How Posters Work
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Graphic Design
How Posters Work Details
Review It’s a great spotlight into the history of the medium while offering fantastic and inspiration posters for creatives today. (The Editors Tory Daily) Read more
Reviews
"How Posters Work" is one of several new books published in celebration of the reopening of Cooper Hewett, the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, in December 2014 after a three-year renovation project. This book is authored (in some parts) and edited (in other parts) by Ellen Lupton, a Senior Curator at Cooper Hewett, the director of a Graphic Design master's degree program, and the writer of many important and influential books on design. In a little over 200 pages, filled with over 300 illustrations, the volume articulates several guiding concepts and shows numerous examples of "how posters work," resulting in a publication that is beneficial to working designers, design students, and those who simply appreciate the power and beauty possible in a 2-D printed message.The first 70 pages of the book are dedicated to several well-illustrated essays, starting with Lupton's "Vision is a Process." She notes that the purpose of the book is to explain "how designers see" and to explore the many ways in which graphic designers apply key principles to achieve a communication goal. Then Lupton expands her premise by describing components of a graphic designer's methodology, such as "vision is active," "vision is immersive," and "vision is multisensory."In the next essay, Caitlin Condell, another Cooper Hewett staff member, describes "How Posters Are Made," starting with the lithography process (invented in 1798) and continuing with technologies ranging from silk screen printing and various photographic processes to relatively recent innovations like digital printing and laser cutting.The next few essays examine works by specific designers (sometimes with the designer explaining his own posters), including E. McKnight Kauffer, Bruno Munari, and a series of Dutch posters that experiment with use of a focal point.Karrie Jacobs' essay "Night Discourse," first published in 1992, discusses political "protest" posters that appeared at night on New York City streets in the 1980s and 90s, including work by professional artists along with posters by "those who have anger but fewer skills."In the final essay, "Collecting Posters," Gail S. Davidson of Cooper Hewett gives a history of how and why this museum added posters to its collection-- starting with an unsolicited gift of posters from World Wars I and II that arrived at Cooper Hewett in 1949, but expanding into deliberate efforts to document achievement in poster art from around the world, and throughout 20th and 21st century design history.The remainder of the book, subtitled "Posters," is divided into 14 groups that convey key approaches to poster design, including foundational design principles such as "focus the eye," "simplify," "manipulate scale," and "tell a story" as well as possibly less-familiar techniques such as "assault the surface," "double the meaning," and "amplify." Each of these sections contains numerous examples of posters that apply the principle, and Lupton (and sometimes other authors) provide explanations and captions that help the reader understand why the use of these principles results in memorable posters. The sample works include famous names of the design field-- Rand, Bass, Glaser, Scher, Beall, van de Velde, Klutsis (spelled here as "Klucis"), Muller-Brockman, Matter, Vignelli, and Sagmeister, to mention only a few-- but the posters displayed from these iconic designers aren't always the "classics" seen in other compilations. Plenty of lesser-known designers' posters are featured as well.The almost-square pages (about 9 inches by not-quite-10 inches) provide ample display space for the posters, many of which are full-page or half-page size, and all of the posters are reproduced in full color. The binding allows the book to open almost-flat for effective perusal of each poster. And although Amazon lists this book as "hardcover," the covers are more like a sturdy paperboard, which doesn't detract from the overall elegance of the volume, and makes the book surprisingly lightweight.It's also surprisingly inexpensive. Therefore, I can't think of any reason that a poster aficionado (professional or amateur) wouldn't want to add this book to your collection.
