How Posters Work is more than a standard exhibition catalogue. Conceived as a useful and illuminating primer in visual thinking, it explores principles of design through a range of historical and contemporary works, uncovering ideas relevant not just to the design of posters but to 2D design more generally. How Posters Work has a unique focus on visual language. Rather than provide a history of the genre or a compilation of collectibles, the book is organized around active design principles. Concepts such as "Simplify," "Focus the eye," "Exploit the diagonal," "Reverse expectations," and "Say two things at once" are illustrated with a diverse range of posters, from avant-garde classics and rarely seen international works to contemporary pieces by today's leading graphic designers. Illustrated with over 150 works from the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, How Posters Work provides a stunning education in seeing and making, demonstrating how some of the world's most creative designers have mobilized principles of layout, composition, psychology, and rhetoric to produce powerful acts of visual communication

Better posters mean better research. Distilling over a decade of experience from the popular Better Posters blog, Zen Faulkes will help you create a clear and informative conference poster that delivers maximum impact. Academics have used posters to share research for more than five decades, and tens of thousands of posters are presented at conferences every year. Despite the popularity of the format, no in-depth guide has been available on how to create and deliver compelling conference posters. From over-long titles, tiny text and swarms of logos, to bad font choices, chaotic colour schemes and blurry images – it’s easy to leave viewers confused about your poster’s message. The solution is Better Posters: a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know – from writing a title and submitting an abstract, to designing the poster and finally presenting it in the poster session. Your conference poster will be one of your first research outputs, and the poster session is your first introduction to a professional community. Making a great poster develops the skills to create publications, reports, outreach and teaching materials throughout your career. This book also has material for conference organizers on how to make a better poster session for their attendees.

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860sÐ1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century ÒiconophileÓÑa new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, IskinÕs insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.

In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, the modern age invaded the city streets of Italy in the form of advertising posters. Bouquets of monkeys, elephants, masks, automobiles and elegantly--and sometimes scantily--clad ladies suddenly blossomed upon walls everywhere, indoors and out, visually grabbing the attention of an Italian public interested in the new commercial products that promised a new way of living. These advertisements were executed by some of the greatest illustrators of the day--Leonetto Cappiello, Achille Lucien Mauzan, Marcello Dudovich, Plinio Codognato, Leopoldo Metlicovitz and Gino Boccasile--who together produced a medley of playful, allusive, ironic and experimental imagery unmatched by any other European or American posters of that era. The current scarcity of Italian posters on the market today makes this lush publication all the more valuable for its depiction of a legacy in poster design.

Defining Russian Graphic Arts explores the energy and innovation of Russian graphic arts during the period which began with the explosion of artistic creativity initiated by Serge Diaghilev at the end of the nineteenth century and which ended in the mid-1930s with Stalin's devastating control over the arts. This beautifully illustrated book represents the development of Russian graphic arts as a continuum during these forty years, and places Suprematism and Constructivism in the context of the other major, but lesser-known, manifestations of early twentieth-century Russian art. The book includes such diverse categories of graphic arts as lubki (popular prints), posters and book designs, journals, music sheets, and ephemera. It features not only standard types of printed media and related studies and maquettes, but also a number of watercolor and gouache costume and stage designs. About 100 works borrowed from the National Library of Russia and the Research Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia-many seen here for the first time outside of Russia-are featured in this book. Additional works have been drawn from the Zimmerli Art Museum, The New York Public Library, and from other public and private collections. Together they provide a rare opportunity to view and learn about a wide variety of artists, from the acclaimed to the lesser known. This book is a companion volume to an exhibition appearing at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.