Some of the world’s top poster designers were born in the year 1914: Tom Eckersley, Abram Games, FHK Henrion, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Paul Rand. From 1940s on they brought to the poster design world modernist ideas and typeface sensibilities.

This year Alan Kitching and Monotype united to create a new project: Alan Kitching and Monotype: Celebrating the centenary of five pioneers of the poster, a series of posters fusing each designer’s style with Kitching’s. The exhibition is being held at the London College of Communication for the London Design Festival.

Over the last 50 years Kitching has built a reputation as one of the world’s most acclaimed letterpress designers. Like the designers he’s commemorating, he’s inspired by the beauty of type. In his workshop he still uses traditional techniques to create typefaces in a printing press. He looks back at the 40s and says “It was a sort of the Golden Age of the poster”.

In the 20th-century when the designers were first breaking ground in graphic design, posters were society’s primary form of communication. “There’s nothing between the message and the image. At a glance, you’ve got it. You didn’t need a lot of words. The image is the message,” Kitching says.

The public generally responded positively to these messages, but some posters were derided for being too strange, too modern, and too ugly. Some of these images are considered to have been ahead of their time.

Today, posters of those decades are sold for exorbitant prices at auction. Technology has changed how designers work but these images will be always considered as a design legacy. Because, as Kitching says. “That was a great time to be doing posters”.

via CNN