Photo from Flickr user Beholder

Okay, time to be a little nostalgic here, and maybe even a little geeky. Let’s remember how this field called Graphic Design got started—with print. Nowadays, it’s a whole lot of websites, apps, interfaces and anything digital, but one of the most quintessential examples of Graphic Design is the poster. I’m sure many of the current designers in the world had a strong base of print design in their education, as did I, but at times we forget the humble yet mighty poster. I’ve been to two events revolved around posters in Chicago in the past few weeks that got me thinking of the poster’s current role in society.

Ever wonder what it would be to be surrounded by posters? If you went to the Second Chicago International Poster Biennial this past month, you would know. This year’s biennial was more of a conventional gallery setting inside of a design school. These posters were gorgeous, strong, and captivating. Each of the four floors, roughly organized by country of origin, were filled with a diverse array of posters that had that je-ne-sais-quoi quality of print that designers just can’t get over. Two years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to frontman Lance Rutter talk about the biennial right before the opening of the first biennial. He spoke about how this type of event is held all over the world, but the U.S. has a serious deficit, not surprisingly. His love of print was clear, and with it he wanted to expose Chicago to a world of ink and paper. The first biennial was about bringing back posters to their original purpose, a temporary public art piece of sorts, so the posters were displayed outside. Back then, the gallery was any public surface, and curation was left to the designer to put up but the general public to take down.  I’m not sure which format is better; both are an homage to posters but in different ways.

The more recent event was a lecture given by Sonnenzimmer at the MCA at the beginning of their week-long residency in the MCA itself. I’ve been friends with Nick an Nadine for a few years, and believe me, they live and breathe this stuff. They had an interesting discussion about how the poster used to be the object that came out before an event to publicize it, and people would steal it for a multitude of reasons. Now, it is the after-product; we buy posters after the event to collect that memory in a physical form. Now, it is a souvenir to display in our homes. Of course there are posters that aren’t connected to an event, like advocacy posters and social issue posters, but even they are often bought and displayed in homes instead of being in the public.

Even the fact that posters and printmakers are featured in the MCA is proof that posters doesn’t act the same way as they did before. As Graphic Design’s print sector evolves, it seems that posters have become more of private art pieces and collectables. We can see what is happening now, but what does the future hold for the poster? Will it become even more of a rarity (and more of an art piece), more of a commonplace, or something else completely? A visitor of the Sonnenzimmer lecture had an interesting idea of using 3D printers for posters, so who knows what will come next. Whatever it is, I hope the passion won’t go away, some people keep it old school, and it’s still light-hearted. Excitement for the future, commence!