Poster #1
Colby Poster Printing Company
The fluorescent legacy of Colby Printing Company, article in TypeRoom
With their bold and strictly black typography emerging through the day-glow palette, Colby Poster Printing Company became an integral part of L.A.’s street aesthetic for more than a century. Sadly the all-manual print shop didn’t survive the digital age. Luckily many people keep on remembering the iconic heritage it left behind. Having its doors closed back in December of 2012, the Colby Poster Company made posters that were designed to catch the eye of passersby for more than half of a century. Delivering the message as directly as possible was the only task of each employee of the company that began in 1948 as a neighborhood operation to promote local happenings like street fairs, concerts, art exhibitions and political campaigns with their eye-catching flyers. No one had any formal training in graphic design. They were members of the letterpress union, the screen printers union, and the typesetters union.
Posters for the People
Article from Eye Magazine By Rick Poynor
Photographs by the Polish designer Wojciech Zamecznik investigate the use of posters as public communication.
Polnische Plakatkunst by Józef Mroszczak, a Polish poster designer, was published in Germany in 1962 at a time when Polish poster art was not only flourishing but arguably leading the world. Still easy to find, the book is a revelation, offering a much better visual survey of the movement than later volumes such as Plakat Polski /The Polish Poster (1979) or Das Polnische Plakat (1980), despite its sparing use of colour. The big square pages are designed with a faultless sense of control, providing an object lesson in how to use white space to organise the flow and placement of pictures to maximum advantage.
The book spotlights 46 designers, each given a section introduced by a short biography and a portrait. One editorial feature that is unusual for this kind of survey – a staple of design publishing to this day – is the inclusion of photographs showing how the posters were displayed in the street. This visual theme is signalled by the cover picture of a bill sticker working in front of a row of posters. The photographs were taken by Wojciech Zamecznik, one of the poster designers presented in the book. Zamecznik’s pages feature two of his pictures and, in one instance, a double-page spread shows both one of his designs, a poster for SOS Titanic, a British film from 1958 (originally titled A Night to Remember), and an apparently rural shot of a wooden shack surrounded by snow where the poster is mounted outside on a door.
http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/posters-for-the-people