Poster House

10 stories

Poster HouseNocturnal: The Renewal of the Cuban Movie Poster What do five good Cuban graphic designers, friends who want to have fun and discuss new group projects, do next?

11.05

Poster HousePost No Buffalo Bills For millions of people at the turn of the 20th century, these posters were the draw that brought them to see mythic reenactments of the American West.

10.22

Poster HouseThe Sicilian Defense A project I’m working on—not related to Poster House—has got me thinking a lot about how hard it is to sell paradise.

10.08

Poster HouseHow Saul Bass Brought a Shine to a Kubrick Classic Despite its chilly reception at first, in the nearly 50 years since its release, The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, has become one of the most celebrated, discussed, and analyzed films…

09.24

Poster HouseBen Shahn: The Time Is Ripe It’s a torrid moment in American history, one characterized by precisely the kind of moral torpor to which Ben Shahn’s art and what he called his “righteous indignation” were most closely attuned.

09.10

Poster HouseStory Pitches & Advertising Pitches: Selling Newspapers Early in the fifth season of the television show The Wire , the city editor of The Baltimore Sun strides through the newsroom, setting junior editors and cub reporters to trembling as he passes them.

08.27

Poster HouseAfter Act Black: Film Posters for a New Generation Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is a groundbreaking exhibition for Poster House: it features the largest combined display of posters and ephemera in the museum’s history and…

08.13

Poster HouseA Career Deferred: Fredi Washington and Hollywood’s Color Line If art is supposed to imitate life, what better art to examine than images from the classic 1934 film Imitation of Life ?

07.28

Poster HouseMade in Cuba The power of these posters lies in the designer’s ability to communicate radical political ideas through visual means, specifically composition, typography, and color.

07.16

Poster HouseAct Black: An Interview with Curator Es-pranza Humphrey Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen is a smash hit and also Associate Curator of Collections Es-pranza Humphrey’s first exhibition in our biggest gallery.

07.02

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. More than eighty sources come in through the day, twenty of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo