Some lovely old posters promoting travel from back in the 1930s and 40s, most produced under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project as part of the U.S. Travel Bureau’s “See America” campaign, alongside a couple of commercially printed railway and airline posters from the same golden stretch of American travel graphics. We love the design of this era, the crisp typography, and the purity of the compositions — this was the heyday of the National Park Service, and there is something genuinely enviable about how confidently these posters distill an entire landscape, or an entire state, into a handful of flat shapes and a few words.
The two posters above are pure Federal Art Project output — hand-pulled silkscreen prints, designed anonymously by government-employed artists and distributed to train stations, ranger booths and post offices rather than sold. The style is unmistakable once you know to look for it: flattened color, hard-edged geometry, and confident, chunky lettering pulled straight out of Art Deco’s playbook, applied to distinctly American subjects — a leaping skater, a drinking deer, a mountain reduced to three or four interlocking shapes. Only about a dozen or so original National Park designs are known to have been made this way, and for decades most of them simply vanished into storage rooms and were assumed lost. The reason we can still see them today largely traces back to one seasonal park ranger who, in the 1970s, found a stack of faded originals in a maintenance building and spent years afterward tracking down what survived elsewhere — turning a nearly forgotten government print run into one of the most recognizable design aesthetics in American travel history.
The same idea, still being made
Way Out West Souvenir Patch
Three words that pulled people across this country for two hundred years, stitched in sunset stripes. Aaron Draplin works in a direct line from these posters.
$8.50
Great Outdoors Souvenir Patch
Layered trees, a low sun, a horizon worth walking toward. About as close as anything still being made gets to a Federal Art Project park poster at pocket size.
$8.50
Not everything here came out of a government print shop, though, and that contrast is part of what makes the set worth lingering over. The railway poster above trades the WPA’s flat geometry for full illustrated color and depth — a pair of travelers pausing under old-growth trees to take in a river valley, sold as a mood rather than a shape. It sits closer to the private-sector graphic design tradition that also produced the great European rail and ocean-liner posters of the period, aimed at persuading rather than informing. Both approaches were doing the same job — convincing an increasingly mobile, car- and train-owning American public that the country itself was worth the trip — they just made very different bets about how a piece of paper should sell a landscape.
By the time the United Air Lines poster above was printed, the whole genre had shifted again — from a New Deal jobs program encouraging Americans to see their own parks, to commercial airlines using the same confident, oversized lettering to sell a specific city as a destination worth flying to. Following that thread from silkscreened deer to painted Manhattan skylines is a small crash course in how American graphic design grew up in about twenty years. It is exactly the kind of thing we keep coming back to in our travel coverage: not just where these posters point, but how much confidence, economy and craft went into convincing you to go.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
1 Comment
Pingback: Beautifully Bright Illustrations by Geraldine Sy | Moss and Fog