What’s next for poster design?
The following is a recent electronic conversation between design journalist Yolanda Zappaterra and Michael Johnson on the state and future of poster design.
YZ: Will there still be print posters in the future, and if so who and what will they be for and what do you envisage them being like?
MJ: I hope that there will still be a place for printed posters, they remain a powerful way for people to reach out to certain audiences. The trouble is, whilst a decade ago, we were designing poster sets for all manner of clients because that was a powerful way to communicate in classrooms, corridors or train stations (in our case), there seems to be much less interest now. Why spend 20 grand or more on a poster set (with its incumbent postage issues) when you can put the information on a website for half that? That, I’m afraid, are the harsh economics of the situation. We’ve had to look elsewhere for regular sources of work.
Unfortunately we’re now surrounded by a dreadful standard of poster design, pretty much wherever you look. On the underground, endless ‘floating head’ cinema cross-track posters stare back at us and cultural institutions seem just happy to blow up a picture of the featured artists’ work then whack a logo in the corner.
Whilst the art of the poster still lives on in Holland and France, it seems that the poster in the UK barely stumbles along in student portfolios, gripped by hidden hands, usually showing a limited edition print of something inane like a cat drawing or a piece of geometric type. There’s very rarely a message, or a piece of genuine communication, if I’m honest.
But, on the positive side, there’s still a basic desire to print something out, wall-sized, stand back and just glory in the sheer scale of a poster. I don’t think that effect of scale will ever go away, that’s why I hope people will always love them. But I fear I’m in a minority.
I like to think that as long as there are walls, there will be people producing posters to stick on them, and that there will always be a need for such a 'throwaway' yet eye-catching marketing and propaganda tool. Do you agree, or do you think that eventually even the tiniest theatres will replace posters with screen-based advertising?
The digital screens themselves won’t completely replace the original printed piece, I’m sure. But as the printed form becomes increasingly rare, the time and budget to allocate decent budgets to decent posters (and decent poster designers) will inevitably diminish. Already we’ve seen the downgrading of ‘design’ as advertising agencies have ring-fenced outdoor advertising for their needs. Often they’ll use blow up the print advert and go home early.
If posters are eventually replaced by Blade Runner-style multimedia and interactive screens (as is already happening in tube stations), what skills should graphic designers be learning to ensure they're equipped for and even be in a position to drive the changes?
We’re already at a transition point, where companies have sprung up whose ‘job’ it is to animate traditional ‘still’ posters into moving, dynamic images with varying degrees of success. What will start to happen soon is that designers and agency creatives will start to realise that having a ‘moving’ idea is just as important as the static idea. (I guess you could argue that all we’re talking about is a moving poster, not a static one). Trouble is, you often end up with movement for movement’s sake, a bit like the early days of web animations. Until creatives come to understand this new challenge, punters will just do the mental equivalent of ‘skip intro’ in the way we did with all those dreadful website splash pages.
But once the idea of a moving poster becomes the norm, then I hope we’ll see a new wave of compelling digital communication for these new channels.
Do you think the skills associated with print posters (understanding of DPI, working with large scale etc) are being lost by emerging designers, and if so what does that mean for the expression and dissemination of counter cultural and protest graphics?
I would imagine that some of those traditional skills will start to be lost, yes. If you don’t practice, you never learn, let’s face it. As a rule though, posters were always most successful in their simplest form – two or three colours, simple design. That’s not a huge technical requirement, to be honest.
There's evidence that in art and international design, interesting new directions are being forged that draw on and reference the art of poster design. Such innovation seems less apparent in the UK. Is that true do you think, and if so, why?
I think the ad agencies here are going through a confused patch – they’ve become so obsessed with social media that large scale ideas or technological wizardry are more likely to be seen abroad. But to be fair, clients are currently running a little scared. Because marketing departments still tend to turn to their agencies for their comms, and attention now flips between on-line and on-tv, ‘outdoor’ and hence posters seem to get slightly ignored.
The paradox of course is that Cameron’s infamous ‘airbrushed’ poster has been the story of the election so far, and there may yet be the traditional ‘battle of the posters’ as we get closer and closer to polling day. Posters remain a potent way to distil an idea or a thought down, and that will never go away. Interestingly though, many of the ones we will see will only run a few times, in selected sites, and the parties will rely on media coverage to turn them into ‘stories’. And it seems, already, that electronics will play a far greater role in this election than ever before.
So, what’s next?
I think in design we’ll see a continued move to more DIY, limited edition runs. The ‘designer poster’ may go through a period when its only job is to decorate a wall, and its communication requirement will lessen even further.
Weirdly though, there really is a whole market out there for graphic/art posters – we’ve sold at least four hundred copies of our ‘Tree’ poster and it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more of this. People do love huge pieces of paper, they always have, and perhaps we’ll all start being more honest with ourselves about this.
Last year there was the phenomenon of US designers creating posters for Obama – they just felt that they should. When you went to the site, you could just print out the pdfs at whatever size you wanted – the site visitor became the user/printer and even decided what size they wanted to make their ‘print’.
I keep coming back to the fact that all of the huge identity schemes we do now are almost always applied out onto posters in the early iterations – it remains one of the quickest ways to see if a headline, a picture and a logo can co-exist in an intriguing and memorable way. Even if it only continues to exist as a hypothetical exercise, it’s an exercise worth doing.
When taxi-drivers ask me what I do, to save long-winded explanations I usually say ‘logos, posters and stamps’. When you think about it, the common design link between all three is the need to communicate something very quickly with the minimum of means. Sure, one of them can be the size of a wall, and the others the size of a thumb-print, but I see no difference in the way I design any of them.
I once used to carry my portfolio around on slide, hoping for projectors when I arrived for interviews but quickly being reduced to a small lightbox (if I was lucky). Those years carrying a miniature portfolio proved to me that all ideas could be viewed 35mm across, irrespective of their actual, physical size. And all the great graphic designers whose work I carefully studied when younger were all consummate poster designers: Fletcher, Glaser, Scher. It was a right of passage to try and become half decent at designing them myself.
Zappaterra’s recent article on poster design, which draws on some of this conversation, appears in this week’s Design Week magazine.
YZ: Will there still be print posters in the future, and if so who and what will they be for and what do you envisage them being like?
MJ: I hope that there will still be a place for printed posters, they remain a powerful way for people to reach out to certain audiences. The trouble is, whilst a decade ago, we were designing poster sets for all manner of clients because that was a powerful way to communicate in classrooms, corridors or train stations (in our case), there seems to be much less interest now. Why spend 20 grand or more on a poster set (with its incumbent postage issues) when you can put the information on a website for half that? That, I’m afraid, are the harsh economics of the situation. We’ve had to look elsewhere for regular sources of work.
Unfortunately we’re now surrounded by a dreadful standard of poster design, pretty much wherever you look. On the underground, endless ‘floating head’ cinema cross-track posters stare back at us and cultural institutions seem just happy to blow up a picture of the featured artists’ work then whack a logo in the corner.
Whilst the art of the poster still lives on in Holland and France, it seems that the poster in the UK barely stumbles along in student portfolios, gripped by hidden hands, usually showing a limited edition print of something inane like a cat drawing or a piece of geometric type. There’s very rarely a message, or a piece of genuine communication, if I’m honest.
But, on the positive side, there’s still a basic desire to print something out, wall-sized, stand back and just glory in the sheer scale of a poster. I don’t think that effect of scale will ever go away, that’s why I hope people will always love them. But I fear I’m in a minority.
I like to think that as long as there are walls, there will be people producing posters to stick on them, and that there will always be a need for such a 'throwaway' yet eye-catching marketing and propaganda tool. Do you agree, or do you think that eventually even the tiniest theatres will replace posters with screen-based advertising?
The digital screens themselves won’t completely replace the original printed piece, I’m sure. But as the printed form becomes increasingly rare, the time and budget to allocate decent budgets to decent posters (and decent poster designers) will inevitably diminish. Already we’ve seen the downgrading of ‘design’ as advertising agencies have ring-fenced outdoor advertising for their needs. Often they’ll use blow up the print advert and go home early.
If posters are eventually replaced by Blade Runner-style multimedia and interactive screens (as is already happening in tube stations), what skills should graphic designers be learning to ensure they're equipped for and even be in a position to drive the changes?
We’re already at a transition point, where companies have sprung up whose ‘job’ it is to animate traditional ‘still’ posters into moving, dynamic images with varying degrees of success. What will start to happen soon is that designers and agency creatives will start to realise that having a ‘moving’ idea is just as important as the static idea. (I guess you could argue that all we’re talking about is a moving poster, not a static one). Trouble is, you often end up with movement for movement’s sake, a bit like the early days of web animations. Until creatives come to understand this new challenge, punters will just do the mental equivalent of ‘skip intro’ in the way we did with all those dreadful website splash pages.
But once the idea of a moving poster becomes the norm, then I hope we’ll see a new wave of compelling digital communication for these new channels.
Do you think the skills associated with print posters (understanding of DPI, working with large scale etc) are being lost by emerging designers, and if so what does that mean for the expression and dissemination of counter cultural and protest graphics?
I would imagine that some of those traditional skills will start to be lost, yes. If you don’t practice, you never learn, let’s face it. As a rule though, posters were always most successful in their simplest form – two or three colours, simple design. That’s not a huge technical requirement, to be honest.
There's evidence that in art and international design, interesting new directions are being forged that draw on and reference the art of poster design. Such innovation seems less apparent in the UK. Is that true do you think, and if so, why?
I think the ad agencies here are going through a confused patch – they’ve become so obsessed with social media that large scale ideas or technological wizardry are more likely to be seen abroad. But to be fair, clients are currently running a little scared. Because marketing departments still tend to turn to their agencies for their comms, and attention now flips between on-line and on-tv, ‘outdoor’ and hence posters seem to get slightly ignored.
The paradox of course is that Cameron’s infamous ‘airbrushed’ poster has been the story of the election so far, and there may yet be the traditional ‘battle of the posters’ as we get closer and closer to polling day. Posters remain a potent way to distil an idea or a thought down, and that will never go away. Interestingly though, many of the ones we will see will only run a few times, in selected sites, and the parties will rely on media coverage to turn them into ‘stories’. And it seems, already, that electronics will play a far greater role in this election than ever before.
So, what’s next?
I think in design we’ll see a continued move to more DIY, limited edition runs. The ‘designer poster’ may go through a period when its only job is to decorate a wall, and its communication requirement will lessen even further.
Weirdly though, there really is a whole market out there for graphic/art posters – we’ve sold at least four hundred copies of our ‘Tree’ poster and it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more of this. People do love huge pieces of paper, they always have, and perhaps we’ll all start being more honest with ourselves about this.
Last year there was the phenomenon of US designers creating posters for Obama – they just felt that they should. When you went to the site, you could just print out the pdfs at whatever size you wanted – the site visitor became the user/printer and even decided what size they wanted to make their ‘print’.
I keep coming back to the fact that all of the huge identity schemes we do now are almost always applied out onto posters in the early iterations – it remains one of the quickest ways to see if a headline, a picture and a logo can co-exist in an intriguing and memorable way. Even if it only continues to exist as a hypothetical exercise, it’s an exercise worth doing.
When taxi-drivers ask me what I do, to save long-winded explanations I usually say ‘logos, posters and stamps’. When you think about it, the common design link between all three is the need to communicate something very quickly with the minimum of means. Sure, one of them can be the size of a wall, and the others the size of a thumb-print, but I see no difference in the way I design any of them.
I once used to carry my portfolio around on slide, hoping for projectors when I arrived for interviews but quickly being reduced to a small lightbox (if I was lucky). Those years carrying a miniature portfolio proved to me that all ideas could be viewed 35mm across, irrespective of their actual, physical size. And all the great graphic designers whose work I carefully studied when younger were all consummate poster designers: Fletcher, Glaser, Scher. It was a right of passage to try and become half decent at designing them myself.
Zappaterra’s recent article on poster design, which draws on some of this conversation, appears in this week’s Design Week magazine.
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