For graphic designers, posters are probably the closest they’ll get to fine art. But if you’ve read the “About” section of the website, you know how I feel about design and fine art. By definition, design cannot be fine art. But it can be art. I was lucky to run a studio at a time when you could still be paid good money for a poster—up to $10,000 if you were famous enough. Nowadays, the only posters that pay decent money are designed for Broadway plays and museum exhibits. Even billboards are on their way out (thankfully).
So let’s drink a toast to the good old days, when great poster artists still walked the Earth (and got paid for it): Toulouse-Lautrec, A.M. Cassandre, Lucien Bernhard, Raymond Savignac, Paul Rand, Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, and many others. I can’t say I was in their league, but I can say I loved the genre. Here are a selection of examples I found in my files.
1980. These two 30-foot billboards were part of a print campaign for a new chain of Mexican restaurants. They went up in a hundred-plus locations in the Bay Area a week before the launch. I drew the illustrations with my own shaky hand. When I saw them from the freeway I realized they were too light. It didn’t matter, though. A huge storm moved through the area the day before the launch, ripping the posters to shreds. (The campaign would probably be considered racist today, but in those days they were charming, even to Mexican-Americans. I know, because we tested.)
1983. Continuing on the spicy theme was a large poster we designed to announce Santa Barbara’s annual fiesta week. The illustration was done by staffer Sandra Higashi; the lettering below is a proprietary typeface I designed for my client Santa Barbara Bank & Trust. The poster can still be seen, framed, in quite a few Santa Barbara homes.
1983. The demand for framable posters, or art posters, was raging in the 1980s. The leader of this industry was Davis-Blue, who agreed to publish this poster under their imprint. The background is a flat, silkscreened gray, with gold elements screened in metallic gold ink.
1984. We designed this dressing-room poster as part of a campaign for Stubbies, makers of beachwear. It’s hard to read the tagline at this reduced size; it says, “California’s native dress.” We were inspired by Richard Hamilton’s 1956 fine-art collage entitled “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”
1984. The same year we recycled leftover images from the Stubbies campaign to create a poster-size call for entries for the West Coast Show, one of the first design competitions to celebrate work done in California. Today there are great design firms all over the country, but at the time, New York dominated the scene. To make a collage like this, you had to cut up printed photos with an X-acto knife and carefully fit them together (remember, no Photoshop in 1984). The images for these last two posters were also executed by Sandra Higashi.
1985. I designed this art poster to announce the firm’s leap from Santa Barbara to Silicon Valley. At the time, people were going crazy for framable posters. I gave it a fine-art feeling with silkscreen printing and heavy, museum-quality paper. By the time I got there the poster was already hanging in my future-clients’ offices. We may have invented a whole new category: cubicle posters.
1986. One of our first clients in Silicon Valley was Adobe Systems. They were having the devil of a time explaining the value of PostScript to designers. So I designed another “cubicle poster” to hang in shops and service bureaus where designers got their photostats and type galleys. You can barely see the copy on this reproduction, but it tells the story of a fictional designer whose reputation was transformed by the precision and speed of technology. The founder of Adobe loved it, and asked me if the images were created with Adobe software. I answered, “Why wouldn’t they be?” Good man, he replied. (Actually, they were years away from that.) Then I offered to redesign that clunky Adobe logo for him. The marketing director kicked me under the table and whispered hoarsely, “His wife designed it.”
1987. One of my favorite clients was the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District, otherwise known simply as “the bus.” Under the leadership of Gary Gleason, MTD became the nation’s leading innovator for city transit. Our strategic brand goal was to make riding the bus not only socially acceptable, but fun. I could create a whole Substack out of all the work we did with Gary, but these car cards are representative of what we did together. Each poster featured popular uses of the bus—going to work, going to the library, and going to the beach, and so on. The whole community couldn’t wait to see what we’d do next.
1987. Another poster for MTD, this time announcing the Superticket program for city commuters. This anticipated the London Transport Oyster Card, which came out six years later to great acclaim. The image for this poster was a collage made of pinstriped wool, fake white leather, and actual skate wheels, photographed in one shot.
1988. Another favorite client was Creative Education, an innovative publisher of books for elementary schools. President George Peterson was the son of the founder, and has now been succeeded by his son. One of George’s most successful innovations was to package famous short stories as standalone books. Here’s a classroom poster we did for a series by Ray Bradbury, one of my early writing heroes.
1989. Here’s an art poster for MTD to celebrate something—I can’t remember what. The mile-long strip of downtown beachfront known as Palm Park is iconic to locals, not unlike the Duomo in Florence or the Eiffel Tour in Paris. When you’ve been parted from Santa Barbara for any length of time, the palm trees are what you miss.
1989. Here’s cubicle poster for a networking client called Bridge, that made advanced equipment for what people had begun calling the World Wide Web. The idea that you could send data around the world as easily as you go next door for a cup of sugar was a mind-blowing concept. This poster, with its vast open space, tried to capture the awesome “2001”of it all. Adobe products were not advanced enough to let us create these sweeping curved lines, so we had to make them by hand with pen and ink.
1992. I believe this was the last poster we created for a client. The world was moving to the Internet (still spelled with a capital I), and technology companies came to believe that print was an anachronism. They were surprised to see all kinds of analog media coming back into vogue, including vinyl records, hardcover books, and printed magazines. But that’s history for you. Kodak’s conference, “Silver to Silicon: Color and Imaging in the ’90s,” may have been their last. They failed to make the leap to digital and soon went the way of buggy whips. Who knows, though—they may have the last laugh if the analog crowd brings back the film camera.
2002. I closed the studio after 9/11 after most of our clients had stopped their projects. Soon the Bush administration declared the “War on Terror,” an initiative based on evidence of “weapons of mass destruction.” The evidence turned out to some large aluminum tubes and not much else. But even if there were weapons, I knew that targeting terrorist organizations would naturally lead to more terror.
2002. I designed a second poster echoing the lyrics of the protest song by Edwin Starr: “War—HUNH!—what is it good for?” The answer is “absolutely nuthin’”—except for making leaders look tough (and stupid). Now, when I view all these posters chronologically, I’m struck by how innocent and optimistic the world was in 1975 compared to 2002. We can probably draw a continuous line from the lies told by the Bush administration to the lies being told by Trump. The graph line of political lies from 2000 to the present would track pretty well with the rise in our disillusionment with government, technology, and education.
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