There are few examples in print design where a more concentrated collison of message grapahic design.

Posters: The Message Dictates the Design

Posters historically have been a popular medium to communicate evasive, political, counter-culteral, and/or civic minded messages. Many have observed that these non-commercial posters are often superior to commercial applicatons of the poster. In fact many commercialized advertising styles have been adopted from posters with decidedly different motives and contexts.

See: The work of John Heartfield

Regardless of what the message is you are to convey, is important to disginuish and distill the message, and meaning into it’s barest essntials, to effectivly communicate a singular, clean, direct, and powerful idea.

Aspects of Poster Design

› Poster design encorporates – and relies on – the environment in which they are presented to communicate the message. A strong sense of audience awareness and the environments they inhabit are needed to correctly integrete a poster into the culteral context.

› Posters are mean to be seen before they are read: Type is used sparingly, and is used equally for compositional elements as well as readable information. When type is used as a dominant element, it’s treatment often doubles the meaning in an illustrative fashion.

› Posters are mean to deliver information in a very simple and direct way. Use of Strong and bold graphic images, string contrast of value, color, and size are used in an aggressive way to attract attention.

› Strong cincgular dominant element. Sometimes called an “Eye Magnet”, this focus in a poster’s compiston can be type, icon, shape, or image. All strong poster design (as well as most other forms of flat art) have a clearly defined center of visual interest, that helps anchor the poster, as well dictact the entire balance of the compositon.

The WPA’s Federal Art Project

The New Deal initative called the Works Progress Administration aimed at employing, among many other occuaptions out of work during the Depression of the 1930’s, artists and graphic designers. The outcome of this branch of the WPA, called the Federal Art Project (FAP) was one of the biggest bodies of non comercial poster artwork ever made.

“http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/wpaposters/highlights.html”:
See: A list of WPA artists

In-Class

Browse the Library of Congress poster collecton via a key work search for “WPA Psoters”.

Browse via “Gallery Veiw” and take an image into the Class Server, to be proected and discussed in class.