By Ellen Lupton. Text by Caitlin Condell, Gail Davidson, Ellen Lupton.
With its unique focus on visual language, Ellen Lupton's How Posters Work is more than another poster book. Rather than provide a history of the genre or a compilation of collectibles, the book is organized around active design principles. Concepts such as "Simplify," "Focus the eye," "Exploit the diagonal," "Reverse expectations" and "Say two things at once" are illustrated with a diverse range of posters, from avant-garde classics and rarely seen international works to contemporary pieces by today's leading graphic designers. Illustrated with over 150 works from the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, How Posters Work provides a stunning education in seeing and making, demonstrating how some of the world's most creative designers have mobilized principles of layout, composition, psychology and rhetoric to produce powerful acts of visual communication.
Ellen Lupton (born 1963) is an acclaimed writer, curator and graphic designer. She is Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Design Thinking. As Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002) and—most recently—Beautiful Users: Designing for People (2014). Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the US.
Featured image is reproduced from How Posters Work.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Tory Daily
The Editors
It’s a great spotlight into the history of the medium while offering fantastic and inspiration posters for creatives today.
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FROM THE BOOK
CHAPTERS INCLUDE:
■ Focus the Eye
■ Overwhelm the Eye
■ Mix Media
■ Assault the Surface
■ Use Text as Image
■ Make Noise
■ Reverse Expectations
■ Say Two Things at Once
■ Make Eye Contact
■ Imply Motion and Depth
Funny, but ever since January 20, we've been obsessed with poster design... Kicking off a week of focus on protest posters, this 1990 screenprint by Swiss designer Hans-Rudolf Lutz for the Concrete Utopias in Art and Society exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich features an enlarged block of handwriting running across the giant number “68,” a symbol for the student uprisings in Paris that defined a generation of artistic, political, and intellectual opposition. The handwritten text, taken from a historic poster from the May 1968 uprising, parses the French verb participer (to participate). For more books on poster design, see Avery Lozada's Staff Picks. continue to blog
Celebrated American graphic designer Milton Glaser produced "Dylan," one of the most iconic posters of the twentieth century, for Capitol Records in 1966. Reproduced from the chapter Overwhelm the Eye, featuring other psychedelic-era designers like Bonnie MacLean, Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso, it is one of 150 exquisite examples selected by Cooper-Hewitt curator of contemporary design Ellen Lupton for the museum's current exhibition on How Posters Work. Lupton writes, "This is not a book about posters. It is a book about how designers see. The works assembled here show how dozens of different designers—from prominent pioneers to little-known makers—have mobilized principles of composition, perception and rhetoric. Each poster enacts ways of thinking and making, and each poster wants to be seen. How do we look at graphic design, and how, in turn, does graphic design look back at us?" continue to blog
In 1956, pioneering Czech designer and information architect Ladislav Sutnar created a new logotype for the Swedish office machine brand Addo-X, along with a series of related posters and advertisements. This poster—boldly designed in 1958 to promote "precision engineered adding machines and calculators"—features Swedish actress and model Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg two years prior to her unforgettable role in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Sutnar's "addo-x" is one of 150 exquisite examples selected by Cooper-Hewitt curator of contemporary design Ellen Lupton for the museum's current exhibition on How Posters Work. Lupton writes, "This is not a book about posters. It is a book about how designers see. The works assembled here show how dozens of different designers—from prominent pioneers to little-known makers—have mobilized principles of composition, perception and rhetoric. Each poster enacts ways of thinking and making, and each poster wants to be seen. How do we look at graphic design, and how, in turn, does graphic design look back at us?" continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 9 in. / 208 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $39.95 ISBN: 9780910503822 PUBLISHER: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum AVAILABLE: 5/26/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WRLD Export via T&H
Published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. By Ellen Lupton. Text by Caitlin Condell, Gail Davidson, Ellen Lupton.
With its unique focus on visual language, Ellen Lupton's How Posters Work is more than another poster book. Rather than provide a history of the genre or a compilation of collectibles, the book is organized around active design principles. Concepts such as "Simplify," "Focus the eye," "Exploit the diagonal," "Reverse expectations" and "Say two things at once" are illustrated with a diverse range of posters, from avant-garde classics and rarely seen international works to contemporary pieces by today's leading graphic designers. Illustrated with over 150 works from the collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, How Posters Work provides a stunning education in seeing and making, demonstrating how some of the world's most creative designers have mobilized principles of layout, composition, psychology and rhetoric to produce powerful acts of visual communication.
Ellen Lupton (born 1963) is an acclaimed writer, curator and graphic designer. She is Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Design Thinking. As Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002) and—most recently—Beautiful Users: Designing for People (2014). Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honors given to a graphic designer or design educator in the US.
