Poster Collection 08: Black & White

Color is rarely the sole focus of a poster, especially since color photography is a given component of most advertising. Thus it is often assumed that the graphic design world will always be brightly colored. But as this latest volume on the Poster Collection of the Zurich Museum fr Gestaltung sets out to prove, there are advantages to working in black and white. In a compilation of international posters created over the last 40 years, Poster Collection 09 brings to light a surprising variety of approaches where the color of the paper and the black of the ink are the only materials at hand. Those materials alone provide the creative will with the tools it needs to create a succinct statement. Examples come via designers like A.G. Fronzoni, Werner Jeker, James Victore and Bro Destruct, and range from the political manifesto to the poetic abstraction, from modernist cool to postmodern eclectic.