I really, really don’t want to spoil the surprise here. I’ll just say I was laughing myself silly, and this is someone who is delightfully familiar with the flat rat phenomenon. Go see!
One of my most favourite authors, Jim C. Hines, came out of model retirement for a good cause:
Click for full size!
And, from The Creators Project, Vintage Posters can now be yours, for free!
If the posters of today still had the look of those of yesteryear, would they still get tagged and trolled as often? Much work today, it seems, lacks the graphic audacity of yore, opting instead for forms and formats we’ve become accustomed to. That’s why, when you find vintage posters in flea markets, you find prices that might suggest they were just printed.
Many of these posters are available online, but it’s often difficult to find high enough quality to print them beyond standard A4 printer paper sizing. Finally, our savior: FreeVintagePosters.Com. The name explains the concept rather well. From Soviet propaganda posters and advertisements for airlines of the 60s, it’s up to you—there are several categories ranging from “Sport” to “Film” to “Nature” and everywhere in between. At Creators in France, we’ve been redecorating. Check out a few of our favorites below:
Head on over to see their picks, or go straight to FreeVintagePosters.com.
I love old posters. Maybe it’s just nostalgia of a kind, but they seem to have a lot more optimism in them -- this despite the Cold War and this and that other war and imminent nuclear winter and a host of other issues. But the poster are snapshots of this dream of a future, a future that never came. And now we’re living in the future, and things just seem a lot less optimistic, including a lot of the view forward. Which fits the facts, sadly.
Anyway, Jim C. Hines ♥!
rq:
Yes, I agree. Old poster art, much of it, were the heralds of new art forms, type revolutions, and so much more. They weren’t so much advertising the product as they were advertising the particular art form, which is why they were, and are, so amazing. That isn’t done as much now. Some of it of course, yes, it’s great art, but like so much these days, the bulk of it has been terribly downgraded.
The flat animals are hilarious -- great laugh to start the day!
The pet puddles are adorable.
Even the one tt looks like Trump’s hair.
… Though I wonder if there isn’t something similar occurring that happens with music: like, ‘music in the 70s was so much better!’ because we only listen to the music from the 70s that ‘survived’, so to speak. I wonder if the same can’t be said of poster art? Maybe 30, 50 years down the road, people will be looking back on today’s avant-garde and innovative poster art as something far more superior to what will be happening then…?
But I don’t know, I can’t agree with that idea 100%, because the old posters really are from when a lot of things were new -- commonplace technologies like cars and phones and TVs were new, ideas about space and exploration and the (cap)ability to do so were new, as were the technologies used in art, and I think the posters do reflect a lot of that exhilaration of saying ‘This is new, and this is awesome, and it will be even better in the future!’
Too bad all highs come down eventually. (I do think posters also had a high point during post-impressionism with Toulouse-Lautrec and his ilk doing wonderful, wonderful work! Still the space imagery of the mid-20th century can’t be beat, in my opinion.)
For more vintage posters (or vintage-style) and space, see Justonescarf:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/226901728/retro-planetary-travel-poster-collection?ref=shop_home_active_6
They are available individually or all on one single poster as well.
(I saw these initially on the Weekly Space Hangout video cast, behind Fraser Cain (publisher of Universe Today).)
rq @ 5, no I don’t think it’s a matter of getting stuck on “old stuff was better”, it is what you said about optimism. Even as recently as the 1970s, there was bright optimism about the future everywhere. We talked about the space stations, which would be built, and fully inhabited by the time 2000 came around, and so on.
The advertising art reflected optimism and hope in the brave new world. That’s pretty much gone these days.
And the pet puddles made me laugh -- I like ’em.
The cat half in, half out of its bed is pretty much me every weekday morning. :-)
Those ‘animal puddles’… at least some of them had to have been photoshopped, right? You just don’t see real, physical entities doing the Dali thing like that one duck, for instance. Weird…
Cubist, no, they aren’t shopped. You wouldn’t believe a flat rat unless you saw one, trust me. You’d swear up and down it was ‘shopped, or dead, or something.
And yes, if you spend time around animals, you do indeed see such things.
Ye (nonexistent) gods!
“Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it damn well pleases.”—the Harvard Law of Biology
The melting ducks are especially Dali-esque. The bird that has a finch-like beak and chickadee-like plumage is also wonderful, from perky to slouching.