Posts Tagged ‘Poster’

Le Thermogène by Leonetto Cappiello

The Vintage Poster Bank opened a shop just up the street from my house a few years ago. They have this great corner-angle building (sort of like a mini Flat-Iron Building) on Delta that has long, open window spaces where they display all these awesome old advertising posters. It’s a great place to find inspiration and take a glimpse into the history of design. I became enchanted with the Affichistes, AKA French poster artists, after teaching Graphic Design History for several quarters. One of my lectures focused on A.M. Cassandre with a short introduction about Leonetto Cappiello.

Imagine my surprise when I see an original print of Le Thermogène, Cappiello’s most famous piece, hanging in the window! Thermogène was medical wadding that became heated when the chemicals it was treated with mixed (or perhaps after it was exposed to air, I’m not 100% sure how it worked). It was mainly used to soothe aches, sore muscles, stiff joints, etc. I believe the text translates to “It keeps you warm.” Bold color and vibrant caricatures placed on a black background were trademarks of Cappiello’s style; techniques which he employed to create a lively mood in his work. Cappiello also experimented with legibility, using large block letters to define and separate space. All of these techniques can be seen executed perfectly in Le Thermogène.

Unfortunately, Thermogene is now the name of some miracle diet pill.

A rasterbated poster of the Kool-Aid man busting through bricks hung up on the wall next to my office door.

Every quarter we hang up student artwork on the walls of our floor. The wall next to my office door is pretty pockmarked from all the push pins used to hold up said work; it’s pretty ugly looking. Ricky thought we should cover the wall with posters, which I agreed was a great idea. We both came up with the idea of a nice big rasterbation. We both wanted something universally recognizable with a bit of pop-kitch. After a bit of brainstorming and image searching, I put together an image of the Kool-Aid man busting through a brick wall with his trademark yell of “OH, YEAAHH!”

What’s a rasterbation? Rasterbation is a process that takes an image and allows you to scale it to any size via a halftone reproduction and then tile the result across several sheets of paper. The name comes from “The Rasterbator” a popular free online program that will create an easy-to-print PDF out of any image you upload to it. Assembling the rasterbation is easy; simply cut out and arrange the tiles in the proper order.

The wall poster is pretty neat because it’s both a cool art piece and an educational tool. I’m teaching the Electronic Print Production class this quarter, which goes into detail about the ins & outs of how printing presses work. The poster is a great example of how a halftone produces an image, as well as a useful example of imposition and pagination.