Advertising Outdoors

by David Bernstein
Phaidon Press, New York, 2004
240 pp., illus. 35 b/w, 553 col. Trade, $75.00; paper, $39.95
ISBN: 0-7148-3635-4; ISBN 0-7148-4386-5.


History of the Poster

by Josef and Shizuko Müller-Brockmann
Phaidon Press, New York, 2004
244 pp., illus. 97 b/w, 144 col. Paper, $39.95
ISBN 0-7148-4403-9.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614, USA

ballast@netins.net

These books are of related interest because both are historical surveys of the design of Modern posters. The first is concerned with "outdoor advertising," particularly billboards; the second with what might be called "indoor advertising," in the sense that it mostly addresses the design of wall posters. Less than a century ago, the two categories were often synonymous, in that giant posters hung (whether by posting or painting) on the sides of downtown buildings, frequently adjacent to railway stations. All that changed, to some extent, with the proliferation of automobiles, which took people out of the city, and dramatically increased the speed at which they traveled past a sign. As the viewing time for outdoor advertising was shortened, so differences arose between billboards (which had to be utterly simple and clear, with almost non-existent text) and posters (which had to attract the attention of pedestrian passersby, but might then be examined more closely and for longer times). It may be of some insight to think about billboards and posters in connection with corporate logos and television commercials, because all these forms entail an extraordinary economy of means (in Josef Müller-Brockmann's words, they strive for "maximum effect with minimum graphic means") while also imparting significance through some disarming graphic aspect. When a poster is effective, writes Müller-Brockmann, it is not unlike an ambush, or, as poster designer A.M. Cassandre put it, it is an "optical incident" that is "not like a gentleman going through the door with a painting on an easel, but like a burglar through the window with a crowbar in his hand."

The volume by Müller-Brockmann is an unrevised new printing of an earlier, influential book about poster design by one of its most accomplished practitioners, a famous Swiss designer who died in 1996. Originally published in 1971, it includes reproductions of nearly 250 posters (144 in color), beginning with examples from the 1890s and ending in 1968. The book by David Bernstein is also a reprint, a paperback edition of a volume Phaidon first released in 1997, so the dates of its visual examples are far more recent and deliberately more inclusive. Bernstein begins with an overview of the emergence of outdoor advertising, then addresses in various chapters ("Poster Rules," "The Creative Challenge," "Brand and Consumer," and so on) the concerns that designers incessantly face. In the process, he introduces nearly 600 visual examples (550 in color), both historic and contemporary, but does it in a way that treats advertising, technology and environmental context with as much seriousness as is more commonly given to art. There is surprisingly little overlap of examples in the two books, and the texts are also quite distinct. In the end, perhaps the paramount value of both is the wealth of their range of examples.

Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review from Vol. 19 No 4 (Summer 2004).