INTRODUCTION

The poster has been around for hundreds of years, serving first and foremost as a
means of communication. The simplest definition of a poster is any form of
paper with a printed design or text that is created to be hung on a vertical
surface. The poster’s genesis was purely a textual form, most often used for
displaying government decrees. One of the earliest, more developed forms of
poster was a means of advertisement, such as for one of Shakespeare’s plays.
Eventually, posters came to be used as a way to spread propaganda, especially
during wartime. Another common use of posters is as a cheap and efficient way
to mass-produce popular artworks for the general public’s consumption.

As the printing process became more modernized and streamlined, posters began
to include images in addition to text. With the invention of color printing, the
poster slowly evolved until its focus was primarily the visual image rather than
the text, because an image could relay the desired message more quickly. The
purpose of the poster image was to catch the eye of the passerby so that he or she
would look more closely at the text for more detailed information.

The tremendous success of the poster can be attributed to one man, Alois
Senefelder, and his groundbreaking invention, lithography. Alois Senefelder
(1771 to 1834) was a German playwright and actor. He soon discovered that he
preferred writing plays more than performing them. But when he began to fall
into debt to his local printer, he began to experiment with new, non-commercial
forms of printing.

Senefelder found that he could apply chemicals to a block of fine-grained stone,
such as limestone (Germany is renowned for its Solnhofen limestone, which is
especially fine-grained and thus ideal for retaining fine details), and the
chemicals would literally “etch” the image or text he had created onto the stone.