plane pervade our view of nature, and gridded structures dominate the built environment. Most writing systems employ horizontal or vertical lines of text. Designers use diagonals to interrupt the static regime of the vertical/horizontal grid and to create a sense of motion and depth.
Architects and engineers use axonometric projections (also called parallel projections) to create drawings whose scale is consistent from the front of an object to its back. This poster uses this technique to build architectural structures with typography.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment Fund
graphic design
museum exhibition
typography
cityscape
exhibition poster
diagonal
To create his Chicago poster in 1987, Apeloig used an early CAD-based typesetting system to produce letterforms that bend to follow the space of the photograph.
Folded sheets of cardboard form converging lines in Apeloig’s poster for Street Scene, an opera set in front of a tenement building with wide marble steps.
Architects and engineers use axonometric projections (also called parallel projections) to create drawings whose scale is consistent from the front of an object to its back. This poster uses this technique to build architectural structures with typography.
Ladislav Sutnar created a bold new logotype for the Swedish office machine addo-X in 1956; he also designed numerous posters and advertisements for the company. This poster features Swedish actress and model Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg, best known for her role in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).
Make a System
Designers devise systems for organizing information and creating a recognizable series over time. A typographic grid is a set of invisible guidelines for aligning elements; a grid can become a strong visual element in its own right. Designers today create systems that allow surprising forms to emerge from a problem or situation.
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment and Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program Funds
stripes
graphic design
exhibition
color blocking
exhibition poster
system
simplify
In the late 1960s, conceptual artist Daniel Buren began creating uniform patterns of stripes— printed or painted on canvas or paper—and inserting them into public spaces. He installed hundreds of striped posters throughout Paris; these affichages sauvages [wild posters] both melded with the urban environment and stood apart from it. Shown here are printed announcements for an exhibition, featuring Buren’s signature stripes at full scale (8.7 cm, 3.43 inches).
Museum purchase from General Acquisitions Endowment and Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program Funds
stripes
graphic design
exhibition
color blocking
exhibition poster
system
simplify
In the late 1960s, conceptual artist Daniel Buren began creating uniform patterns of stripes— printed or painted on canvas or paper—and inserting them into public spaces. He installed hundreds of striped posters throughout Paris; these affichages sauvages [wild posters] both melded with the urban environment and stood apart from it. Shown here are printed announcements for an exhibition, featuring Buren’s signature stripes at full scale (8.7 cm, 3.43 inches).
screenprint, stencil and black spray paint on wove paper
Gift of Sara and Marc Benda
graphic design
museum exhibition
stars
exhibition poster
system
communism
overlap
These posters for an exhibition about the history of political posters feature a screenprinted image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary whose face became synonymous with leftist oppositional movements in the twentieth century. Variations of the poster were produced by directly spray-painting different messages and marks over Guevara’s portrait.
offset lithograph, stencil and black spray paint on wove paper
Gift of Sara and Marc Benda
graphic design
museum exhibition
exhibition poster
system
communism
overlap
These posters, created for an exhibition about the history of political posters, feature a screenprinted image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary whose face became synonymous with leftist opposition movements in the 20th century. Variations of the poster were produced by directly spray painting different messages and marks over Guevara’s portrait.
Experimental Jetset was founded by Erwin Brinkers, Marieke Stolk, and Danny van den Dungen in 1997. Experimental Jetset’s poster series for Paradiso, an Amsterdam concert venue, established the studio’s systematic approach early in their career. The designers claim to have been "completely absorbed" as teenagers by numerous post-punk movements: psychobilly, garage punk, new wave, two-tone, and American hardcore. They were drawn to both the music and its graphic manifestations, such as record sleeves, T-shirts, patches, band logos, and posters. Today, their inspirations remain modernism and rock culture.
Experimental Jetset was founded by Erwin Brinkers, Marieke Stolk, and Danny van den Dungen in 1997. Experimental Jetset’s poster series for Paradiso, an Amsterdam concert venue, established the studio’s systematic approach early in their career. The designers claim to have been "completely absorbed" as teenagers by numerous post-punk movements: psychobilly, garage punk, new wave, two-tone, and American hardcore. They were drawn to both the music and its graphic manifestations, such as record sleeves, T-shirts, patches, band logos, and posters. Today, their inspirations remain modernism and rock culture.
Experimental Jetset has designed numerous identities, posters, and publications for Bureau Europa, a Dutch architectural institute. Seen together, these posters demonstrate Experimental Jetset’s consistent methodology, applied to subject matter ranging from architecture featured in Playboy magazine to the work of the New Brutalist architects, Alison and Peter Smithson.
Experimental Jetset has designed numerous identities, posters, and publications for Bureau Europa, a Dutch architectural institute. Seen together, these posters demonstrate Experimental Jetset’s consistent methodology, applied to subject matter ranging from architecture featured in Playboy magazine to the work of the New Brutalist architects, Alison and Peter Smithson.
Make Eye Contact
Eyes are powerful attractors. Eyes looking out of a poster challenge the viewer to look back. Eyes can be as compelling in their absence as in their presence. Blocking the eyes implies physical and emotional violence or states of denial, desolation, or emptiness.
This poster suggests an altered state of mind by filling John Lennon’s glasses with a swirling optical illusion. The photograph has been converted to a high-contrast image, a technique sometimes called "posterization."
Jean Genet’s 1957 play, The Balcony, is set in a brothel where male patrons take on roles of social power—bishop, judge, and general—while an uprising unfolds on the streets outside. By the play’s end, the authority figures they’ve been portraying have been killed in the revolution. In Chantry’s poster, the blocked eyes suggest a mental state of self-delusion, while the blindfold represents a tool of physical dominance (one often used in brothels). The photograph depicts the playwright.
Founded in 1992, the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) staged public demonstrations or "actions" to raise the visibility of women in art, culture, and society. The wide-open eye logo, designed by Marlene McCarty and Bethany Johns, signaled that WAC’s members were paying attention. The poster was watching, and so was WAC.
In this theater poster, two startling eyes fill the width of the page. Printed in red, the eyes force the rest of the face to recede into the background. Scher uses scale and color to amplify the poster’s arresting gaze.
The targets in Rand’s poster double as a pair of eyes. This ingeniously simple poster harbors a surprisingly complex metaphor, asking the viewer to identify alternately with the shooter and the target.
In her poster for the play Him, Scher has placed text where the eyes should be, making tangible the title character’s emptiness or superficiality. The magnetic attractor of eye-to-eye contact draws us in, but the poster refuses to give us the human connection we are looking for.
