№
Year
Artist/Designer
Title
emulate what people were seeing on billboard speaks to ideas of aspiration and similarly empathy, the idea that you can see yourself within an ideology works to the notion of moulding an electorate into an image in which you want it to take. Using photography to imbue these ideas of reflection gave Labours posters a superior edge to that of the Conservatives, giving them professionalism and cohesion, but also a relatability that although illustration had done a good job with in the past, couldn’t be matched any more. The aesthetic success of photography shifted imagery within advertising and by the 1950s illustration was a dying form, it was the more relatable photo that was 25 Christopher Burgess, ‘Picturing on the rise.25
Politics’, Picturing Politics <https:// picturingpolitics. wordpress.com/tag/ posters/> [accessed 20 June 2020].
A further observation of the 1945 campaign is the attempt by the Labour party to become a design-savvy organisation, recognising the financial might of the Conservatives and their ability to outsource their campaigns to advertising agencies. Labour recognised that with their limited resources to counter this it would be wise to become more aesthetically savvy, as Harriet Atkinson writes ‘The post-war Labour Party was itself aware of the impact of typography and lettering. It had been casting around a new look after the Second World War when in 1948 the Party commissioned typographer Michael Middleton to write ‘Soldiers of Lead: An introduction to layout and typography for use in the Labour Party’ This acknowledged that Labour could become more successful if they thought harder about how 26 Harriet Atkinson and Mary Banham, The to unify their look.26 Middleton himself had Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People written prior that ‘Labour Party printing has (London ; New York : New York: I.B.Tauris in the main been neither functionally nor & Co. ; Distributed in the United States aesthetically satisfactory’ and pitched that ‘a by Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 133. degree of standardization of typography in
Democracy in Print
29
