Abstract

This project will focus on a German designer, Lucian Bernhard and his poster style, Plakatstil. 

Lucian Bernhard, as a pioneer of modern design, advocates simpleness and clearness for his poster style. Based on his style, first of all, I will focus on the life of Lucian Bernhard, introduction of the Plakatstil. Because the characteristics of Plakatstil is minimize the images and text, it is similar to the Minimalism. Therefore, I intend to find the similarity and difference between Plakatstil and Minimalism. Furthermore, I believe that the there must be some reasons for creation of new things. Consequently, I plan to do some relative researches on history and philosophy during the development of this poster style. Finally, based on the poster analysis and design reports, I will follow the example of Bernhard’s “Klein-Adler” (1914) and imitate his poster style to create my own poster for apple.co. The final product will contain one booklet, one Apple poster, and one poster of the content. 

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Introduction

Lucian Bernhard was a German graphic designer and artist during the first half of twentieth century. Mostly self-studied, Bernhard studied briefly at the Munich Art Academy before going to Berlin in 1901. He was influential in helping the design style known as Plakastil. His father was a physician and wanted him to follow a career in medicine. But he was attracted by drawing and became fascinated with letters. Unwilling to obey his father’s wishes, he ran away from home and never went back. In 1920, Bernhard was appointed as the first professor of poster design at the Berlin Royal Academy. He was also co-founder of the magazine Das Plakat. In 1923, he emigrated to New York, where he joined with Rockwell Kent to establish the New York design company Contempora. He continued designing posters and teaching at the Art Students League and New York University. He lived until his death on 1972. Since he started to invented many of his early biographical accounts deliberately, it is hard to know his real experiences after he ran away from home. 

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Plakatstil

By the start of the twentieth century, young artists began to go far beyond complex forms of Victorian, Art Nouveau, and Arts & Crafts design. The world of medieval poetry and complicated patterns had no place in this new future universe for these young artists. When Lucian Bernhard was fifteen years old, he came to a Munich exhibition of work that was a departure from the Victorian era's gloomy tones and clutter. He was "walking drunk with color through the exhibition," as he phrased it. He made the great leap into discovering that design could be minimal and obvious when he designed the original Priester poster. This style is the precursor of today's modern graphic design, which promotes an idea through symbols and shapes rather than exact portrayal. Plakatstil ("poster style" in German) or Sachplakat ("object-poster" in German) are two terms used to describe this kind of work. The use of inferred shape in conjunction with negative space is a fantastic approach to engage the spectator. This is an effective strategy: the more a viewer attempts to comprehend the visual, the more likely he or she is to remember it. The font was hand-drawn as part of the illustration, and it was also pared down to its most basic statement. The German poster movement is characterized by vibrant colors, abstract and flat patterns, and a rejection of everything beautiful. Without realizing it, these artists were also the first to work with modern corporate identity. Modern identity design, minimal posters, and the underlying principle of less is more are all influenced by the German poster.

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The Object Poster

With the development of chromolithography during the late nineteenth century, a significant change in advertising form and content revolutionized the art of graphic design. The ability to reproduce color images has not only been convincing, but has also created something new and popular art. The poster was like a big canvas, full of imaginative characters, funny metaphors, cool colors, and artful letters. However, artists were not satisfied with one method, and their visual approach evolved into many complex graphic styles. As a result of this complexity, a more simple simple style arose, which was easy to read by passers-by on crowded boulevards. The Object Poster is based on the New Objectivity, which originated in Germany after the First World War as a reaction to Expressionism and promoted a return to realism and everyday life. This style’s proponents aimed to depict truth without the use of artifice or sentiment. Bernhard was influenced by the minimalism created by Peter Behrens and began to focus on simplification. His compositions were as simple, realistic and objective as possible, ensuring that the message he presented had an immediate impact. The desire for this poster style persisted in Switzerland, where the passion for precision in printing and drawing technique was unrivaled. After that, the iconic beauty of ordinary objects became the mission of a group of artists in Basel, who established the Plakatstil as the dominant Swiss style in the 1940s and early 1950s. Furthermore, the advertiser believed that the complex elements did not emphasize the product but compete with it. Laced with humor and stunning visual impact, these posters represent the last great period of the lithographic poster, which high cost and long production cycles was soon to eliminate.

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Minimalism

Across the realm of artists and designers, the most important aspect is that they want the audience to have the immediate and absolute visual reflection on their works. Although minimalism arts look simple, they do not make the audience feel crude but focus on the object, which illustrates that the practicability of minimalism is better than other design styles. It is easy for the audience to know what the designers did on their works. There are three basic characteristic features of object posters: a single, oversized, simplified and yet realistic subject; a brief slogan, often amounting to no more than a brand name; the intention to create a symbolic image that will be associated with the brand in question. 

 

Compared minimalism with Bernhard’s works, his poster style can be classified as minimalism. First of all, the products are realistic in his poster. Secondly, there is nothing about the description of products or companies, only the brief and oversized slogans shown in his posters. Thirdly, there are no more five colors in his posters. However, the difference between minimalism and his works is that some minimalism arts are much too abstract, which means that the audience needs to guess the deeper implications that the author wants to express. By contrast, there is no emotions or other complicated elements in his poster. Because of this, his poster style are more direct, and the objects in his poster can be jumped out at the audience. 

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Philosophy

For centuries, posters have played a major role in delivering information to the public. However, during the First World War in Germany, the poster design began to be perceived not just as an economic enterprise, but as an important national undertaking. Those posters activated these feelings of national interest through its politicized imagery. The depictions heroes in early war propaganda operated as primary symbolic figures, inciting feelings of group cohesion with a shared impetus toward a higher moral purpose. Besides an attempt to validate their war engagement, these posters were used to promote enlistment, encourage conservation of food and resources among the people, raise funds for the military and boost the overall morale. Few designers knew that their posters would affect the result of the war. The poster design of the Central Powers was primarily inspired by Lucian Bernhard and simplicity of the Plakatstil style. For example of Lucian Bernhard’s 1917 poster “Das ist der Weg zum Frieden—die Feinde wollen es so! Darum zeichne Kriegsanleihe” (That is a way to peace—The enemies want it so! Subscribe to war loans”), this poster reads fist as the focal point of the image. he showed the aesthetic achievement. Like his commercial advertisements, this poster makes a strong impression with an emphasis on simplified lines and limited color usage. A lot of people thought that Bernhard’s Plakatstil style made the main influence for the beginning of propaganda poster design in the First World War. Therefore, Many artists produced some similar propaganda posters for the First World War in this style, often incorporating the same gothic typeface and neutral colored background. This poster illustrated how the medieval hero was often blended with imagery of the contemporary soldier and invited civilians to participate in political action either directly or indirectly.