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Design

Posters, Broadsides and Design

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This colour poster was produced using the second great technology of printing, lithography, which is the most common form of printing today (in a much more sophisticated form known as offset lithography). Building on this basic framework-words and images, lines and colours-we have arrived at the complex and fascinating visual medium that is the modern poster.

Consider the two posters that use one of Canada's most endearing (and enduring) symbols, the beaver (Castor canadensis). The simpler poster has an effective headline and a lovely (if small) woodcut illustration. It communicates perfectly well. But the rich, dense undergrowth of the Roots poster, by Heather Cooper, suggests so much more: a fantasy world of medieval tapestries and magic gardens. Looking at both beavers closely, we see that images, depending on how they are rendered and reproduced, are often more than what they appear.

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Letterpress printers worked hard to overcome the limitations of their technology. The poster announcing a "Grande assemblée" for the Honourable Ernest Bertrand uses many different type styles at once, trying to catch our eye despite the lack of pictures. Because early images had to be individually cut into wood or metal, at great time and expense, they were used only for important subjects. When a Mohawk Methodist church was burned down in December 1875, illustrations of the scene both before and after the fire were produced within a week, resulting in this "Oka Outrage" poster. This is really a form of photojournalism, only without the help of fast cameras and photographic reproduction.

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Sometimes the level of ornamentation on early posters could be quite elaborate, as the border and main lettering on this notice for Russell's Hotel shows us. Such decorative uses of type were lovingly preserved and studied for generations afterward. The designers at the Cooper & Beatty typesetting firm reproduced a selection of vintage wine labels, displayed photographically on this poster from the 1970s.

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Once lithography was developed, artists could draw an image by hand in colour on a stone and use it to print detailed posters. The Grenville Brewery in Prescott, Ontario, thought that a grand view of its factory would help sell its ale. Nowadays, modern advertisers usually choose to show you their product or better yet, attractive people using it.

The next huge step in the art of the poster came with the arrival of technology to reproduce photographs. The Canadian Illustrated News was so excited by the upcoming visit of Prince Arthur (Queen Victoria's son) to Montréal in 1869 that it developed and used a new technology just to capture the event. The halftone, then known as the Leggotype (after its co-inventor William Leggo), was revolutionary: for the first time, photographs (an invention that at this time was about 40 years old) could be transferred directly to printing plates. This greatly expanded the ability of posters to communicate. In later years, further innovations would see colour photography reproduced as well.

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Posters employ more than mechanical technologies, however. The different styles at play in rendering typography and images are also a form of social technology. Compare the feeling and intent we can read from the "objective" photograph on Joseph R. "Joey" Smallwood's campaign poster, with our impression from Theo Dimson's greatly simplified (and some might say glorified) illustration for a theatre production. The powerful, expressionist directness of Mayo's movie poster for Coal Face seems far removed from the subtle and musical style Ken Dallison uses for the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Athletes leap accompanied by a symphony of dynamic but harmonious colour, while dancers crouch in a dense, obscure thicket. Abstract shapes have long provided a stand-in for sound, from the repeated curves of the number "9" to evoke Beethoven's great symphony, to the visual invention of Neville Smith's treatise on sound (later revived as a promotion for an Ottawa gift shop, named Folio). From an expressive caricature of a Quebec playwright looming over the playhouse, to more concrete, objective forms drawn from science, the design of posters creates new visual tools, altering our very understanding of the meaning of form along the way.

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Developments in printing technology have had an enormous impact on the form-and power-of the poster. A vast array of visual techniques, developed throughout the long history of the poster, has emerged in response to our seemingly infinite need to communicate. And this has helped produce a separate technology: the set of visual effects and possibilities that are the tools of contemporary design itself.

Professor Brian Donnelly
Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
York University
Sheridan Institute Joint Program in Design

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