Basel And The Cultural Poster

Basel looks back on a long and impressive tradition of poster design. In the context of the Basel School of Design artists like Emil Ruder and Armin Hoffmann developed what later got known and appreciated as the Swiss Style. Yesterday on April 24th an exhibition on the contemporary poster in the context of urban culture in Basel was opened to take a look what has accrued from this fertile base. The show is hosted by the Basler Plakatsammlung which is a department of the Basel School of Design since 1996. The association Plakatfreunde Basel supports the event as they are jointly responsible for the poster collection. Until May 17th several cultural posters done by local designers and agencies between 2001 and 2009 are presented.

I had been attending the opening to make my iPhone's camera seriously discharge its duties for the first time to capture some impressions. So let's have a look at the current output of Basel's poster designers.

The posters above were designed by the guys of the young studio Hauser, Schwarz for thr Kaserne, a venue for cultural events in Basel.

Another studio of young designers is Claudiabasel. They work in the field of graphic and interaction design. The shown posters were done for the S AM, the Swiss Architecture Museum they developed the entire corporate design for.

A very interesting example is the poster series shown above that was created by Marco Papiro to promote events like live concerts. The designs are printed by a fax machine. By doing so Papiro playfully comprises the imprecise and error-prone piece of stone-age transfer technology as a part of the design process. The results are posters in suprinsing and varying dimensions and a very individual graphical language.

The appropriation of unusual materials as print substrate are an interesting aspect of contemporary poster design – especially in cultural context. Another nice example of a similar approach that was done by Markus Staehli can be seen below.

The appearance of the posters vary significantly depending on the client they were done for. In the exhibition the subcultural posters that are characterized by their materiality and very own way of dealing with typography and images are clearly contrasted with the posters that promote established and generally respected institutions of the cities cultural landscape.

Produced via four-color offset printing process and created by renowned studios these posters particularly focus on the use of images which unfold their effect through an often irritating change of context caused by the added text information. The nice promotion (above) for a show of the work of Michaël Borremans was done by Neeser & Müller. The posters below for the concerts of the Basel Sinfonietta are a work of the advertising agency WOMM.

A kind of «local hero» is the designer Ludovic Balland who last year also did the visual identity of the 5th Berlin Biennal. His very own approach to typography and also the habit to develope own fonts for particular applications made him a bit of an icon of urban and subcultural graphic design in Basel, Switzerland and beyond. Unsurprisingly a lot of his works are shown within this exhibition. The images below may give you an idea of his work.

So if you are a poster enthusiast and you incidentally are around before May 17th I definitly advise you to stop by! It's a very inspiring show – for a change – on contemporary Swiss poster design.