These and many more exquisite posters are available for purchase from International Posters.
Recently I visited the Ian Potter Gallery on campus to look at a selection from the Gerard Herbst Poster Collection. They are beautiful! Thick vibrant screen-printed imagery in bold colours advertising everything from the Nazi Party to an Italian dubbed Sophia Loren movie. I would gladly display anyone of them in my home but I began to think about the effects digitisation will have on the printed ad.
According to the History of the Poster first printed by Phaidon on 1971, posters are ‘barometers of social, economic, political and cultural events designed to draw attention to social message, publicize products and invited us to events.’1 Apart from not being able to remember when the last time I received a paper invitation was I realised the printed ad might be an endangered species. Though marketers are still ever present in society, according to research printed in Advertising Age earlier this year, the way in which they chose to attract their audience is focused on hard objectives, such as specific market-share gains, rather than soft ones, such as brand awareness or visual aesthetic.
Though it appears online and television (though the advent of TiVo is threatening the commercial break) advertising allows for marketers to reach a broader audience, the actual design process has changed and the poster may be dead.
Back to the Future part II saw Marty McFly travel to 2015 almost 5 years away and hanging in his future self’s house are screens displaying imagery that constantly changes - i wonder how long it will be before Apple invent this?!
1 Josef and Shizuko Muller-Brockmann, 'History of the Poster', New York:Phaidon, 1971
Are there less posters and printed ads around nowadays than there used to be? I guess it's hard to tell ...
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't forget those big tv-screen things hanging in Union House, which are already like proto-versions of Marty McFly's wallscreens. We can make screens like that by 2015 for sure. (Hoverboards, though ... I guess we'll have to wait & see ...?)
Maybe in the future there will still be posters, but they'll all be printed on super-improved electronic paper - so they'll be able to play animations instead of static images. Would that destroy the art design of posters, or just give them another dimension?
(Also, one good thing about non-paper ads: if future ads are all-digital, they'll be archived on the internet forever, so we'll never lose them - unlike all those awesome 1820s posters that we'll never see ...)
hm i love posters too. i was just at the ian potter this week and there were a couple of polish movie posters on the second floor. the thing i like about old posters is the beautiful quality of the print. you can see where the colour blend, and the detail of the text is so beautiful - that might just be me though :)
ReplyDelete