The object poster, product advertising and the travel poster
During and after the Second World War, the object poster or ‘Sachplakat’ became the leading advertising style. It is characterised by a simple, factual design and clear typography and was implemented with particularly great passion by the graphic designers of the Basel school including Niklaus Stoecklin, Peter Birkhäuser, Herbert Leupin, Fritz Bühler and Donald Brun, but also by others such as Hans Aeschbach in Zurich or Herbert Libiszewski from St. Gallen.
Their poster designs are characterised by a factual, figurative design peppered with simple pictorial narration, often humorous content, memorable figurative symbols and colourful contrasts.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of influential Swiss painters such as Pierre Gauchat, Pierre Monnerat and above all Alois Carigiet, Hans Erni and Hans Falk successfully revitalised the ‘gallery of the streets’ with their posters and continued the tradition of the painter’s poster.
For trilingual Switzerland, where posters had to be displayed in the respective language in the different parts of the country, the object poster with its focus on the visual message was particularly suitable, as the same poster could be displayed everywhere with no or only minor changes to the text. The image effect was supported by rich colours and a perfect printing process using lithography, which in Switzerland was used for a particularly long time during this period alongside the newer offset printing. From 1960 onwards, the cheaper and less high-quality offset printing became the dominant printing process. In the 1950s, the Hug printing company in Zurich printed the first offset poster in world format.
Posters for typical Swiss products such as chocolate or cheese and for Swiss travel resorts characterised the country’s image at home and abroad. From the interwar period onwards, the Swiss mountains and lakes were not only visited in summer, but increasingly in winter too, and winter sports became more and more popular. After the Second World War, tourism benefited from the great economic boom, which was also reflected in poster production. Today, collectors particularly appreciate Martin Peikert’s large-scale, detailed yet elegant posters for travel advertising of this period. Some Swiss graphic designers worked in Italy and became highly successful there, such as Lora Lamm, who became famous in the 1950s primarily for her work for Pirelli and the La Rinascente department stores.
