Posters and their
Inspirations
“There’s applied art and fine art. The tools are irrelevant. It’s
either applied: applied to somebody else’s problem or product, or its fine art:
standing alone. The difference is really defined. It’s not a grey zone, in my
opinion, its black and white”
Peter Saville,
graphic designer
Basically when one thinks of a
poster one would immediately picture a combination of image and words. This
essentially is the essence of graphic design, communication through visual art.
It is a union between words and image which generally have endless
possibilities.
When talking about posters the name
Jules Cheret comes to mind as the ‘father of the poster’. He was a French
painter and lithographer who lived in the 19th Century.
Fig.1
As we can see in this example of Jules Cheret, he
manipulates the text to flow with the image creating a rather flat image
clearly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. I like to think of art as a
medium that is constantly growing, art influences art yet sparks inspiration,
inspiration leads to new ideas, in turn new ideas lead to new styles. Some of
these styles are loved and built upon whilst others maybe rebelled against creating
and opposite different style. Therefore it is almost always possible to link
modern art to different periods in history.
Fig.2
In association with my statements
earlier one can virtually always link any poster back to Jules Cheret. Subject
matter may differ completely, one being rather elegant (fig.1) whilst the other
being slightly chaotic and violent in comparison (fig 2). Yet if one had to
look at technique we see flat imagery in both images. There is a ‘relationship’
between the words and images where the artists played with ‘layers’ making the
posters a single item rather than being text and imagery. We see how the use of
a solid black outline remained effective over time, be it the 19th
century or the 21st centhury. Therefore there is a deeper so called
meaning to a poster, at the end of the day is isn’t there just to advertise,
but it is a genuine union between typography and imagery.
Hall A. (2011), Illustration,
London, Laurence king Publishing Ltd
