Written Study




Unit 3 Written Study.

The History of Transportation Posters since 1960

From the second world war onwards, people’s personal disposable income increased considerably, and out of that, economic growth of the travel industry. This was the time when speed and luxury travel, as well as the possibility of reaching long distance destinations were the ultimate goals for people with more money. As the travel industry expanded and competition increased, the companies such as airliners, cruise steam shipping, and steam railways had to make their posters and ways of organising travel more unique and appealing to entice people to use their modes of transport. In order to do this, they had to commission world class artists to create striking posters that represented the feelings of the customer in the modern world, and the necessity to use only their services.

The style of posters at the time showcased destinations, with all the glamour and scenic views that could be reached by a train or ship, with the company’s name always like an afterthought: “Visit this place! Oh, and you can go by this handy train!” For example: Vintage Railway Posters from the National Museum. Posters were mainly about the art rather than the company, with a minimal mention to the name, and more attention to the big visual pictures. This was the same for steam ship and airline advertising, with hardly any text and big bold illustrations.



 By the 1960’s, print advertising started to increase, and line drawing became less popular among businesses, as photography started to replace this outdated technique. Posters went from painstaking drawings, to photography, with more focus on being creative, by using wording to sell something and different styles and techniques of layout and content. Advertisers started to develope a campaign theme (see examples below). Therefore, the 60s is commonly known as the creative revolution of advertising.










The 60s started to use slogans, catchy one liners, alliteration etc on their posters to get people’s attention - see above for early examples.

With the arrival of the Internet in the 90s, a whole new generation of businesses started to develop websites and so traditional printed posters would be designed to direct people to a website, usually by giving the viewer half the information and displaying the web address in a find out more way. Adverts become much cleverer with the wording and type, instructing people to visit something or call a number or see someone. Recently, about one or two years ago, a new technology that could be planted somewhere small was introduced: this technology was none other than QR codes (Quick Response).

These were small squares that looked like a broken up jigsaw puzzle, and gave the correct viewer instant access. All the viewer had to do was get a QR scanner app, scan the QR code, and they would be taken to an exclusive content web page. This would endlessly tease people who didn’t know what it was, or didn’t have a scanner. QR codes popped up in posters, on drinks bottles, buses, sculptures, etc.


Digital technology also allowed for computer enhancement of imagery through programs like: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Quark, etc. In the modern day, designers often use the old line drawing techniques but with the advantage of digital enhancement.

Throughout all this research of how the years changed the way of poster advertising, my personal opinion is that the early posters are more visually interesting, but perhaps are not the best in terms of selling the service compared to modern day posters. What I like about the 1960s period of advertising, was the painstaking artwork, the flamboyant colours, and the beautiful scenes, where the companies could be seen as friends that had a train, bus, or car to help carry you or your luggage to and from exquisite destinations. Through my experimentations I found the colours really pleasurable to recreate, the faded sky blues, the imperfect bold colours and in places, the lack of detail. This compares to the modern day poster, where I just had to fill the picture with primary colours, as well as roughly sketch over a background image using an illustration computer program: modern day posters usually used about two or three colours for the whole image due to the expense of the ink used to print out the posters.

An advert has two roles. The first one is to draw attention, and the second role is to trigger a reaction to whatever it is that is being advertised, for example: “I must have an ipod” or “I really want to go to Hastings”.

A lot of travel advertising posters that I have researched use puns to do this. Puns are a small amount of text that either uses alliteration, or relates something that has been mentioned to something else in the text.
A pun is a play on words, for example the travel poster to the left uses text saying “Still a Virgin?”. This is cunningly advertising to the public that Chiltern Railways are more elite, as the pun here is "still a Virgin customer?".
Puns are used to attract the audience to the poster, and make them feel some kind of connection to whatever it is that is being advertised. So, using the strapline as an example, people would find this funny and therefore be more inclined to remember it.

There is a contrast between the posters. While the Hastings poster is very open, sunny, and appealing to families, the Virgin America advert below is quite voyeuristic. You are looking at a young woman dressed in a skimpy dress. She also appears to be flirting with a man off camera (you can just see his leg), who is presumably interested in her. Lastly, there is a couple kissing in the background. The colours of this poster are more dark and sexy.

Another advertising technique is playing around with reality where the advertiser distorts an image or merges two things that would not usually fit together so that it puts across a certain message. A great example of this would be the British Airways poster below. The audience is instantly attracted to the advert because of the cleverness of the islands representing two hands typing on a laptop, with the sandy beaches representing the generated glow from the laptop. However, there wouldn’t be a point to this without any explanation or meaning, and that’s where the strapline explains to you what you are seeing and makes you feel some sort of connection to the advert. This is a very common technique in advertising, but a very effective one. This is also a technique that advertisers in the modern age have been able to take advantage of because before computers and modern day technology came about, this wasn’t possible. Tools such as Photoshop and Indesign make this possible for advertisers today.


Another technique that I noticed was where the advertiser deliberately changed the perspective to make you look at things in a different way. For example where you have the backs of people’s heads looking away from the camera, as in the advert below. This attracts your attention because you want to see what they’re looking at, and it all makes sense when you read the strapline. The advert below is interesting because the background is of the interior of an aeroplane with people looking ahead. Also, there are graphics of paper aeroplanes, that appear to be thrown forward and represent a love heart. This links with the strapline: ‘The best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end’. The typeface gets smaller as the strapline progresses, like the journey, which indicates moving forwards.



What works at any moment in time in terms of advertising depends on lots of society factors, like people’s opinions, open mindedness, politics, power, ethics, spending, economy, hierarchy. For example, what worked for travel in the 40s and 50s, was innocent and ‘fun day out’ advertising: Go to this place, see the sun! from the 60s onwards, the advertising really started to take-off, with politics, drugs, women’s liberation, and rock and roll all affecting the modern day image of a good advert. Adverts soon started to turn to saucy, realistic, or psychedelic themes, reflecting the reality of what was going on in the world. By doing this, advertisers can fool or encourage people to buy their products or services by getting them to believe the adverts claims are genuine. However, it will always be people that decide what sells, and not the advertising industry. As quoted by Antonio Petra:  “In today’s world, people buy advertising, not the other way round”.


The Work of David Kirk and His Artistic Influences

I have chosen to look at the life and works of David Kirk. David Kirk is an artist who specialises in beachside and cityscape scenes, like the postcards he has designed for Aldeburgh, Snape, Southwold and London. The reason these pictures are appealing to me is because the scenes are quite prominent, and dreamy, the quick outlines of the people remind me of children’s storybooks, due to the childlike innocence and soft colours used. The beach scenes particularly remind us of past-times, when poster adverts were portraying holidays and day trips to the coast.

Kirk was born in Somerset, in the year 1960 and studied fine art in Oxford. In 1985, Kirk exhibited his first batch of paintings at James Gallery in Bath. To this day, Kirk continues to paint pictures of English landscapes and buildings in a style that he has made his own. Kirk’s approach to his paintings is described as “kind of rural surrealism in which he depicts mysteriously significant events unfolding in the English countryside”. If we consider the following examples, we will understand what is meant by this. My particular favourites are the following:

Passing Train


What really stands out in this picture is the curve of the train, the surrealism of the curving end, with the garden curving towards you and the horizon curving away. Also, everyone in the picture is looking at something beyond the canvas which is quite mysterious, and makes the viewer want to know what it is they are gazing at.

Sudden Gust Of Wind

What really stands out in this picture, is the vacant look on the stamp collector’s face as he watches the stamps fly like butterflies out of the window. Also, when looking in the left hand corner, there has been a convenient swap between the butterflies in the picture frame, and the stamps caught in the wind. We can tell it’s a very windy night by the dramatic curves of the curtain.


By contrast, if we look at the beach and coastal pictures, these seem to be more postcard perfect and calm. For example, this postcard of Woodbridge captures the innocence and ambience of childhood holidays, perhaps a place David Kirk would have visited when he was young. The postcard below is very nearly an exact copy of the real life scene of the Woodbridge tide mill. This is one piece of artwork from David Kirk that I really like. This is due to the vacant appeal of the image, with the still waters, and the moored boats. I also like the picture as this place is very local to me, and I really think the way Kirk has portrayed the location has done it justice.
Tube Train
Another really pleasant example of where the painting is of a real-life location, would be Dunwich, Suffolk (above). This village is based very close to the coast, and is beautifully portrayed by Kirk in the painting below. As you can see, the postcard is very similar to the photograph of the actual location, but the objects in the painting are portrayed as really bright, clean and appealing, whereas the photograph shows Dunwich as dull and dingy.

Not only did David Kirk have a fascination with countryside and coastal scenes, a lot of his work is based on cityscapes, and the detail of the daily lives of people in the city, like the picture to the left. The strong posture of the man emphasises movement and speed on the train, as it appears to be coming out of a tunnel, to call at “Charing Cross”. This contrasts with the tranquility of the previous coastal pictures.


Another style of city paintings, is this London postcard. Here, Kirk has used a simple technique of placing St Paul’s Cathedral in the foreground, with nothing but circles, squares, and rectangles in the background, to create depth, and the impression of millions of office blocks. Also, with Kirk’s choice of colour, there is a 3D element to the painting.


David Kirk drew inspiration for his own style of painting from two artists: Stanley Spencer, and Paul Nash.

Stanley Spencer was a 20th century English artist. Spencer focused on painting portraits and landscapes from the village of Cookham which was his home. I believe it was from the landscape paintings that David Kirk took his inspiration as much of Spencer’s work was also innocent, although it came with an imaginative darker side.

Paul Nash was a British painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. Nash thought that “art, beauty and modern life could be reconciled”, however his own work reflected the sadness of his experiences in the first world war.

It is easy to see where David Kirk’s own style came from, through research of both of these artists. It seems he took the ideas of landscape from Spencer, and the surrealistic book illustrations of Nash and turned these elements into his new warped, fantastical and brilliant artworks.

To conclude my study of the abstract, I have made a number of observations about the artists that specialised in the particular style I am interested in. All of the artists I have studied (Harry Beck, David Kirk, Frank Pick) employ a very simple technique in their pieces. The artworks use very clean lines, with bright colours, and not too much detail. Common themes include a childlike simplicity of form and content and iconic city of London imagery, for example, the underground map/logo. In some cases, Frank Pick’s advert for "Thanks to the Underground” is very much like David Kirk’s dreamlike and surreal style.
Because of this same simplicity the artwork is very easy to reproduce and develop for publicity purposes eg reproduction posters, merchandise and so on.

All of  the artists have a very unique way of drawing the eye to the heart of their pieces. If we look at the style of the posters for the underground that Harry Beck and Frank Pick designed, they are very clever because the usual logo is emphasised, but a lot of the posters are very strongly bound to a circular design. (In fact the original underground logo developed out of the need to give standout to station names. This was done by placing the name in a circle to emphasise it from the surrounding advertising.)

The bold, often primary colours that all the artists use are very eye catching, and effective. This links back to the illustrative style of the 1940’s-1950’s posters. This is a style that has never really gone out of fashion. By simply using photoshop, this effect could be recreated in modern times, but compliments the style of the previous artists, rather than replacing them with modern technology.

In terms of the future of the form, Harry Beck and Frank Pick have obviously stood the test of time in that they produced iconic maps and logos strongly associated with London. David  Kirk has also tapped into our affection for the cityscapes and English countryside. People always seem to really like the idea of something old and English, so this method is probably going to survive for quite a long time. David Kirk’s dreamlike style also has this nostalgic quality which I personally find inspiring, and it will probably be just as appealing to people in the future as it was throughout the 20th century.

The parts of David Kirk’s work that inspired me and I would be happy to use in my final piece, are the simple drawings, the iconic structures, and the sometimes warped angles. I also prefer the bright colours, because they are simple to achieve, and emphasise the piece.










Bibliography

http://www.ltmcollection.org/roundel/about/detailedhistory.html?IXpage=3&_IXSESSION_=tDHQ1cszQsl

http://vintageposterblog.com/2012/11/13/mounting-prices/#.UO6tgo590f0

http://www.nrm.org.uk/OurCollection/Posters/CollectionItem.aspx?objid=1989-8961&pageNo=374
http://www.britishairways.com/travel/posters-1960-1969/public/en_gb

http://todaybostontomorrowtheworld.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/is-it-a-bird-is-it-a-plane-eh-is-it-a-night-club/

http://www.festrail.co.uk/content/publish/news/Arriva_Club_55.shtml

(Essay)  Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images In Advertising (Paul Messaris)
“Visual Persuasion is an exploration of the uniquely visual aspects of advertising. Because of the implicit nature of visual argumentation and the relative lack of social accountability which images enjoy in comparison with words, pictures can be used to make advertising claims that would be unacceptable if spelled out verbally. From this starting point, Paul Messaris analyzes a variety of commercial, political and social issue advertisements”.

(Article)  Customers drive the changing face of advertising: (Antonio Petra) www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/12/83633.html
By: Antonio Petra
17 Oct 2012 13:123 comments3 BizLikes
“Advertising is changing fundamentally. It is being significantly challenged by internal and external forces such as an ongoing global economic crisis and increased measurability which are hammering it into a new shape, and possibly a new industry. What it will become is still to be determined. The learning is however clear. In today's world, people buy advertising, not the other way round”.

www.britishairways.com/travel/posters-1960-1969/public/en_gb

www.goldmarkart.com/scholarship/artists-2/david-kirk/

www.rennart.co.uk/nash

www.stanleyspencer.org.uk/http://davidkirk.moonfruit.com/



Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images In Advertising (Paul Messaris)
Customers drive the changing face of advertising: www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/12/83633 (Antonio Petra)
www.britishairways.com/travel/posters-1960-1969/public/en_gb

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