Items28The creator’s order
  1. 1Alphonse MuchaAlphonse MuchaBorn 24 Jul 1860The look we call Art Nouveau on a poster is largely Mucha's: a tall, narrow format, a woman framed by a halo-like circle, hair in whiplash curves, and a mosaic of flat pastel colour. It began with a rush job over Christmas 1894, a poster for Sarah Bernhardt's play Gismonda, which so pleased the…0i
  2. 2Edward McKnight KaufferEdward McKnight KaufferBorn 14 Dec 1890An American in London who brought Cubism and Vorticism to the bus stop. Frank Pick of the Underground commissioned well over 100 posters from him between the wars, and Kauffer's are the ones that still look modern: Soaring to Success! for the Daily Herald in 1919, with its flock of angular birds,…0i
  3. 3CassandreCassandreBorn 24 Jan 1901Cassandre's posters for railways and ocean liners turned speed into geometry. Normandie, 1935, shows the liner's prow from below so it towers like a cliff, with tiny gulls for scale; Étoile du Nord puts rails converging on a single star. He also designed the Peignot typeface and, for Dubonnet, a…0i
  4. 4Jan TschicholdJan TschicholdBorn 2 Apr 1902If you have ever picked up an orange-and-white Penguin paperback, you have held Tschichold's work. Hired by Allen Lane in 1947, he spent two years writing the Penguin Composition Rules and redrawing the three-band cover grid so that hundreds of titles from different printers looked consistent and…0i
  5. 5Harry BeckHarry BeckBorn 4 Jun 1902Beck was an engineering draughtsman laid off by the Underground who sketched a new Tube map in his spare time in 1931, borrowing from electrical circuit diagrams: only horizontal, vertical and 45-degree lines, evenly spaced stations, and the central area enlarged at the expense of geographical…0i
  6. 6Josef Müller-BrockmannJosef Müller-BrockmannBorn 9 May 1914The face of Swiss Style. Müller-Brockmann's concert posters for the Zurich Tonhalle from the 1950s onwards use nothing but sans-serif type, coloured bands and arcs laid on a strict mathematical grid, yet they feel as rhythmic as the music they advertise. His 1981 book Grid Systems in Graphic Design…0i
  7. 7Abram GamesAbram GamesBorn 29 Jul 1914Games's motto was maximum meaning, minimum means, and his Second World War posters prove it. As the War Office's official poster artist he made Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades, in which a gossiping soldier's words spiral from his mouth and turn into a bayonet running through three of his comrades.…0
  8. 8Paul RandPaul RandBorn 15 Aug 1914Rand persuaded American business that a logo should be simple enough to survive a fax machine and a matchbook. His striped IBM mark of 1972, the UPS shield with its parcel tied in string, the ABC lettering in a circle and the Westinghouse W all came from that conviction. He also had the nerve to…0i
  9. 9Herb LubalinHerb LubalinLubalin treated letters as pictures. In his famous Mother and Child logo the ampersand nests a child inside the O of Mother; in the masthead for Avant Garde magazine the capitals lean and lock together so tightly they read as one shape, and the typeface he developed from it with Tom Carnase became…0i
  10. 10Corita KentCorita KentSister Corita, a Catholic nun who taught art in Los Angeles, made screenprints that look like nothing else: supermarket slogans, song lyrics and scripture cut up, enlarged and set in sizzling Day-Glo colours. Her students at Immaculate Heart College helped pull the prints and stage her joyful…0i