GPO poster Archives - Page 13 of 14

Find me an artist. From 1953 please

Mr Huveneers, I presume

designers

Unless you have studied GPO posters with a rather unnatural intensity, you probably wouldn’t know the name of Peter (or possibly Pieter) Huveneers. But it’s worth making his acquaintance. He designed a whole series of delightful posters for the Post Office throughout most of the 1950s.

The BPMA have about 20 of his designs catalogued, including this gem.

And he also worked for British Railways into the early 60s.

Until 1963, when the last piece of design I can track down is a British Railways poster in the National Railway Museum collection. And then he disappears.

Fast forward to 1968, when another designer called Pieter Huveneers sets up a design company in Australia. Now, if you’re Australian and of a certain age, Pieter Huveneers is a big name. He’s the down-under equivalent of Wim Crowel or Hans Schleger, a designer who shaped the fabric of everyday life.

Huveneers’ work is still written all over Australia. He designed the logos and identities for two of Australia’s national institutions, Australia Post and Telecom Australia when they were created in 1975.

an australian stamp

(The Australia Post logo, with its neatly incorporated post-horn is still in use, although slightly rejigged in recent years. Telecom Australia rebranded itself as Telstra in 1995).

He not only designed the logo but also created the name of the bank which emerged from Australia’s biggest ever bank merger in 1981, when the Commercial Bank of Australia and the Bank of New South Wales became something much more modern and international.

And completely rebranded one of Australia’s iconic breweries, Tooth – this is his logo design from 1981.

And that’s just what I’ve been able to find out about from the other side of the world, I’m sure there’s more as well.

The thing is, I have no way of proving that this is the same person. The dates add up, and the Australian Pieter Huveneers was born in c1926, which gives him plenty of time to be designing GPO posters before emigrating to Australia, and the chances of there being two of them in the design world at the same time have to be pretty slim anyway. But is it or not? I can’t say for sure.

But I seem to have reached the limits of what I can find out without being either a) Australian or b) within easy reach of the British Library. So if there are any Australian design historians out there who are able to tell me a bit more about him and his design studio, I’d really love to hear from them. As far as I can tell, he’s still alive too, so perhaps he might be able to answer the question of whether or not he designed those posters himself. Hope so.

Four posters in search of a story

posters

I’ve always been interested in the afterlife of objects – how things survive long enough to become collectibles or heirlooms or even national treasures. It’s generally a story of chance and – quite often – being so lost and overlooked that no one bothers to throw you away. It’s also a story that isn’t often told as part of design history; once an object has been created and made, that’s normally the end of it. But often what happens next is at least as interesting, and can also be very revealing about how we appreciate, or disregard, the objects around us.

So, following on from yesterday’s post about just how little survives, here are a few of our posters with the tales of how they made it through to the twenty-first century.

Tom Eckersley, Post Early for GPO, 1955, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Saved by a man who went into his local post office and asked them to keep for him all of the posters and publicity material that they had finished with. (I will write more about this one of these days as it’s worth a whole post in its own right.)

F H K Henrion, Changing of the Guard for London Transport, 1956, Double Royal 40″ x 25″
Kept by a tutor in graphic design who used it in his teaching.

Mount/Evans, Anti-Smoking poster for COI, 1965-ish, Double Crown 30″ x 20″
Bought at auction but I believe it came from the designers’ own archive.

ARP Poster, Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1938, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Found in the roof of a scout hut. The air rifle pellet holes had to be restored…

Patrick Bogue from Onslows also mentioned in passing that he once found original railway poster artwork being used as insulation in a loft space. Can anyone better that?

Dekk hands

designers

This great little GPO poster (a Crown Folio, naturally) was recently on eBay

as a Buy It Now (for £20, it didn’t last long).

From 1949, it’s by Dorrit Dekk, who, despite designing some iconic COI posters like this one

and some very smart later stuff too, such as this P&O menu design

isn’t as well known as she rightly ought to be.

But more than just posting some lovely images of her work (there are plenty more of her later designs on a nice Flickr set here), I also wanted to point you at an interesting, if slightly strange set of interviews with her.

They come from Your Archives, which is an attempt by the National Archives to create some Wiki-style content. The Dekk interview is part of a World War Two artists section, although it’s about the only bit of original content that I’ve managed to find in there. Most of the articles are just standard bios with link to relevant artworks in the archives. Which would be alright if the National Archives had any thumbnail images in there, but they don’t.

There’s a perfectly servicable biography of Dorrit Dekk included, so I won’t repeat what they can perfectly well tell you themselves, but her career included an apprenticeship in the COI under Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans, as well as designing for the Festival of Britain.

Amongst other things, she explains how Reginald Mount gave her the pen-name Dekk:

Now one day, when the printer came back to collect the art work for the first poster I did and I was still finishing it off. He said “Well, you haven’t signed it” and so I said “I hadn’t thought about signing it.” And then I had a problem. I said “My married name was Klatzow” – which was a Russian name – and in those days a foreign name would have been difficult and unpronounceable. K-L-A-T-Z-O-W: that would be fashionable now! I didn’t like my maiden name, Fuhrmann. So then, Reggie said “So what are your initials?” and I said “DKK” and so he said “There you are: DKK. We put in the E” and Dekk was a good thing because was easy to understand on the telephone. It was not like having to spell Klatzow or Fuhrmann and, written down, it was good for signing. And it looked foreign which was an advantage – I didn’t pretend to be English – but at least it sounded possible.

And how designing for the Festival of Britain was the fast-track to a career after the war,

…the fantastic thing about the Festival was that you met all the great designers because you always had meetings together: Misha Black and Jimmy Holland – of course I knew him by then – Henrion, Abram Games, everybody! Abram I must have met at one of those meetings. And without the Festival I wouldn’t have been successful – it was like a badge of honour. If you had been a designer for the Festival you had arrived. And I was quite young after all and I had no experience – just those two years at the COI. I mean I was green. And then after the festival, all the jobs came in. It was so easy to get commissions after that because I had met everybody and, if I approached people with my portfolio asking “Can I design anything for you?” I got new commissions.

But large swathes of the interview are dull, if not frankly borderline surreal. Instead of asking her more about what working in the C.O.I was like, or about her later work, the questions are about gouache, Tippex and paper quality instead.

A bit of digging around reveals that the purpose of the whole project (and hence the interview) is for conservators at the National Archives to

identify the paint and drawing materials (media) used by artists for propaganda artwork and illustrations during the Second World War.

Which I am sure is terribly useful for them, but a gigantic missed opportunity for the rest of us. Although I suppose that the lesson is that I shouldn’t rely on the journalistic nous of archivists and conservators if I want to find out about designers and their work.

Dorrit Dekk is still alive and working, incidentally. And if you want to buy one of her recent collages, they are available on eBay right now.

Vintage design for modern times

A lesson in poster sizes – from Tom Eckersley

useful

I got told off the other day for being poncey, because I described the Post office ‘Properly Packed Parcels Please’ posters as Quad Crowns. Now this is close to being a fair point, but at the same time I think the proper names for poster sizes are lovely things and should be used more.

So, in the spirit of inclusivity and fairness, here is a brief guide to the commonest poster sizes. Then I can keep being poncey when I talk about posters, and everyone will know what on earth I mean. And there’s the added benefit that the title of this blog, and my posting name, may make a bit more sense if you’ve just stumbled here at random.

Our tutor for this lesson will be Tom Eckersley OBE (courtesy of his 1954 book on Poster Design).

The most general proportions of poster sites in Britain are illustrated here:
Extreme lower left: Crown (15 x 20 inches)
Lower left: Double Crown (30 x 20 inches)
Top left: Quad Crown (30 x 40 inches)
Right: Double Royal (40 x 25 inches)

Most of the advertising, GPO posters, film advertising, public information posters and so on were made in the left hand sizes and their variants. They also went bigger – many advertising posters were a 60″ x 40″ single sheet. (We accidentally bought one on eBay once. It’s big. Very big.)

Mr Eckersley has also left out the half size Crown Folio, which I love so much that I have not only taken as my name but will blog about properly one day. This seems to have been the default size for display advertising in Post Offices, and so you find National Savings posters this size, as well as the GPO’s own.

Meanwhile, on the right, the Double Royal (and its bigger sibling, the 40″ x 50″ Quad Royal) were mainly used by the railways and London Transport. I believe that LT posters are still Double Royal these days, although I haven’t actually ventured onto the tube with a measuring tape to verify this. So pretty much any railway or LT poster will be one of these sizes.

Eckersley also mentions two other poster sizes which don’t fit these proportions. One is the London bus poster (as seen for sale elsewhere), which is 10″ x 13″.

And the other is a “long van strip poster”. I’ve only really mentioned this so that I can include a colour version of the poster he uses as illustration (with thanks to the BPMA once again).

It’s by Lewitt Him, from 1940 and I want it. But I’ve never ever seen one of these van posters for sale – they were presumably just chucked out when they went out of date. Unless anyone happens to have one that they might want to get rid of…

And a final word from Mr Eckersley. This is how he illustrates lithographic colour printing. It could have been a poster in its own right.