In 2012, under the direction of Stephen Frykholm, Herman Miller, Inc. solicited proposals from a group of international graphic designers for a limited edition poster campaign that would highlight ten of their iconic products still in production.  Ten posters, produced in a edition of ten copies of each, were printed and exhibited in a small...

During the second World War, the French city of Le Havre was severely bombed. August Perret, a pioneering French modernist architect, was tasked with rebuilding the city. Perret’s reconstruction is considered exceptional for its seamless integration of the city’s extant historic structures with modern concrete construction and design innovations. Perret’s new buildings for Le Havre...

Canadian designer Marian Bantjes began her career as a typesetter before creating a personal style that combines type and ornament.  This distinctive aesthetic has allowed her to cross boundaries between fine arts and design, illustration and typography. This poster was produced to advertise the annual conference of the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). It was printed in...

Throughout the 19th century, Egypt was considered to be nominally a province of the Ottoman Empire, although both France and Britain worked to assert influence and control in the country. Isma’il Pasha was a young man when succeeded his uncle as Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt in 1863. Isma’il presided over the country as it was...

German-born Margarethe (Grete) Fröhlich was a young artist when she moved to Frankfurt, Germany in 1929.  In the early 1920s Frankfurt had experienced a housing crisis.  In an effort to address the shortage of affordable housing, the city embarked on a major building project, constructing nearly 15,000 residences in a period of five years.  The...

Many graphic designers have explored the graphic possibilities of lithography by combining it with photography. Among those was E. McKnight Kauffer, an American designer who moved to London just before the First World War and stayed until the advent of the second. Kauffer often combined illustration with halftone reproductions of photographic elements, and he remained committed...

“The best political graphics today exist on the cusp of art and graphic design. The people responsible often see themselves as both artists and designers. The posters don’t look like they were done to express the views of a client, but rather to express the viewpoint of the creator. The work doesn’t exhibit the sort...

Australian designer Mark Gowing explains that the repeating forms of his country’s minimalist landscape are manifested in his geometric compositions. This poster was designed to advertise a solo exhibition of the work of Jonathan Jones, a Sydney-based Aboriginal artist from the Kamilaroi/Wiradjuri nations located in South Eastern Australia. Jones’s work in sculpture and installation features fluorescent...

For her poster campaign for the Ad Council of Japan on the theme “Media Literacy Is an Imagination,” Shiro Shita Saori turned to the classic Japanese proverb of the three wise monkeys, who embody the maxim “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” This poster plays on the first element of the maxim,...

After studying graphic design at the China Academy of Art, Jianping He earned an MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts and a PhD in cultural history from the Free University of Berlin. In 2002, he founded Hesign, a Berlin studio that not only designs posters, books, and corporate identities, but also curates exhibitions...

For their poster publicizing dancer Eunme Ahn’s performance of Three Questions on Death, Sulki & Min designed text in a style that recalls stenciled letters, their nod to the impermanence of the performance held before the opening of the Asian Arts Theatre, Asian Culture Complex in Gwangju. Cloudlike bubbles, culled from poster designs advertising earlier...

Jan Lenica was a leading figure in the Polish School of Poster Art, a term he coined in 1960 in the Swiss magazine Graphis. This poster depicts a scene from of Alban Berg’s atonal opera Wozzeck. The opera’s title character stabs the mother of his child in a fit of jealousy and then throws the...

In 1975 Swiss graphic designer Niklaus Troxler founded the Willisau Jazz Festival, which he directed until 2009. His series of posters for the festival represents an ongoing study in design process, as Troxler explored diverse means to create letterforms outside the norms of typography and typefaces. As variations on a theme, the posters reflect on...

As digital screens become increasingly prevalent, the printed poster has taken on new roles. For his commemoration of the transition from summer to fall in his poster Herbstzeitlose (Autumn Crocus), Götz Gramlich created both a digital animation and a screenprinted poster around the same design concept. In the animation, the letters peel away one by...

Risography was invented in the 1980s in Japan as a cheaper alternative to xerography for small businesses. The machine is similar in appearance to a photocopier, but as a form of stencil duplication, it is akin as a printing method to screenprint. An image, designed to print one color at a time, is cut into...