Plakatstil Evolution of Poster Design

Posters date back further than you may think. One of the earliest forms of visual advertising, they were often used in ancient Greece and Rome to make official announcements and legal texts accessible to the general public. These early posters were placed on large white wooden panels and were usually placed in town squares to ensure as many people as possible saw them. By the 16th and 17th centuries, with the development of the printing process, posters had evolved into a combination of text and pictures to advertise goods sold by tradesmen and merchants and to entice spectators to upcoming events, such as Shakespeare plays circuses, and fairs.

Lithographic posters became relatively popular in the early 1800s. Lithography, a printing process invented in the 1790s in Germany by Alois Senefelder, enabled artists to create metal and wood engravings with simple designs. Colour was possible – these lithographs were known as chromolithographs – but the process was laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. Chromolithographs were impractical for mass production, so plain monochromatic lithographs became the norm.

Posters produced by different countries bore their unique cultural preoccupations. While cabarets and cafes were popular in France, posters from Italy celebrated fashion and opera, and posters from Britain celebrated pastimes such as attending the circus and riding bicycles. Posters from Spain showcased their love of festivals and bullfighting. Each country’s individual style was also expressed in its posters. German posters were influenced by their prosperous medieval period and their culture’s directness, and Dutch posters expressed their culture’s desire for neatness and restraint. Modernism also influenced many countries and incorporated its abstract style into their posters.

While the poster was used as a propagandist tool during the Second World War, attitudes towards it had changed by the 1950s. Knowing they had to compete with unforeseen competitors such as television, poster makers adapted and embraced the new decade’s emerging consumer and corporate culture. Posters from the 1950s are characterised by two styles. The first is fanciful, bright colours designed to encourage playfulness; this style was popular in travel posters. The second is sensible and orderly informative posters, inspired by the cool, sophisticated, and no-nonsense style of the stark Bauhaus movement.