One of my favorite illustrators is eBoy (a collective of people from Germany and LA). They designed our Jackhammer Jill logo and did a cool Boing Boing shirt many years ago (I don't think it's available any longer). eBoy just created this gigantic poster of New York, which you can tape to a wall and color in with pens or colored pencils. This would make a good gift. Read the rest
Tibor Helényi created a lot of great posters for films screened in the Hungarian People's Republic during its communist era, like these posters for the original Star Wars trilogy. Read the rest
The intrepid counterculture archivists/publishers of Boo-Hooray have posted their "Top 100 Posters" for sale. What a stunning collection of avant-garde art and design. It makes me yearn for the downtown scenes of the prior century. Read the rest
Cheap visual charts were the main educational aid in Indian classrooms until recently. Meant to teach children good behavior, and to assist their reading skills, these inexpensive posters were plastered everywhere by local printers. They have a naive art aesthetic since the artists were unschooled themselves. Generally the charts follow a formula of filing in a grid with examples. Like comic books, their garish colors and simple forms have their own innocent charm. This book rounds up a hundred samples of what is now a rare folk art.
Ideal Boy, An: Charts from India by Sirish Rao, V. Geetha, Gita Wolf (Editors) Dewi Lewis Publishing 2001, 120 pages, 6.9 x 1.0 x 9.4 inches, Hardcover $7 Buy on Amazon
Trumpism is nothing new, as University of Michigan's digitized sets of historical political posters show. Many are in the public domain, including my fave announcing the 1918 "Grand Picnic and Re-Union of All the Radicals of the City of Chicago." Read the rest
Rotten Tomatoes compiled a highly subjective list of striking movie posters.
Since the Moonlight and Sausage Party posters are well-known, here are a few lesser-known posters they list. Note: poster quality and film quality do not necessarily correlate. Read the rest
Jordan Bolton makes cool posters comprised of objects seen in famous movies, like this one for Amelie. Read the rest
These Soviet safety posters delivered their message in bold terms.
What a delight: NASA itself published a series of retrofuturistic tourism posters for other worlds. Better yet, the images are less unfree, though they also sell prints. I'm off to the exoplanets, see ya!
If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, you’ve undoubtedly seen the large posters showcasing some of the popular rides and attractions. Over the past sixty years, what started out as teasers for park guests have evolved into valued works of art. They transition from simple works with minimal design and color of the mid 1950s to finely-detailed full-color masterpieces that perfectly capture the tones and atmospheres of each attraction of the present day.
Poster Art of the Disney Parks compiles Disney theme park attraction posters from around the globe into one volume. The book is oversized for proper viewing of the full-page prints, which are rich in history, color, and detail. Each chapter is broken down into the different lands (Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, etc.) as well as two chapters dedicated to the Disney California Adventure park and the Tokyo DisneySea park.
The tome focuses strongly on the art with minimal text. There are a few paragraphs at the beginning of each chapter and a few captions to accompany the images, but beyond that, it’s an art-lover’s dream. There are so many poster images that even a hard-core fan of the Disney theme parks wouldn’t recognize all of them. Add to that the plethora of sketches, color samples, and poster variants, and you’ve got a 146-page book that is jam-packed with visual treats that will rekindle childhood memories of the Disney theme parks.
– Robert Nava
Poster Art of the Disney Parks
by Daniel Handke and Vanessa Hunt
Disney Editions
2012, 144 pages, 11.2 x 14.2 x 0.8 inches
These delightful images were created to celebrate an annual food and culture festival in Brazil. Read the rest
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union was flooded with striking posters spreading communist propaganda. Read the rest
There's a new book out about Big O Posters, which grew out of the graphic design vision of Peter Ledeboer, the charismatic art director of the U.K. incarnation of music and counter-culture magazine Oz, published psychedelic, sci-fi, and fantasy posters from 1967 until 1980.
Originally promoted in the pages of Oz to sell readers full-size posters of the artwork they were enjoying in the magazine, the roster of Big O posters included some of the biggest names in rock art, from Martin Sharp (a pair of album covers for Cream) and Mati Klarwein (Santana’s “Abraxas”) to H.R. Giger (Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery”) and Roger Dean (multiple covers for Yes). It’s a big, image-packed tale, which is why The Art of Big O, designed and published by Michael Fishel and written by Nigel Suckling, both of whom were Big O artists, feels so right. It, too, is big and image-packed, capturing both the atmosphere of the London graphic-design world of the 1960s and ’70s as well as the work itself, which is jammed into every nook and cranny of the hefty tome like so many posters tacked to the walls and ceiling of a teenager’s bedroom. The result is less a nostalgic trip down memory lane than a paean to the obsessives who produced and printed this often unapologetically obsessive art.
See sample pages from The Art of Big O on Wink Read the rest
Mary O'Malley's "Bottom Feeders" sculpture-series depicts cups, teapots, plates, saucers and bowls that appear to have been recovered from the sea-bottom, covered in barnacles, coral, tentacles and crustaceans. Read the rest
Backers of the Rocky Horror Saved My Life documentary post-production effort can one of these beautiful posters for a $20 contribution. I saw them in person today at New York Comic-Con and they're gorgeous. Read the rest
A detail from a poster, sold by Pop Chart Lab for $29, which diagrams the opening lines of 25 famous novels using the Reed-Kellogg system for breaking down the grammatical construction of sentences. [via Wired] Read the rest
Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says: "We just published an interview with Zack Coutroulis, who has an amazing collection of vintage magic posters. Zack explains how many of the most popular magicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries got their starts in vaudeville, sandwiched between song-and-dance acts and comedians. If the magicians got big enough to go out on their own, they'd produce lithographed posters to publicize their shows. While some of these posters were portraits of magicians such as Dante, Carter the Great, Kellar, and Thurston, often surrounded by devils and imps whispering dark-art secrets into their ears, other posters showcased particular illusions, such as the one of Harry Houdini performing the water-torture trick."
Dark Art: Spectacular Illusions from the Golden Age of Magic Read the rest
