1950 Unknown

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 on the rise.25 25 Christopher Burgess, ‘Picturing Politics’, Picturing Politics <https:// A further observation of the 1945 campaign is picturingpolitics. wordpress.com/tag/ the attempt by the Labour party to become a posters/> [accessed 20 June 2020]. 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 to unify their look.26 Middleton himself had and Mary Banham, The Festival of Britain: written prior that ‘Labour Party printing has A Land and Its People (London ; New York : in the main been neither functionally nor New York: I.B.Tauris & Co. ; Distributed aesthetically satisfactory’ and pitched that ‘a in the United States by Palgrave Macmillan, degree of standardization of typography in 2012), p. 133.