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Globe, a job printer, sells design and manufacturing services directly to clients, thus making the professional design consultant unnecessary. Globe's in-house compositor Harry Knorr developed a poster style in the 1950s that featured wood and metal typography printed on top of bright, silkscreened fields of color. After the company switched to digital composition and offset printing in 1988, many of Knorr's signature headlines were replicated in electronic scans. The distinctive look of Globe's posters evolved at a slow, deliberate pace across decades of technological change.
Although the direct, unpretentious style of Globe's posters might be deemed a crude "vernacular" by some designers, the posters are viewed as a language of authority by the audience that reads them. According to Ken Moore of IcyIce Productions, a company that promotes music events in Washington, "Globe pretty much sets the standard in making the show 'official.' People in the Metro area are conditioned to recognize that, when they see a Globe poster, they know the show is really going on. You see fliers and handbills all the time, but if someone goes to the expense of ordering from Globe and putting up the posters, people feel pretty good that an artist or a group actually is going to be there." Globe posters give credibility to the events that they announce: for the public the posters serve, they are a formal, authoritative presence.
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North American Tour '94 |