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The poster competition 100 beste Plakate des Jahres selects the 100 best posters from the german speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland. All 100 are considered equal "winners", there is no gold medal or first prize. The winners for 2014 have already been published, their posters will be shown in an exhibition in Berlin from June 19 to July 12, 2015 (opening on Thursday, June 18, 2015), and can then also be seen on the new website of the competition, together with all other selected posters since 2001.
The secretary of the competition, Hermann Buechner, has kindly allowed me to have a peek at the results and let me select a dozen for publication on Posterpage, ahead of the official award ceremony. I very much appreciate this privilege. The posters I have selected for Posterpage are not necessarily my favorite posters as in some previous years, nor an expression of downright despair as in last year's selection, but rather works that I consider typical and worthy of discussion. All posters on this page have in common that they show a word which is broken into peaces, often in unuasal or unexpected ways. Please see my comments, and the figure captions, below the pictures. |
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I have always viewed the "100 beste competition" as something special, quite distinct from the Warsaw, Toyama or Mexico competitions, for example. I was never sure however whether they were ahead of the pack, givig us a preview of the future of poster design and the exciting things to come, or rather the last twitches of a dying art that had seen better days, or both. Last year I was convinced that the end was near.
During 2014, I noticed a type of viral posters whose common element was an idea, not a visual similarity like in the hundreds or thousands of posters for Rosie the riveter, Obama or Keep calm, the Fukushima earthquake poster with the ubiquitous japanese flag, or Montgomery Flagg's I want you or a number of other viral posters. The idea is rather simple: Break up the main words in your poster into separate pieces, in unexpected places if possible, without apparent reason, making the poster as difficult to read as you can, avoiding conventional hyphenation rules or hyphen characters. I began to collect digital samples of these posters, using Pinterest, and easily found more than a thousand within a few months. As I had not seen them in such large numbers before, I concluded that this was a recent development, a virus epidemic in fool bloom. Now here was an opportunity to test the character of the "100 Beste" competition (or the quality of this year's jury): If any of the "word breakup" posters would show up in their 2014 selection, they were indeed leading edge, otherwise just documentation of a degenerating mainstream. I eagerly awaited the results, and was overwhelmed. Twenty out of a hundred posters may not seem to be such a big number, but if 20% of a population would be infected with a new kind of disease, with no end in sight, the world would stand still. Go to the exhibition, buy the catalogue or use the new database after July 18, and see for yourself!
Figure captions
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