The Architect & The Industrial Arts exhibition poster
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Architect & The Industrial Arts, 11th Exhibition of Contemporary American Design, February 12 to March 24 [1929]
This poster was designed in 1928 [Met]. Futura had first come onto the market merely a year before, in late 1927. Unsurprisingly, Dwiggins uses capitals only. He found the new European sans serifs like Futura, Kabel or Gill Sans “fine in the capitals and bum in the lower-case”. [Paul Shaw] One year later, in February 1929, Mergenthaler Linotype commissioned Dwiggins to design a better sans serif, as a competitor to Futura & Co. This was to become Metro, his first typeface design.
The image is taken from the recommendable @WADwiggins Twitter stream about “America’s Master Graphic Designer, Artist, and Wit”, edited by Bruce Kennett as a teaser for an upcoming illustrated biography by Letterform Archive.
3 Comments on “The Architect & The Industrial Arts exhibition poster”
Yesterday, a better (unfaded) copy of this poster sold at auction for $50,000. You’ll see that the original fourth color was green, not gray.
Paul Shaw has written much more about the exhibition and the poster. He shows a comp with serif lettering for the text that was later set in Futura.
You can now snag a facsimile of the poster (in its true colors from another copy recently acquired by Letterform Archive) by pledging to the newly launched Dwiggins reprint on Kickstarter.