Poster

“ The proper use of colors will make your posters stand out like a sore thumb on a one-armed man.
Colors catch the eye. A small child is attracted to a colored Easter egg where it wouldn’t waste any time on an ordinary piece of hen fruit. We are all susceptible to the beauty and attraction of colors, and nowhere in advertising does color cut quite so much of a figure as in posting.
Strong contrasts and striking effects, rather than daintiness and real artistic combinations, are to be sought for poster work. A poster can either be made or marred by the proper or improper use of colors. ”

“ Looking at the French war posters as a whole, one feels that in no other country has there been the same poignant appeal, the same presence of a deeply-felt emotion. And these have been transferred to the posters with a spontaneity, a lightness, and an expressive sufficiency that make the French poster stand alone. Take the posters of Steinlen, Faivre, Willette, Poulbot, and that versatile master, Roll, whose death occurred while these notes were being prepared. They each have the brilliant quality of a sketch by a man who is master of his material. ”

“ Roll, the more complete artist, versatile and subtle in his work, master of many styles, proved that he, too, could design an appealing poster, as the fifth plate in this book testifies.
The poster artists of France were not to the same degree overshadowed by one great executant as were those of England by Brangwyn. But for all that, a [Pg 20] figure stands out before the rest, both by his power as a craftsman and the weight and strength of his individual characteristics. ”

“ I have already remarked that the poster movement in this country amounts to a positive revolution. No young artist is satisfied unless he has a hand in the decoration of the hoardings; the gold frame is for the time forgotten, and all have their eyes on the lithographers stone. France has undoubtedly had a long start of us, but if she is to retain her supremacy she must look to her laurels. Our young men are beating at her doors, though beating only in a spirit of friendly rivalry. Happily, between England and France there is, at this moment, only one war—the war of the pictorial poster. ”

“ All this art may be said to be what the quite new art of the poster certainly is, art meant for the street, for people who are walking fast. It comes into competition with the newspapers, with the music-halls; half contemptuously, it popularises itself; and, with real qualities and a real measure of good intention, finds itself forced to seek for sharp, sudden, arresting means of expression. ”

“ To familiarize the public with your package means instant recognition when they see it on the dealer’s shelf, counter or floor space.
If possible, have your poster made by a poster artist, and not by a designer of newspaper or magazine advertisements. The proper handling and harmony of colors, [15] as well as that broad poster-carrying effect can only be fully realized by the artist who has specialized in that field.
The poster should be judged from a distance, and should be made for carrying effect rather than close view. People do not stand close to a poster ”

“ And so it happens that he is willing, nay eager, to turn his attention to the poster, with the result that the hoarding becomes an interesting, even a charming, gallery of designs. What was one of the most hideous of human inventions is transformed into a delight to the eyes. Colour and interest are added to the street; the gay and joyous take the place of the dull and ugly. ”

“ While we have had individual poster artists, such as Nicholson, Pryde, and Beardsley, whose work has touched perhaps a higher level than has ever been reached on the Continent, our general conception of what is good and valuable in a poster has been almost entirely wrong. The advertising agent and the business firm rarely get away from the popular idea that a poster must be a picture, and that the purpose of every picture is to “point a moral and adorn a tale.” ”

“ In the sweet uses of advertisement the American is surely an expert, and it would have been curious indeed, if he had overlooked so obvious and so effective a method of advertising as the pictorial poster. ”

“ The repetition of the poster design in the store window at the place where the article can be purchased will be strongly supplemental, will tend to freshen the mind of the consumer as having seen the poster and create a desire to buy and try at just the right moment. ”

“ Freshly papered boards are a good advertisement for your medium.
Don’t spoil a good effective poster by smearing paste all over the face of it. Put your paste on the back of the poster, and place it with a brush wet only in water, or, if you must use paste on the face of the paper, do so sparingly.
Don’t get into any wrangles with the local Civic Improvement Society, and have them writing all your advertisers to discontinue the use of your medium. You can find plenty of good locations without spoiling the landscape. ”

“ The fact that men so highly endowed as Chéret and Lautrec deliberately choose to appeal to the public chiefly by means of the affiche, well knowing that their gallery is the common hoarding, places the illustrated poster outside the bounds of ridicule. A modern art critic of high repute and of enormous energy has assured us that, in these days, to neglect the poster is mere folly on the part of those who care for the application of taste and skill to the objects of everyday life. ”

“ It is simply muddle-headed to apply it to any appeal for volunteers anywhere, in Ireland or England. The whole object of a recruiting poster, or any poster, is to be attractive; it is picked out in words or colours to be picturesquely and pointedly attractive. If it lowers you to make an attractive offer, do not make it ”

“ The bounds of freedom in the cases of painting and of sculpture are, comparatively speaking, so wide that one is not unnaturally amazed that the artist of talent is willing to work within the strict limitations imposed on him in the production of a pictorial poster. ”

“ They seldom realise that poster [Pg 8] art and pictorial art have essentially different aims. If a British firm wishes to advertise beer, it insists on an artist producing a picture of a publican’s brawny and veined arm holding out a pot of beer during closed hours to a policeman; or a Gargantuan bottle towering above the houses and dense crowds of a market-place; or a fox-terrier climbing on to a table and wondering what it is “master likes so much”—all in posters produced at great expense with an enormous range of colour. ”

“ The old theatrical poster represented, in glaring colours, the hero in a supreme moment of exaltation, or the heroine in the depths of despair. Mr. Beardsley did not condescend to illustrate, but produced a design, irrelevant and tantalizing to the average man, though doubtless full of significance to himself. In many respects the Avenue bill must be considered the best poster which so far has come from this artist's hands. The very graceful figure on a small poster for "The Yellow Book" speaks for itself. ”

“ It is clear that the poster is one of the oldest and most obvious forms of advertisement. It is almost impossible to conceive a time in the history of man, once he had learned to express his thoughts in design or in writing, when the idea of the thing did not exist. ”

“ The illustrations in Punch stand as high as the names of its excellent artists, and of course caricature portraiture plays its part prominently there in black and white, as it also does in many of the magazines and evening papers.
"Poster" work is in a strong position, too, in this manner, and here I must again refrain from individualising its chief exponents. ”

“ It should act as a wholesome corrective of the usual slipshod treatment accorded to the artist. Mr. Pennell is at least an enthusiastic lithographer. He knows the business right through; and his little series of essays should leave his reader convinced that a poster grows in power and influence upon the spectator just in accordance with the genuine craftsmanship displayed in it.
The total effect of a poster is cumulative: we feel its design; but we feel its design more strongly for its fitting colour scheme ”

“ The type equipment of the poster specialist includes strong gothic and Clarendon faces, of a variety of widths that enable him to make a full line of almost any word or combination of words. When such strong-printing capital letters are used, most of the lines should be full, as the general effect should be one of compactness. A very little amount of spacing is sufficient. No extended reference will be made here to the conventional poster that carries these heavy types, as its arrangement is merely one that emphasizes in a plain manner the various important parts of the copy. ”

“ On a series of posters a whole story can be told, because one argument can be driven home on each poster. The “reason why” feature of advertising can be applied to posting by the use of this method, and in the development of posting in the coming years the tendency to limit the copy for a poster to merely the name and trade-mark will be over-ruled. ”

“ The critic and the Sales Manager are not ordinarily regarded as of the same craft, nor are the poet and the advertising agent. It is true that some serious artists are occasionally tempted into poster designing. ”

“ As an example of the comparative pulling powers of illustrations I have understood that the news-stand sales of the Saturday Evening Post are appreciably larger when they have on their front cover the picture of an attractive woman than when the design is more general and of less heart interest. If you have a trade-mark for your product that trade-mark should always appear in your poster. ”

“ For obvious reasons only a limited number of the posters could be reproduced in colour, the main portion of the plates in the book being in black and white. But since the primary element counting for success in the poster is design, it follows that excellent colouring will not save a badly-designed poster from failure, however much it enhances the power [Pg 6] of one already successful. Indeed, we may go further and claim that ineffective or quite bad colouring often fails to mar entirely the success of a good design. ”

“ An advertising trade-mark is a great barrier to imitation and substitution.
The first essential of a successful posting campaign is to have a good poster. A bad design will spoil the most alluring campaign ever outlined.
A figure is always attractive in a poster, because it carries with it a more-than-ordinary element of human interest. ”

“ Posting a small thumbnail image, or even a somewhat larger image, on a monitor is very likely to be fair use, while hanging a high-resolution, life-size poster is less likely to be fair use. Displaying the picture on a public billboard or in a different building is less likely a fair use. ”

“ Prominent among the French designers of posters with whom I have not previously dealt is Guillaume, an artist widely known in England by reason of the admirable illustrations which, from time to time, appear in our periodicals. Save Chéret and Choubrac, few artists have done so much poster work as Guillaume, and not many have maintained so high a level of accomplishment. Vigour, vivacity, and high spirits, rather than beautiful design and fine colour, are the characteristic qualities of posters by Guillaume. ”

“ The space allotted by the bill-poster for an 8-sheet poster is 112 inches high by 84 inches, and the advertiser who is only getting 109 or 110 inches in length by 75 or 76 inches in width is apparently not getting the best run for his money. It would, therefore, seem that all posters should be made so that they will occupy the full quota of the allotted space when pasted up. This may add slightly to the cost of paper but it will mean an added prominence for your posters. ”

“ For its maximum influence the poster must be designed by a skilled lithographic artist (if lithography should be the medium chosen) , executed upon stone by him, and printed either by him or under his direct supervision. It is the failure to appreciate this which has marred so many of the United States posters, and made them of little importance. Anyone who could draw has been considered suitable for the task of designing; anyone who could print has been considered equal to printing their posters. ”

“ The famous sentence from the Academy discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is inscribed as a motto over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum—a sentence much quoted during the Victorian era, but in these latter days perhaps little regarded—may be applied to the poster equally as to more durable and delightful works: “The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.” If the poster which accomplishes its purpose is indeed the most “artistic,” then Germany excels in the artistic poster. ”

“ The first item that appears on the manuscript, the title, is coming more and more to be regarded from its literary and story-fulfilling point of view. We must ever bear it in mind, however, chiefly as a commercial asset. First, will it attract and reach the pocketbook of the hesitating public and add a drawing power to the poster displayed in front of the theater? ”

“ The cheap sketch is the most expensive in the end.
There are all kinds of posters, just as there are all grades of printing and paper, and therefore there is a great variance in costs.
Shun the cheap poster and buy the best the lithographer can turn out. ”