The Posters

After Utagawa Hiroshige · One Hundred Famous Views of Edo · 1856–58

1760–1880

The poster

Namiji · Travel print series, Edo · 1857

How it works

Each colour was cut into its own woodblock and printed in turn over a black key line. Printers wiped ink across the block by hand to get the graded bokashi sky, and the title sat in a coloured cartouche at the edge. European designers who saw these prints in the 1860s rebuilt the Western poster around them.

How to spot it

A big cropped foreground framing a small far view, a sky wiped down from deep indigo with a red band at the horizon, flat colour held by a fine key line, and two cartouches in the top corner.

Use it yourself

Let one gradient do the atmosphere and keep everything else flat. The contrast between them is what makes the flat parts feel solid.

After the Victorian letterpress playbill · wood type from Wells, Page and Figgins · 1840–90

1830–1900

The poster

Menagerie · Travelling show, Bristol · 1870

How it works

Jobbing printers set posters from whatever wood type they owned. Each line was set in the biggest face that would fill the measure, so every line changes typeface, weight and width, all centred on one axis.

How to spot it

Centred stacks of mismatched faces, fat faces and slab serifs beside condensed grotesques, each line running full width, a second colour for one or two words, rules and stars as punctuation.

Use it yourself

Rank your words by importance, then give each rank its own face and fill the width. Hierarchy by contrast, not by space.

After Alphonse Mucha · “Job” · 1896

1890–1910

The poster

Vervaine · Fragrance, self-initiated · 1895

How it works

Mucha built every poster the same way. A halo disc behind the subject, ornament pilasters holding the left and right trim, and a cartouche at the foot carrying the boring information.

How to spot it

Whiplash line that thickens and thins, botanical fills, lettering drawn rather than set, and a palette drained of black.

Use it yourself

The halo. Any subject gains authority sitting inside a disc that frames it.

After Hector Guimard · Paris Métro cast-iron arabesques · 1896–1900

1890–1910

The poster

Nouveau · Métro Castings & Botanical Lithography, Paris · 1896

How it works

Vegetal whiplash curves enter from structural pilasters, swell asymmetrically around a circular halo, and exit at unexpected heights. Lettering is drawn rather than set, with roots and stems forming structural cartouches.

How to spot it

Whiplash line that thickens and thins, botanical fills, Paris Métro wrought-iron arabesques, lettering drawn rather than set, and a palette drained of black.

Use it yourself

Let the contour dictate the layout. If any line looks like it was drafted with a straightedge or compass, curve it until it looks alive.

After William Morris · the Kelmscott Press and the Kelmscott Chaucer · 1891–96

1880–1910

The poster

Bramble · Private press, Hammersmith · 1896

How it works

Morris hated the grey, machine-made books of his day and went back to the fifteenth century. He designed his own typefaces, cut woodblock borders full of vines, and set the text so dark and tight that border, initial and words share one colour of black.

How to spot it

A heavy vine or leaf border, a huge decorated drop initial, dense justified black text, red used for headings and paragraph marks, and old spellings.

Use it yourself

Balance the weight of the ornament against the weight of the text. If the border is darker than the words, the page falls apart.

After Koloman Moser · Secession exhibition posters · 1902

1897–1918

The poster

Quadrat · Applied-arts society, Vienna · 1902

How it works

The Secession artists wanted one discipline for everything a building, a chair or a poster could hold. Moser boxed his lettering into square cells and let checks and dots do the work other posters gave to pictures.

How to spot it

Square formats inside tall sheets, letters locked into a grid of cells, black and gold on cream, chequerboard borders, circles set in rows like rivets.

Use it yourself

Pick one shape and refuse every other. When the letters, the picture and the border share a module, the whole sheet reads as one object.

After Lucian Bernhard · Priester matches · 1906

1905–1925

The poster

Blei · Pencil maker, Berlin · 1906

How it works

Bernhard won a competition by deleting everything the other entries had: the table, the smoker, the slogan. What was left was the product, drawn flat, and the brand name. The German poster followed him for twenty years.

How to spot it

A dark flat ground, one object drawn with three tones per face and no shadow, a heavy hand-drawn name, and nothing else. No tagline, no address.

Use it yourself

Before adding anything, ask what the poster would lose without it. The answer is usually nothing.

After F.T. Marinetti · Zang Tumb Tuuum and the parole in libertà · 1912–19

1909–1920

The poster

Rombo · Motor race, Brescia · 1914

How it works

Marinetti wanted type to make noise. He broke the line, sized words by how loud they were, slanted them by how fast, and scattered them around the point where the action happened.

How to spot it

Onomatopoeia, words at steep angles, radiating lines, typefaces of every weight on one page, maths symbols as punctuation, and almost no conventional sentences.

Use it yourself

Map the sound of your subject onto size and angle. The reader hears the page before reading it.

After Kazimir Malevich · 0,10 exhibition and the Suprematist compositions · 1915–16

1915–1930

The poster

Nulya · Exhibition of new painting, Petrograd · 1916

How it works

Malevich stripped painting down to what he called the zero of form: squares, bars and circles floating on white, at angles that suggest flight rather than rest. Lissitzky and the Constructivists took these shapes straight into typography a few years later.

How to spot it

A black square, bars of red, blue and yellow tilted on one diagonal, a white field with no ground line, and very little text.

Use it yourself

Remove the horizon. Once nothing is standing on anything, a few tilted shapes feel like movement.

After Mondrian · and Piet Zwart’s typography · 1921/1928

1917–31

The poster

Plane · Architecture, self-initiated · 1917

How it works

Rules of unequal weight divide the sheet into cells that never repeat a proportion. Colour lands in three or four cells only. Zwart then dropped real typography into the cells and made it a working poster.

How to spot it

Primaries plus black and white, no diagonal except where Van Doesburg broke the rule on purpose, asymmetry held in balance.

Use it yourself

Vary rule weights. Two thicknesses of line do more structural work than any amount of colour.

After Joost Schmidt · Bauhaus Ausstellung poster · 1923

1919–33

The poster

Formwork · Craft education, self-initiated · 1919

How it works

Schmidt turned a circular composition off the vertical and let the type run up the edge of the sheet. Bayer then cut the capitals out of the alphabet entirely and set the school’s printing in lowercase.

How to spot it

Circle, square, triangle in primaries, overlapping in multiply so the intersections make a fourth colour. Geometric sans, lowercase, function ahead of decoration.

Use it yourself

Rotate the whole composition, not one element. A fourteen-degree tilt reads as intent; three degrees reads as an accident.

After El Lissitzky · “Beat the Whites” · 1919

1917–35

The poster

Lever Press · Print studio and workshops, self-initiated · 1920

How it works

A single geometric event carries the message. Lissitzky drove a red wedge into a circle. Rodchenko put a shouting figure on a diagonal and let the type climb the same slope.

How to spot it

Red, black and paper. Nothing sits square. Type is boxed in slabs of unequal width so the block itself becomes a shape.

Use it yourself

Give the type a rotation and everything else the same rotation. One angle, applied without exception.

After Kurt Schwitters · and Theo van Doesburg · Kleine Dada Soirée · 1922

1916–1924

The poster

Laut · An evening of sound poetry, Hannover · 1922

How it works

Schwitters treated the printer’s type case as a scrapyard. Words arrive in whatever face was to hand, at whatever angle fitted, and giant red letters are printed underneath the lot. The sheet is full to the edges.

How to spot it

Dozens of words in ten or more typefaces, letters of different fonts inside one word, words turned every way, printers’ rules used as pictures, huge red letters underneath, and no empty space.

Use it yourself

Break alignment on purpose, not everywhere. Keep one strong axis, like the long black rule here, so the chaos has something to push against.

After Alexander Rodchenko & Varvara Stepanova · Lengiz poster & Lef · 1924

1919–1934

The poster

Constructivism · Gosizdat & Production Art, Moscow · 1924

How it works

Stark red, black and raw paper ground. Type is boxed in slabs of unequal width so the block itself becomes an architectural beam, canted along a megaphone wedge that projects across the sheet.

How to spot it

Red, black and paper. Nothing sits square. Giant condensed grotesque shouting out of a diagonal cone, heavy geometric framing bars, and dynamic typographic weight.

Use it yourself

Ban curves and ornamentation. When shouting a message, give the typography geometric momentum so the words hit with industrial impact.

After A.M. Cassandre · ocean liner posters · 1930s

1920–40

The poster

Meridian Line · Rail, overnight services, self-initiated · 1925

How it works

Cassandre reduced a ship to a single symmetrical mass seen from below, then airbrushed it so the form reads as light rather than outline. The type is a plinth under it, never a label across it.

How to spot it

Strict symmetry, stepped frames, converging rays, metallic gold on a deep ground, capitals tracked to half an em.

Use it yourself

Symmetry plus one dominant mass. The eye reads scale before it reads words.

After Karel Teige · ABECEDA, with Milča Mayerová · 1926

1920–1931

The poster

Pohyb · School of modern dance, Prague · 1926

How it works

Teige called it typophoto: picture and letter built from the same parts so they read as one message. In ABECEDA a dancer holds the shape of each letter beside a letter made of bars and circles.

How to spot it

Bars of one weight, a single red circle, thin hairline rules, a geometric sans, and a lot of open paper. The picture always rhymes with a letter.

Use it yourself

Draw your illustration with the stroke weight of your type. They stop fighting the moment they share a pen.

After Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg · Soviet film posters · 1923–33

1923–1933

The poster

Vint · Film premiere, Moscow · 1927

How it works

The Stenberg brothers made about three hundred film posters. Without enough film stills to work from, they projected frames onto paper and redrew them by hand, modelled them in tone like a photograph, cropped them huge and tipped them off the level so the poster moved like cinema.

How to spot it

A figure traced from a film still and shaded like a photograph, extreme crops and tilted angles, a huge condensed Cyrillic title running uphill, and credits stacked in narrow vertical lines.

Use it yourself

Pick the most extreme camera angle you can justify. A flat, head-on view never sells motion.

After Edward McKnight Kauffer · London Underground posters · 1915–40

1915–1940

The poster

Current · Electric railway, London · 1930

How it works

Frank Pick commissioned artists rather than advertisers for the Underground, and Kauffer brought Cubism and Vorticism to the platform. He sold the railway as a destination: the river, the country, the season, rarely a train.

How to spot it

A picture broken into faceted cubist planes, set in a panel on cream stock, drawn lettering above, and the railway’s name across the foot in a clean sans.

Use it yourself

Advertise the invisible benefit, not the machine. People do not want a train, they want to arrive.

After the Shanghai yuefenpai calendar posters · Hang Zhiying and Zheng Mantuo · 1920–40

1910–1940

The poster

Moli · Toilet soap, Shanghai · 1932

How it works

Foreign and Chinese brands gave away calendar posters so their name would hang on a wall for twelve months. The picture was always a fashionable woman, painted in rubbed charcoal and watercolour for a soft glow, with the product small at her side and an ornamental frame round it all.

How to spot it

A modern woman in a qipao as the whole picture, pastel airbrush-soft colour, a gold ornamental frame, bilingual Chinese and English lettering, the product tucked into the scene, and a twelve-month calendar strip.

Use it yourself

Make the useful part the reason to keep it. A calendar earns a year on the wall that an advert would never get.

After Harry Beck · London Underground diagram · 1931–33

1931–1960

The poster

Loop · Pocket railway map, London · 1933

How it works

Beck was an engineering draughtsman who drew the network like a circuit. He straightened every line to horizontal, vertical or 45 degrees, spaced the stations evenly and enlarged the centre, because underground nobody can see the geography anyway.

How to spot it

Three angles only, even station spacing, ticks for stops, open circles for interchanges, one colour per line, clean sans labels, and the words not to scale.

Use it yourself

Draw what the user needs to decide, not what is physically true. Order and connection beat accuracy when the task is getting from A to B.

After the Federal Art Project poster division · See America series · 1936–39

1935–1943

The poster

Highland · State parks programme, New York · 1936

How it works

Out-of-work artists were paid by the government to make public posters, and silkscreen was cheap enough to run by hand. Every colour is a separate stencil, so the picture is built from four or five flat shapes laid on top of each other.

How to spot it

Flat layered landscapes, a big sun, four or five inks with no gradients, condensed capitals in the sky, and edges that do not quite meet where two screens overlap.

Use it yourself

Limit the palette to what you could afford to print. The constraint does the art direction for you.

After Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss · and the streamlined railroad posters · 1934–40

1930–1945

The poster

Arrowline · Overnight express, Chicago · 1937

How it works

American industrial designers gave trains, toasters and radios the teardrop shape of a fast object, whether it needed it or not. Posters sold the promise with speed lines, chrome airbrushing and a low sun on a long horizon.

How to spot it

Rounded noses and teardrop shapes, triple speed lines trailing behind, chrome gradients, thin geometric capitals, and a warm sunset palette.

Use it yourself

Style for the feeling you want, not only the function. Nobody needed a streamlined pencil sharpener, but everyone wanted one.

After Abram Games · Festival of Britain and wartime posters · 1942–51

1940–1960

The poster

Pennant · Sea festival, Falmouth · 1951

How it works

Games worked to the rule ‘maximum meaning, minimum means’. He looked for one image that carried two ideas, here a festival pennant that is also the sail of a boat on the Thames, then airbrushed it so it seemed lit from inside.

How to spot it

A single central symbol, a double meaning inside it, smooth airbrushed tone on flat colour, patriotic red, white and blue, and a short spaced sans line underneath.

Use it yourself

Before drawing anything, write down two things the image must say, then find the one shape that says both.

After Giovanni Pintori · Olivetti advertising · 1950s

1948–1965

The poster

Calcolo · Office machines, Milan · 1953

How it works

Olivetti let its designers treat advertising as art. Pintori sold adding machines without showing them: the product’s own output became the picture. Here the one image, a plus sign, is built from the digits the machine prints.

How to spot it

Abstract shapes or characters built into a picture on white, bright primaries overprinting each other, a small lowercase product name tucked into a corner, lots of air.

Use it yourself

Show what the product makes, not the product. The machine is dull. What comes out of it rarely is.

After Saul Bass · film title sequences · 1955–62

1945–65

The poster

Margin Press · Publishing, translated fiction, self-initiated · 1955

How it works

Bass cut shapes from paper with scissors, so every edge is slightly wrong and the wrongness is the signature. He never drew a subject whole. He gave you enough fragments to assemble it yourself.

How to spot it

Three or four flat colours, deliberate off-register, one hand-drawn line among the flats, type set small and tracked wide beneath the image.

Use it yourself

Cut the shapes, do not draw them. Irregular edges read as human at any size.

After Reid Miles · Blue Note record sleeves · with Francis Wolff’s photographs · 1956–67

1954–1968

The poster

Nocturne · Jazz record label, New York · 1957

How it works

Reid Miles designed hundreds of sleeves on tiny budgets and admitted he did not much like jazz. He cropped the session photographs brutally, tinted them one colour, and set the title in huge condensed sans so the type swung like the music.

How to spot it

Condensed sans capitals at enormous size, a photograph cropped until it is almost abstract, a single tint colour, small tracked credits, and a catalogue number in the corner.

Use it yourself

Crop past the point of comfort. A fragment that makes people look twice does more than a full picture they understand at once.

After Josef Müller-Brockmann · Musica Viva · 1957

1950s onward

The poster

Tonreihe · Contemporary music, self-initiated · 1958

How it works

The image is generated, not chosen. Müller-Brockmann’s concert posters are arcs and bars stepping on a fixed mathematical interval, so the picture is the grid made visible. The grid is faintly drawn here so you can see it working.

How to spot it

Neutral grotesque, flush left ragged right, tight leading, one accent, and white space treated as a material with a cost.

Use it yourself

Derive the image from the system. If the decoration can be described as a rule, it will never look arbitrary.

After Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari · Noigandres · 1952–62

1952–1970

The poster

Ruído · Poetry magazine, São Paulo · 1958

How it works

The Noigandres poets decided the page itself was the poem. They used a single clean sans in lowercase, repeated a few words in a grid and let small changes, a letter dropped or a colour shifted, carry the meaning. Here noise becomes street becomes river.

How to spot it

Lowercase sans on a lot of white, a strict grid of one or two repeated words, one letter or word in red, fading or thinning towards the end, and no punctuation.

Use it yourself

Treat copy as material. Repetition plus one change is the oldest trick in the typographic book, and it still stops people.

After Romek Marber · the Marber grid for Penguin crime covers · 1961

1955–1975

The poster

Heron · Paperback crime series, London · 1961

How it works

Marber drew one grid for a whole list of paperbacks: a coloured band at the top for the series, title and author in a fixed position, and the lower two thirds left free for an illustration or photograph. Dozens of different designers could then work within it and the shelf still looked like one brand.

How to spot it

A coloured band across the top third, title and author ranged left in a clean sans, a thin rule dividing band from image, and a stark graphic image below, often in black and one colour.

Use it yourself

Fix the frame, free the content. A strict container is what lets a series change its pictures every time.

After Warhol’s serial repeats · and Lichtenstein’s Ben Day · 1962–66

1955–70

The poster

Holler · Soft drinks, retail, self-initiated · 1962

How it works

Warhol printed one image four times and changed only the colourway. Repetition drains the subject of meaning, which was the argument. Lichtenstein supplied the dot screen and the black keyline.

How to spot it

Serial grids, mechanical dots, saturated primaries, comic lettering, a speech bubble doing the job of a subhead.

Use it yourself

Repeat with one variable. Four colourways of one mark makes a system out of a single asset.

After Yusaku Kamekura · Tokyo Olympic posters · 1961–64

1955–1975

The poster

Hinode · Design exhibition, Tokyo · 1964

How it works

Kamekura took the rising sun from the national flag and gave it the whole sheet. Below it, a gold rule and a wide gold word. The Swiss grid is there, but the idea is Japanese restraint: say one thing at full size.

How to spot it

A single huge red disc on white, gold used for the name only, very wide capitals with generous tracking, symmetry, and emptiness that is clearly deliberate.

Use it yourself

Find the one symbol that already means your subject, then make it bigger than feels safe and remove everything competing with it.

After Jan Lenica · Polish opera and film posters · 1960s

1950–1980

The poster

Kruk · Opera in three acts, Warsaw · 1964

How it works

Under censorship, Polish poster artists could not say things plainly, so they said them in images. A film or opera became a single painted metaphor, and the title was lettered by hand to match the painting.

How to spot it

A surreal central image, visible brush texture, a muted ground with one blood-red accent, and hand lettering that wobbles, leans and changes size from letter to letter.

Use it yourself

Look for the image that means the story rather than shows it. Then paint the words with the same hand, so they belong to the picture.

After Maija Isola · Marimekko printed cottons · 1964

1951–1975

The poster

Kukka · Printed textiles, Helsinki · 1964

How it works

Isola drew plants at a scale no textile had used, with blunt flat forms and no shading, and printed them by hand on cotton. Cropped by the edge of a dress or a curtain, a seed head or a stem became pure shape and colour.

How to spot it

Oversized flat organic shapes, no outline and no shading, two or three strong colours plus black, deliberate cropping at the edges, and very little type.

Use it yourself

Scale is a design decision. Blow one simple motif up past the frame and it turns into a system.

After Karel Vaca, Zdeněk Ziegler and Olga Poláčková · Czechoslovak film posters · 1959–70

1955–1975

The poster

Holub · Feature film, Prague · 1965

How it works

Czechoslovak film distributors hired artists rather than studios, and the artists refused to put stars on posters. They made collages of torn paper, halftone scraps and drawn details, with the title written by hand, so each poster felt like a small art print about the film’s mood.

How to spot it

Torn paper layers, a single surreal eye or object, a coarse halftone scrap, one warm accent colour on grey, and a loose hand-written title.

Use it yourself

Sell the mood, not the cast. An image that makes people curious outlasts one that only tells them who is in it.

After Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast · Push Pin Studios · 1954–75

1954–1975

The poster

Bandbox · Music revue, New York · 1966

How it works

While Swiss modernism preached neutrality, Push Pin raided the past for fun: Victorian display letters, Art Nouveau curves, woodcut and comic colour, all drawn with a confident black line. Illustration was the idea, not a decoration added later.

How to spot it

Flat bands of bright colour inside a thick black outline, quirky revival lettering, a single witty central image, and a warm off-white ground.

Use it yourself

Borrow from history on purpose and mix it. A style lifted whole looks like pastiche; three styles mixed look like you.

After Wes Wilson · Fillmore Auditorium · 1966–67

1965–72

The poster

Marigold · Music festival, self-initiated · 1967

How it works

Wilson drew the shape first and swelled the letters until they filled it, so the type has no fixed width and no baseline. Moscoso set colours of equal value side by side so the edges appear to move.

How to spot it

No white space anywhere, complementary colours that vibrate, words stretched and swollen to fill one shape, legibility slowed on purpose so you have to stop and look.

Use it yourself

Draw the shape first, then stretch the words until they fill it. The lettering becomes the picture.

After Eduardo Muñoz Bachs · ICAIC film posters · and OSPAAAL · 1966–70

1965–1980

The poster

Rollo · Travelling cinema, Havana · 1967

How it works

Cuba had no offset presses to spare, so film and solidarity posters were pulled by hand in silkscreen. The OSPAAAL posters went out to three continents, which is why the message runs in Spanish, English, French and Arabic.

How to spot it

Two or three saturated flat inks, a bold simple emblem, a black shadow printed slightly off, and the same line repeated in four languages across the foot.

Use it yourself

Design the message so it survives translation. If the picture carries it, the words can be repeated in any language without changing the sheet.

After Lance Wyman · with Eduardo Terrazas · Mexico 68 identity

1966–1970

The poster

Ritmo · Dance festival, Mexico City · 1968

How it works

Wyman drew the Olympic logotype, then kept drawing: parallel lines rippled out from the letters onto posters, tickets, pavements and building walls. The identity was less a logo than a way of drawing everything.

How to spot it

Bold rounded capitals outlined in several concentric rings, fields of parallel lines, black and white op-art with bright pink, cyan and orange.

Use it yourself

Build a pattern out of your logotype rather than beside it. Then any surface can carry the brand without the logo appearing at all.

After Massimo Vignelli & Bob Noorda · NYCTA Subway Diagram · 1972

1972–79

The poster

Orbit · Public transport, self-initiated · 1972

How it works

Vignelli and Noorda threw out the map’s geography and kept only its logic: lines run at 0°, 45° or 90°, stops sit at even intervals whatever the real distance between them, and one colour carries one service end to end.

How to spot it

Straight lines meeting only at right angles or diagonals, a white-ringed circle wherever routes interchange, one grotesque face for every label, and colour used to name a route, never to decorate one.

Use it yourself

Separate the diagram from the territory. A system map earns a distortion a street map never could: riders forgive a wrong angle faster than a late train.

After Massimo Vignelli & Bob Noorda · NYCTA Graphic Standards Manual · 1970–1972

1965–1980

The poster

Transit · Rapid Transit Standards, New York · 1972

How it works

Wayfinding reduced to a strict topological matrix. Routes meet only at right angles or 45-degree diagonals, stations are evenly spaced regardless of physical distance, and pure colour names lines rather than decorates them.

How to spot it

Straight lines meeting at 45 or 90 degrees, white-ringed interchange discs, one grotesque face for every label, and solid colour-coded route bullets on bone-white ground.

Use it yourself

Sacrifice geographic fidelity for cognitive clarity. A diagram that tells commuters where to change trains is ten times more useful than an accurate aerial map.

After Otl Aicher · Munich 1972 pictograms and identity · 1967–72

1965–1980

The poster

Laufen · City run, Munich · 1972

How it works

Aicher built a whole visual language from rules: pictograms drawn only on a square grid at 45 and 90 degrees, one typeface set in lowercase, and a palette of sky blue, green, silver and orange chosen to avoid the red and black of the 1936 Games.

How to spot it

Figures made of bars and circles on a visible grid, pastel sky blue and green, lowercase Univers-style type, horizontal colour bands, no red, no black, no shadow.

Use it yourself

Write the drawing rules before you draw. When every pictogram obeys the same grid, a family of a hundred reads as one voice.

After Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell · Hipgnosis album covers · 1968–83

1968–1985

The poster

Mirage · Rock album, London · 1973

How it works

Before retouching software, Hipgnosis built their surreal ideas for real: people on fire, beds on beaches, objects hanging in the desert, photographed in camera. The band name was often left off the cover entirely.

How to spot it

A single impossible object in an ordinary landscape, a calm documentary photograph, long shadows and a low sun, and little or no type on the front.

Use it yourself

Make one thing wrong and keep everything else plausible. Surprise needs a believable setting to land.

After Morteza Momayez · Tehran International Film Festival posters · 1972–78

1960–1979

The poster

Sepideh · International film week, Tehran · 1974

How it works

Momayez studied in Paris and came home to build modern Iranian graphic design. He combined a Swiss discipline of flat colour and a single bold symbol with Persian calligraphy, so the letters work as picture as much as text.

How to spot it

One strong central symbol, often a bird or a figure, flat deep grounds, Persian lettering at display size in a second colour, and a small Latin line for the international audience.

Use it yourself

Let your local script lead and the international one follow. It is the most distinctive thing you have.

After Grapus · Pierre Bernard, Gérard Paris-Clavel, François Miehe · 1970–90

1970–1990

The poster

Tapage · Street theatre festival, Ivry-sur-Seine · 1975

How it works

Grapus refused the clean corporate modernism of the day. They worked for theatres, unions and local councils, and made every poster look made: handwriting, paint splashes, children’s drawings, tape and typewriter all on one sheet.

How to spot it

Scrawled marker lettering at an angle, a big splash of red, a doodled face or hand, a strip of tape, and the practical details typed as if on a flyer.

Use it yourself

Let the hand show. A little roughness tells people a person made this for them, which is exactly what a local poster should say.

After the Bombay cinema painters · hand-painted Hindi film posters and hoardings · 1950–90

1950–1990

The poster

Toofan · Hindi feature film, Bombay · 1975

How it works

Before digital printing, Hindi film posters and giant cinema hoardings were painted by hand in studios across Bombay. Painters worked from stills, pushed the colour to fever pitch, and built the title as a three-dimensional object with stacked shadows.

How to spot it

Saturated sunset gradients, glowing painted faces or profiles in close-up, a title extruded into 3D with stepped coloured shadows, the Hindi title alongside the English, and the stars named at the top.

Use it yourself

Give the title real depth and weight. When the name is an object, it can compete with the faces around it.

After Jamie Reid · “God Save the Queen” · 1977

1976–82

The poster

Shunt · Small music venue, self-initiated · 1977

How it works

Reid cut every letter from a different newspaper so no two share a face, a size or an angle. The ransom note was a real anonymity device before it was a style, which is why it still reads as a threat.

How to spot it

Torn edges, photocopier grain, spot colour printed out of register, and a deliberate refusal of craft that takes considerable craft to fake.

Use it yourself

Misregistration. Sliding one colour three millimetres off does more for authenticity than any texture overlay.

After Lemi Ghariokwu · Afrobeat album covers · 1974–85

1970–1990

The poster

Ariya · Afrobeat album, Lagos · 1977

How it works

Ghariokwu was a self-taught teenage illustrator when he started drawing Afrobeat sleeves. He filled the whole square with bold outlined cartoons, crowds and symbols, hand-drew every letter, and used the cover as a front page for the songs’ politics.

How to spot it

Thick black outlines, flat saturated colour filling every corner, crowds of simple figures, speech bubbles, a big sun or central symbol, and chunky hand-drawn title lettering.

Use it yourself

If the audience holds it in their hands, fill it. A sleeve can carry detail a billboard never could.

After Wolfgang Weingart · Kunstkredit and Kunsthalle posters · 1976–82

1972–1990

The poster

Raster · Typography exhibition, Basel · 1978

How it works

Weingart taught inside the Swiss school and pulled it apart from the inside. He stepped lines of type down the page, sandwiched halftone films, enlarged the dots until they became texture, and let the layers show through each other.

How to spot it

Letterspaced capitals stepping diagonally, blown-up halftone dot screens overlapping, flat colour boxes in multiply, a single hard rule, and big numerals.

Use it yourself

Keep the grid, break the rhythm. Structure the viewer can still feel lets you get away with far more play on top of it.

After Ettore Sottsass and Nathalie Du Pasquier · Memphis Milano · 1981

1981–88

The poster

Blocco · Stationery and paper goods, self-initiated · 1981

How it works

Du Pasquier drew the patterns, Sottsass built the objects. The Bacterio squiggle field was a plastic laminate first. Everything is a surface applied to a shape that does not need it, and that mismatch is the joke.

How to spot it

Squiggle fields, terrazzo confetti, clashing pastels held in place by heavy black keylines, and no grid at all.

Use it yourself

The black keyline. It lets genuinely incompatible colours sit next to each other without curdling.

After Ikko Tanaka · posters for Japanese theatre and dance · 1975–85

1960–1990

The poster

Mai · Classical dance, Osaka · 1981

How it works

Tanaka rebuilt traditional Japanese subjects from a handful of flat geometric shapes, drawn with compass and ruler. Here the dancer is never shown: the open fan is a half circle, the long sleeve two rectangles, the family crest three dots. The subject is centuries old, the method is pure Bauhaus.

How to spot it

A subject built from squares, circles and arcs, flat unshaded colour, a restrained Japanese palette of indigo, vermilion, ochre and pale green, and a lot of empty ground.

Use it yourself

Draw a traditional subject with a modern tool. The tension between the two is what makes people look.

After Peter Saville · Factory Records sleeves · 1981–85

1978–1992

The poster

Harbour · Independent record label, Manchester · 1983

How it works

Saville treated a record sleeve like a gallery wall. He borrowed old paintings for the front, here a marine view of a harbour at dusk, printed no band name, and spelled the title in a colour alphabet whose key was hidden on the back. Fans had to decode it.

How to spot it

A borrowed classical or industrial image, no obvious title, blocks of colour standing in for letters, a catalogue number used like a logo, and a lot of quiet dark ground.

Use it yourself

Trust the audience to do a little work. A code they crack themselves turns listeners into insiders.

After Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans · Emigre magazine · 1984–90

1984–1995

The poster

Lowres · Independent magazine, Berkeley · 1986

How it works

When the first Macintosh arrived, most designers treated its jagged screen type as a stopgap. Licko drew typefaces that embraced the pixel grid instead, and Emigre used them in layered, overlapping layouts that the old paste-up studio could not have made.

How to spot it

Bitmap letters with visible stair-steps, an outline copy offset from the solid, narrow columns of small caps, one elegant italic dropped in for contrast, grey scanlines.

Use it yourself

Design for the medium you actually have. A constraint used honestly becomes a style; one hidden badly becomes a flaw.

After Art Chantry · Seattle gig posters · 1988–95

1990s

The poster

Spindle · Second hand records, self-initiated · 1991

How it works

Chantry worked with a photocopier and a scalpel, never a computer. Copy a halftone, copy the copy, and the dots break down into blotches. The degradation is the artwork, not a filter over it.

How to spot it

Blown-out halftone, muddy palettes, rubber stamps, typewriter faces, contrast pushed down rather than up.

Use it yourself

Degrade a real thing rather than adding a texture layer. A scanned photocopy has flaws no noise filter invents.

After the riot grrrl and DIY zine makers · Olympia and Washington DC · 1990–95

1976–2000

The poster

Scrawl · Self-published zine, Olympia · 1992

How it works

Zines were made with scissors, glue sticks and whatever copier could be borrowed. Letters were cut from magazines, text was typed or hand-written, photographs went muddy with every generation of copying, and the lack of polish announced that anybody could do this.

How to spot it

Ransom-note letters in mismatched faces, heavy black copier grain, crunchy halftone photos, typewriter text in boxes, marker hand-writing, staples and a handwritten price.

Use it yourself

Show the process. When the audience can see how it was made, they feel invited to make their own.

After The Designers Republic · WipEout · 1995–99

1995–2004

The poster

Subframe · Electronic music, independent label, self-initiated · 1993

How it works

The Designers Republic dressed a racing game as a corporation, complete with fake subsidiaries, version numbers and safety notices. The clutter is the world-building. None of the codes mean anything and all of them look official.

How to spot it

Chrome display type, technical legends set tiny, reticles and warning bars, ice blue and silver, a version number on a poster.

Use it yourself

Invent a system of labels. Small technical furniture makes a flat layout feel like an interface to something.

After Paula Scher · The Public Theater · 1994–96

1994 onward

The poster

Mouthpiece · Festival, spoken word, self-initiated · 1994

How it works

Scher filled the sheet edge to edge with type alone, alternating condensed and extended cuts of the same family so the texture changes line by line. There is no image because the type is the image.

How to spot it

Type set to the trim, widths pushed to both extremes, colour changing per band, one word rotated up the side.

Use it yourself

Use width, not weight. Alternating a condensed and an extended cut gives contrast that bolding never will.

After Kwame Akoto (Almighty) · and the Accra video-club painters · 1985–2000

1985–2000

The poster

Cobra · Video club screening, Accra · 1995

How it works

Travelling video clubs toured Ghana with a VCR and a generator, and hired local sign painters to advertise the films. Paid to pull a crowd, the painters exaggerated freely, often painting scenes that were not in the film at all, on flour sacks stitched together.

How to spot it

Oil paint on cloth with a visible seam, lurid creatures at impossible scale, a small fleeing figure, yellow title lettering with a red drop shadow, and the showing time in a black band.

Use it yourself

Sell the feeling, not the facts. One exaggerated moment, painted at full volume, pulls a bigger crowd than an accurate summary.

After David Carson · Ray Gun · and Neville Brody · The Face · 1983–95

1980s–90s

The poster

Bleed · Independent publishing, self-initiated · 1996

How it works

Carson set an interview in Zapf Dingbats because he found it boring, and the magazine ran it. The point was that a page can communicate a feeling before a single word is read, and sometimes instead of it.

How to spot it

Type cropped by the trim, columns collapsed into one another, a masthead treated as raw material, one word at a hundred times the size of the next.

Use it yourself

Crop the display type off the edge. It implies the sheet is a window onto something larger.

After the millennium web and consumer-tech aesthetic · iMac, i-mode and Tokyo club flyers · 1997–2004

1996–2004

The poster

Hyperlink · Web magazine launch, Tokyo · 2000

How it works

Around the millennium, new software made chrome, gloss and lens flare easy for the first time, and translucent computers made technology look friendly. Designers dressed everything as a shiny object from the near future, then added tiny pixel fonts because screens were still low resolution.

How to spot it

Chrome bubble lettering, icy blue gradients, glossy pill-shaped buttons, orbiting rings and sparkles, faint grid lines, and tiny pixel captions with web addresses.

Use it yourself

Make the interface feel like an object you want to touch. Gloss and depth are shortcuts to delight, as long as the words stay readable.

After Apple’s Aqua · and the Iconfactory school · 2001–12

2001–13

The poster

Foolscap · Software, notes and journals, self-initiated · 2007

How it works

Every surface claims to be a material. Brushed metal, green felt, stitched leather, a gel button lit from above by a light source that is consistent across the entire operating system.

How to spot it

Bevels, inner shadows, letterpressed text made from two offset shadows, and controls that look pressable because they look like objects.

Use it yourself

One consistent light source. It is the discipline that separated Aqua from the plastic imitations of it.

After the rotulistas of Mexico City · hand-painted shop signs · 1950s to now

1950–present

The poster

Güera · Sandwich shop sign, Mexico City · 2008

How it works

Across Mexico, sign painters called rotulistas letter shopfronts, market stalls and walls by hand. Each line gets its own colour, outline and shadow, the food is painted large and glossy, and the price sits in a burst. The style is being displaced by vinyl printing, which is why designers now collect it.

How to spot it

Bright wall colours, every line in a different lettering style with outlines and drop shadows, a painted product picture, a round price badge, and a list of what is sold.

Use it yourself

Give each line its own voice but hold them with one axis and one shadow direction. Variety feels joyful when the structure underneath is steady.

After Microsoft’s Metro · 2010 · and Google’s Material · 2014

2010 onward

The poster

Wardline · Sheffield, S1 to S14 · 2010

How it works

Metro took Swiss principles into an operating system and threw out every gradient. Material added back exactly one dimension, elevation, and gave every shadow a rule about how high the surface floats.

How to spot it

Bold flat colour, an eight-unit spacing rhythm, geometric icons, a shadow used only to say what is above what.

Use it yourself

Depth as a scale, not a decoration. Two shadow levels, applied consistently, beat twelve applied by eye.

After the Outrun revival · and “Floral Shoppe” · 2011–15

2011 onward

The poster

Cassiopeia Instruments · Turin, Italy · 2011

How it works

The whole look is a memory of 1984 that never existed. A wireframe horizon from an early flight simulator, a sun sliced by the scanlines of a television, and chromatic fringing borrowed from a worn VHS tape.

How to spot it

Magenta against cyan, a grid running to a vanishing point, slitted sun, type split into coloured channels.

Use it yourself

The channel split. Offsetting one copy of the type in cyan and one in yellow costs nothing and dates the piece instantly.

After Wolff Olins · London 2012 identity · 2007–12

2007–2015

The poster

Surge · City summer festival, London · 2012

How it works

Wolff Olins built an identity meant to be hated a little. The mark was a set of jagged shards that could hold any colour, photo or pattern, and it was deliberately graceless so it would feel young and loud rather than official.

How to spot it

Sharp angular shards at odd angles, fluorescent magenta, cyan, green and yellow on black, heavy condensed type tilted to match, and no curves anywhere.

Use it yourself

Design a container, not a picture. A shape that can be filled with anything will survive a thousand applications you never imagined.

After the flat-illustration house style · Alegria · 2017

2017–2022

The poster

Kerb · Leeds · 2017

How it works

Flat vector people, no faces, limbs longer than anatomy allows, drawn in a palette of three muted brand colours. It became the default illustration of the funded-startup decade because it scales to any subject and offends nobody.

How to spot it

Small heads, elongated arms, rounded blob shapes behind the figures, one flat weight of line, a single ground rule.

Use it yourself

Make the drawing say the sentence. The style is empty when a figure gestures at nothing; it works the moment each figure performs the exact action the caption names.

After the neo-grotesque revival · Basel and Berlin · 2018

2016 onward

The poster

Datum Calibration · Rotterdam · 2018

How it works

The International Style put back into service by software companies who wanted to look serious. Flush left, one rule, one red, a visible column grid and margins wide enough to be a statement about money.

How to spot it

A single grotesque in two or three weights, tight negative tracking on the display sizes, a hard horizontal rule, and nothing centred anywhere.

Use it yourself

Put tracking on a curve rather than choosing it per line. Tight above 40pt, neutral at reading size, open below 10pt: one rule, applied everywhere, and the page stops looking assembled.

After the independent-magazine serif · Didone display · 2019

2018 onward

The poster

Fallow · Herefordshire · 2019

How it works

High-contrast Didone display over a plain sans for everything else. It arrived when every brand looked like the same geometric sans and a serif was the cheapest way to sound older than the company was.

How to spot it

Enormous masthead, hairline rules, small caps set wide, an italic used once, and a colour that appears exactly twice.

Use it yourself

Delete the middle. Set the display at 40pt and up, the text at 11pt and down, and use nothing in between. The gap is what reads as editorial; a 24pt subhead fills it in and the whole thing goes flat.

After the Swiss-punk backlash · Sheffield · 2019

2018 onward

The poster

Halfmoon · Glasgow, Dennistoun · 2019

How it works

Swiss training used against itself. Type sits at the wrong size for its importance, blocks collide, colours clash on purpose, and the whole thing is still built on a grid because a genuinely random poster is unreadable, not rebellious.

How to spot it

Acid yellow with black, one weight pushed to its heaviest, overlapping blocks, and a mono caption that behaves itself while everything else does not.

Use it yourself

Keep the grid and lose the manners. Twelve by twelve, every block snapped to it, and all four edge positions occupied so nothing floats. The discipline is what stops it looking like an accident.

After the solarpunk illustrators · and Art Nouveau line · 2020

2019 onward

The poster

Verge · Bristol · 2020

How it works

The optimistic answer to a decade of dystopia: sun, growth and public infrastructure drawn as something worth wanting. It borrows Art Nouveau’s botanical line and puts it on a poster about solar panels.

How to spot it

A warm paper ground, a disc of sun behind the title, plant forms drawn in a single green line, and no black anywhere on the sheet.

Use it yourself

Draw the plants at true relative height. A sunflower is more than three times a lavender bush, and once the scale bar is honest the illustration stops being decoration and starts being information.

After the chrome 2.0 sleeve · acid graphics · 2020

2019 onward

The poster

Molten · Antwerp, Nieuw Zuid · 2020

How it works

Liquid metal rendered in a browser: blobs, warped type and a chrome finish built out of a gradient rather than a render. The acid green is there to stop the metal reading as luxury.

How to spot it

Blown-out highlights next to near-black, a soft blob form, one fluorescent accent, and type filled with the same metal as the object.

Use it yourself

Fix the metal as six stops in one order and vary only the angle. Every chrome object on the sheet then belongs to the same material; picking new colours per object gives you tinfoil.

After Gumroad’s 2022 rebuild · and the brutalist web

2020 onward

The poster

Halyard · Developer tooling, self-initiated · 2020

How it works

Take the default browser look, the one everyone spent twenty years hiding, and commit to it. Thick borders, unblurred shadows, colours from a highlighter pen, controls that shout about being controls.

How to spot it

Offset shadows with zero blur, borders at three pixels or more, monospace for anything factual, and a marquee doing work no marquee should.

Use it yourself

Zero blur. A hard shadow is a graphic shape and reads at any size, unlike a soft one.

After the mesh-gradient product page · 2021

2020 onward

The poster

Quiet · Copenhagen · 2021

How it works

Three or four soft colour fields blurred into each other behind a plain white card. It replaced the flat pastel era and gave software companies atmosphere without asking them to commit to an image.

How to spot it

Heavy blur radius, colours that never meet at a hard edge, one opaque panel carrying all the text, and a very light typeface at a very large size.

Use it yourself

Let the blur carry no information. Three stops, one order, everything readable sitting on flat ground above it. The moment a word depends on the gradient behind it, the page fails on the first cheap screen.

After the bento product page · and Apple’s tile grid · 2022

2021 onward

The poster

Crate · Tallinn · 2022

How it works

A lunchbox layout: rounded tiles of unequal size packed into one rectangle with no gaps. It solved the problem of a feature list nobody reads by turning each item into an object you can look at on its own.

How to spot it

Consistent corner radius and gap, tiles spanning two or four columns, one accent tile, one inverted tile, and a figure large enough to read from across the room.

Use it yourself

Pack the tiles, do not arrange them. Size each one from what it holds and let the grid close the gaps. Choosing sizes by eye produces a layout that breaks the moment a number gets longer.

After Frutiger Aero · the Vista and Wii era · revived 2023

2023 onward

The poster

Springline · Exeter, Devon · 2023

How it works

The optimism of 2007 operating systems brought back deliberately: gloss, water, leaves, sky and a humanist sans. It reads as nostalgia for a moment when technology was sold as clean and calm.

How to spot it

Sky gradient, bubbles with a specular highlight, a glass panel with a white inner edge, wet gloss on everything, and one green organic form.

Use it yourself

Nothing opaque, everything legible. Every panel is translucent, so every panel had to be checked against the gradient behind it rather than against a colour you can name. Gloss without that check is unreadable.

After the analogue backlash · letterpress and risograph · 2024

2023 onward

The poster

Proof · London · 2024

How it works

A reaction to work that could have been generated. Registration marks, colour bars, visible stock and a misregistration left in, all of it there to prove a physical press was involved and a person was standing at it.

How to spot it

Trim and register marks in the margin, a process colour bar, paper grain, one channel visibly out of register, and mono annotations in the hand of whoever pulled the sheet.

Use it yourself

Record the defect, do not style it. A real offset is a fixed distance on the sheet, so it stays the same width behind a headline and behind a footnote. Faked grunge scales with the type, and that is how you spot it.

After Tobias Frere-Jones · Retina, 2016 · revived as a style 2026

2026

The poster

Wedge · Reading, Berkshire · 2026

How it works

A notch cut into the inner corner of a letter so that spreading ink fills the gap instead of closing the joint. Newsprint needed it at agate sizes. Screens never did, which is exactly why it now reads as a deliberate mark rather than a repair.

How to spot it

Wedges bitten out of every acute inner corner, tight apertures, a squared skeleton, and the traps left visible at display size where no press would ever have needed them.

Use it yourself

Put the trap where the letter actually closes. This A has three, at the counter apex and at both junctions under the crossbar, because those are its only acute inner corners. Traps scattered on the straight edges are decoration wearing an engineer’s coat.

After Studio Feixen · elastic display lettering · 2026

2026

The poster

Longwave · Hull, East Yorkshire · 2026

How it works

Letterforms stretched, softened and run together until they behave like a fluid rather than a set of fixed shapes. It is a reaction to a decade of variable fonts used only to save kilobytes: here the axis is the point.

How to spot it

Two widths of the same family stacked against each other, letters bleeding into their neighbours, blobs that merge with the type rather than sit behind it, and everything you actually need to read left crisp.

Use it yourself

Melt the display, never the details: the date and the address sit outside the filter at a normal width. Blur in container units rather than pixels, or the same design is crisp on a poster and illegible on a contact sheet. And boost alpha, not contrast: a contrast strong enough to fuse letters also drags every colour to a primary, and then the swatch table below is describing a plate that no longer exists.

After Rosa Menkman · A Vernacular of File Formats, 2010 · revived 2026

2026

The poster

Dropout · Sheffield, South Yorkshire · 2026

How it works

Compression failure treated as material. Channel separation, dropped scanlines and displaced blocks are the artefacts of a codec giving up, borrowed deliberately because a clean image no longer proves anything about how it was made.

How to spot it

Red and cyan pulled apart from a single headline, horizontal tears at fixed heights, a scanline field, and mono captions written in the language of the error rather than the event.

Use it yourself

Split the channels with a shadow, not three copies of the headline. Duplicated text is read out three times by a screen reader and hides the tear from every search. The same rule puts the scanlines behind the type: the effect goes on the ground, the message stays clean.

After Michal Malewicz · who named it, 2019 · revived 2026

2026

The poster

Sill · Norwich, Norfolk · 2026

How it works

One ground colour for everything, with each element pushed out of it or pressed into it by a matched pair of shadows, light from the top left and dark from the bottom right. Skeuomorphism minus the photography: the surface is a material, not a picture of one.

How to spot it

A single fill used for page, card and control alike, paired light and dark shadows, inset wells for anything showing a value, generous radii, and a geometric sans with no weight above medium.

Use it yourself

The extrusion is not allowed to carry information. This style is famous for failing contrast because the shadow was asked to say “button”. Here the ink is near-black on light grey at ten to one, and every shadow could be deleted without losing a word.

After Susan Kare · Macintosh system icons, 1983 · revived 2026

2026

The poster

Cold boot · Late opening & exhibition, Cambridge · 2026

How it works

A visible unit grid, a bitmap face at display size, a palette small enough to name, hard edges everywhere, and glyphs drawn as runs of cells rather than shapes that happen to look blocky. Forty machines from 1974 onward, all switched on.

How to spot it

A visible 16px unit grid, crisp bitmap display typography, a neon phosphor palette (CRT green and amber on black), and iconic Macintosh-style pixel glyphs.

Use it yourself

Draw on a low-resolution canvas without zooming in. If an icon doesn’t read at 1:1, adding more pixels won’t fix the thinking.

After Susan Kare & ordered dithering algorithms · Macintosh & salvage revival · 2026

2026

The poster

Relay · Dundee, Angus · 2026

How it works

Four colours, and anything that needs a fifth is dithered: an ordered Bayer pattern of two of the four. The palette cannot grow, which is the whole discipline: a constraint that can be relaxed is not one.

How to spot it

Bone, amber, teal and deep ink. Ordered 4×4 dither patterns creating half-tones without adding ink, crisp pixel typography, and hardware workshop iconography.

Use it yourself

Pick four colours and declare them sacred. When you need a shade between them, cross-hatch or dither them together on the grid.