Concert Posters

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I didn't go to art school, but I still love to learn about art anyway.

Betty: Hi, and I'm Betty. I also didn't go to art school, but I also love learning about art as well as design, which is going to be something we talk about today once again.

Quinn: I feel like we are in our most pure form recently where I am talking about musicals and now you're talking about design and it's just like, this is what we live for. This is what… we are in our elements. 

Betty: Yeah, exactly. And this one does have some parallels kind of coincidentally with what you were talking about in our last episode about musicals. And, but like, I didn’t—they’re total, I think they are total coincidences. Cause I didn't even know what you were talking about last time and you didn't know what I was planning to talk about. But yeah, I think it's going to be quite interesting to see what some of these connections are.

Quinn: Well, I’m very excited to hear all about it. So take it away. 

Betty: Yeah. Thank you. So yeah, like I mentioned, this is going to be kind of related to what we talked about last week. Except slightly different, although it is musically related, I am going to be going through a brief history of concert poster designs. And so I'm going to be starting in the 1800s, and we're going to end up with concert poster designs today. This was a topic that came up when I was talking to some of the volunteers from the AGO, which we are actually currently planning to go back to, into the actual art gallery to volunteer again. So it's exciting. I just found out like a few days ago. So hopefully it's going to start at the start of 2022. But I was talking to one of the gallery guides and she reminded us of an exhibition that was there before COVID, which was a show all about the golden age of magic in the 19th and 20th century. And in that sho  there was a bunch of art posters for these shows. And that topic kind of led to let us on to talking about concert poster designs from back in the 19th century all the way up until now. So I am stealing that topic discussion that we had when I talked to the other volunteers to talk here on Pictorial about it.

Quinn: Wow. You love to see it.

Betty: Yeah, it was actually, it was a really fun show and maybe, maybe we'll do a Pictorial episode on that too, at some point. But yeah, today's topic is concert posters. And the reason why I'm starting in the 1800s slash 19th century, more specifically the late 19th century, is this was kind of when concert posters, I guess kind of became a thing. So the reason is this printing method called lithography was invented in 1798. But initially it was really expensive to use, but it became more and more viable throughout the 1800s. And so eventually a lot of people started using them and then it made mass production of posters much easier. And that's kind of why you started to see reproduced concert posters a lot later in the century. And the reason why lithography was a thing was because it, so it's a printing method that uses a flat stone or a metal plate to —it has a greasy substance that you put on it which will attract ink and where there isn't a substance ink isn’t attracted to it. So then you're printing the image with where the ink is. And the reason why this invention became really significant is because it's apparently possible to print a much wider range of colors than before. And it also made it easier to use. So that's why it not only was used for mass production, it also just made colors a lot easier and a lot more vibrant when when it shows up on the paper. And so the first person to kind of pioneer a technique that was widely used was this French painter and poster designer called Jules Chèret. And I just put, I put a link in the show notes to give you an example of some of the designs he did. So the example that I gave you is a poster that he did for this musical called El Dorado in Paris. And it was done in 1894 and he pretty much kicked off this golden age of poster design,. And a lot of people who are designing a concert posters in this time ended up taking after his style as well. So, yeah. What do you think of this, some of the earliest examples of musical advertisement?

Quinn: This is very much the style of when you walk into the apartment of the cool art girl that you've met, and like she studied abroad somewhere in Europe for a year. And like, all of her clothes are thrifted and she wears like a cool denim jacket. These are the kinds of posters that are on her wall. I hope I'm painting a picture that makes sense to anyone but me. It’s just clearly like an older vintage poster in style. This center piece is you have like… a red orb. That’s the best way to describe it. And in front of it is this a little bit simplistic drawing of a woman, like in full motion who is dancing and playing the tambourine, it says El Dorado in big letters above the woman and the orb. And then there's like musicians and clowns at the bottom, and then information about the show on the bottom left. And there's definitely like a very particular color palette to it as well. It's blues and the red of the circle was also the red of the text in the bottom left. And then there's kind of these yellow highlight colors throughout the woman on her dress and her hair. But it's definitely like, the whole thing is actually only done in a few colors. And so it creates definitely like a very aesthetically pleasing image and I can definitely see this—like I'm only looking at the one poster right now, but I could definitely see this being part of a set where it's like, oh, it's posters for all these different shows, but they all use like basically the same color palette and kind of fonts is what I'm visualizing in my head. And it would make a set if you wanted to collect them.

Betty: Well, that's actually a really good observation about the colors, because most of the times these posters would have been printed in the colors you see on this poster, which are red, yellow, and blue. And it's mostly because that, those were the colors that were widely available with the printers who are doing these lithographic prints. And they, so they're done in this way called registration where one color is printed first, and then it goes through with another color and then the next one. So I'm going to show you another poster in a bit, which kind of follows that similar color scheme. And yeah, I presume like a lot of the, the letters would also be in a similar font. Most likely the printers would have had like a certain set of patterns for fonts that they would have used to create similar posters. So the next example I have relates to what you mentioned last time which was about the play Moulin Rouge. And so this is actually an example of the first poster that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec designed back in 1891 for the dance hall Moulin Rouge. And it is also in a similar style and he's using the techniques that Jules Chèret invented, which again is using these colors, red, yellow, and blue and then printing it in these colors. But also you'll notice it's similar to the other one where there is, there's like a woman in the middle, which represents, you know, the dancers that were in the establishment that he was advertising for. But it also is quite simple. It just has the image of, you know, it has the image of the dancer and it has some people around it and it has the name of the show and the location, and is like, even though it probably doesn't seem very minimalist to us now, it is a pretty simple way of conveying the message of what they were advertising for.

Quinn: It's interesting to think of the mindset of a person who would just be seeing this as a contemporary to this poster and it's like, what am I seeing in this poster? What is being advertised to me? And obviously, I don't know, like the proper nouns that are on the poster don't mean anything to be besides Moulin Rouge as the venue. But you know, you have this, you have this dancing woman who is clearly surrounded by men. They're just silhouettes, but you can tell by the hats that these are, these are men. And so it's like, okay, this is definitely painting, even in a very simplistic way or like a very streamlined way of expressing that, definitely painting quite a picture. It's not like this woman is particularly scantily clad or anything, but, you know, for the standards, I think her hiking her leg up there to dance probably, you know, implied a lot that they wanted to imply.

Betty: Yeah, actually it's funny because the Moulin Rouge was actually at the time known to be really scandalous and risqué. Again by today's standards probably not, but at the time, yeah, they had dancers that would hike up their skirts so you could see their underwear, basically. And would dance in these provocative ways. Apparently like the police would like visit the establishment every once in a while, just to make sure that they weren’t being too crazy. So yeah, there were, there were about 3000 copies, around 3000 copies of this particular poster that was printed. And at the time it would've just been like posted all over Paris. And because concert posters, or at least when they made this poster at the time, like they didn't think people would end up collecting it. Like the idea was just to advertise for the show that was going on at the time. They're usually done on really cheap flimsy paper. And again, because they're distributed outdoors, most of them are lost. There are very few actual copies of this left. Obviously because of that, this became really iconic. But also I did read that apparently the style that he was designing in was actually inspired by Japanese prints which was really popular in Paris at the time. And there were also other artists who were inspired by Japanese art as well. So that's an interesting connection I thought.

Quinn: Oh, that is very cool.

Betty: Yeah. Kind of moving forward to the early 19th century. The next example I have is an example of an art nouveau poster. Now art nouveau was a movement that wasn't just in concert posters, it was art and design movement that was a part of architecture, applied art, decorative arts, but also visual arts. And it's like, if you've ever seen the imagery that looks like really exaggerated curved flowers and plants, basically lots of swirls. That's probably art nouveau. One artist that was known for designing posters or designing art nouveau style posters was this Czech painter called Alphonse Mucha. And the particular example I gave you is an example of a poster he did for a violinist. And so would you like to describe what you see on the screen now?

Quinn: Yeah, this is definitely a lot different from the first two that we looked at, both in terms of style and in color. So at this point we have a drawing that's much more detailed of a woman who is a cellist. She's holding her cello and is leafing through sheet music, and then that's taken up about half of the poster and the bottom half of the poster is devoted to her name. And then it says “the greatest Bohemian violoncellist”, which is, you know, very nice. And the colors are, like I said, are a lot different. It’s very muted. Everything is, I would say quite similar in shade, it's kind of blues and yellows, definitely on a very narrow sliver of the color spectrum. And then we have these, a little kind of decorative circles of flowery shapes that adorn the image of this woman as well.

Betty: Yeah. I'm not entirely sure if this picture I showed you is like, it might be a version of a faded one because I have seen pictures of other copies that are, are a little bit more vibrant than this one. But I do think in general, like it's got that more like pastel-y look compared to the posters that we were looking at previously. So this one is kind of interesting, has kind of an interesting story. Apparently Alphonse Mucha was living in Chicago for awhile and apparently also taught at the Chicago Institute of Art. There he met this Czech American person and he had, at the time he had a seven year old daughter who was already really amazing at playing the violin. So Mucha said, hey, if you ever become like a professional violinist, I can design your posters or your music posters for you. And apparently she took him up on that when she became the greatest Bohemian violoncellist at age 16. I don't know who gave her the title, but she must've been pretty good at it if she received the title from somebody. So in 1913, he designed this poster for an upcoming European tour that she was going to do in the fall of 1914. But unfortunately she never actually went on this tour because World War I broke out shortly after this poster was designed. So this poster was never actually used, but there were a bunch printed before they realized, you know, they had to cancel. And I read that recently an original lithograph of this sold for 5,000 US dollars.

Quinn: That's right everybody, hold on to your Katy Perry posters. Cause you never know.

Betty: Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's the thing that's really interesting because this was like, this was a concert series that was never actually that never even happened. And the posters are worth a lot.

Quinn: Who has posters from something that was supposed to happen that got canceled due to COVID? Hey!

Betty: So I'm going to skip ahead a little bit to the 1950s, the image that I'm going to show you is an example of this method called letterpress printing. Apparently is just a process of pressing paper onto wood or metal relief that's covered in ink. I'm sure it's got, there's more of the process than that, but well from what I read, that is what it is. This was an example of a poster by a company called Hatch Show Print which is a company from Nashville, Tennessee, who started printing posters since 1879. And originally they weren't doing music posters, but they eventually started to pick up opera singers and then eventually rock and roll musicians such as Elvis. So this example that I just put in the show notes is, the reason this is interesting is because this style of concert posters is actually called the boxing style poster. And the reason it's called the boxing style is because it's inspired by old boxing posters.

Quinn: This poster actually reminds me of some of the designs that we talked about in the campaign posters episode back in November 2020, because it has some similar design elements to what we commonly saw in those, where first of all, is a red, white, and blue color scheme, which is definitely very reminiscent of that. Mostly red text, mostly text as well. There's one image in blue and white of Elvis playing a guitar and singing. Good for him. And then it's just a bunch of information about, you know, the show and who's going to be there and what it is and blah, blah, blah. So it is mostly text design as well. There's a couple of little red stars that are thrown in. Like they just realized there was too much white space and they're like, oh, I better do something about that. And you can definitely clearly see the influence in this boxing poster that you showed me, which is a very similar kind of thing. All red and blue text, you have two little images of the two boxers faces. They also look so similar. That's very funny. Bobby Ruffin versus Santa Buka, I guess. Big boxer names. And then it's all the other names that are going to be on the billing, all the information about when and where it is. Because you have like a little images of the people there who were your headliners, but then mostly it's just text to give you the actual information, because there is so much more detail on posters versus like here's a cellist that's coming to town, I guess, is like all of the information on some of these other posters versus like, now it's the 50s, things are happening. Things have times and dates now.

Betty: Yeah. I mean, it is true. Like a thing that I noticed too, was the other, the other posters were very straight to the point and simple.

Quinn: They were also much prettier.

Betty: Yeah. And whereas like the boxing poster, it's kind of, it's kind of like loaded with information. It's like, you just need to know everything about this show, it's on the poster. So I did find out that apparently Hatch Show Print is a company that still is making posters today. Their posters are much prettier today, I would say. Here, although again, like these posters because of their iconic boxing match style, a lot of them have also become collectible pieces because they kind of represent this time period of, you know, the boxing matches. And concert posters that look like boxing matches.

Quinn: I guess I always wonder with stuff like that, where it's like, did people at the time think that looked good? Cause I feel like there's some stuff that happens and you could watch it happen where like there's a design style that's popular in clothes, decoration, whatever. And you're like, oh, that's pretty. And then time goes on and you're like, no, that would never looked good actually. Or like, it looks bad to me now. And sometimes stuff happens and you, the first time you look at it, you're like, that's ugly as sin. And I always wonder with like previous styles. Did people really like that or was it just, did a lot of people think it was very ugly. And it's not, it's not that bad, but you know. I've seen worse things. But it's definitely not as beautiful as it could be.

Betty: Well, I actually, I'm interested to know what you think of the next poster design, which is the one named Globe poster, Mr. Dynamite. So a global poster is a company in Baltimore, Maryland. And they were actually the competitor, or I guess a competitor to Hatch Show Print and probably the most prominent competitor. And maybe there was some sort of like north, south rivalry or something. But what do you think of their poster at around the same time?

Quinn: Okay. This poster is way better. It's actually, it looks like it was actually designed. And not just, you know, someone writing a bunch of things around a picture of Elvis. You've got this really cool illustration of James Brown. You have really dynamic colors, bright blues and reds that are—and the whole thing, you know, you have a black and white picture of James Brown with kind of like, almost like a black halo of color emanating from him with white streaks. And then there's bright red surrounding that. Then you have a blue at the bottom with red letters over it. Like it's just very bright and in your face and like, oh, someone who read a couple pages of design theory actually designed this. And it also has way, like the more like pertinent information that’s like the fine print stuff is more condensed into the bottom versus most of the poster is devoted to actual advertisements: “James Brown, Mr. Dynamite, a show for the whole family.” Like it seems like it's actually trying to get you to come instead of just like “it's Elvis, you want to come see Elvis? Of course you do. It's Elvis.”

Betty: Yeah, exactly. And again, a lot of these posters were also, you know, stapled at two telephone poles at the time. But they've also become highly collectible. And not just with collectors. Apparently a lot of them are displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and also at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture because they did represent a lot of Black artists, like James Brown and Aretha Franklin and apparently Tupac as well. One of the reasons actually they became really famous, and also, as I mentioned, the importance of being stapled to a telephone poles was because—they didn't invent this, but they were one of the first ones to start utilizing this technology, which is called Day-Glo Ink. And that is the same ink or the same type of ink that you see on streets signs, stop signs or like signs that you, that your car lights would light up as you're driving past it. So these posters would use that same type of ink. So at night they would like basically glow and shine really brightly as you're, as you're looking at them, if there's a light on it.

Quinn: That is so smart.

Betty: Yeah, exactly. So this particular poster, the James Brown, Mr. Dynamite poster apparently was named by Billboard as the 17th best rock poster of all time. I did, we don't have time to go through 16 to number one, but it is one of, one of the best.

Quinn: Well, there you go. Listen, I looked at it and I said it was good. Billboard said it was good. We’re the same.

Betty: Yeah. So the next one I'm going to show you, it's actually criminal that it's not on the list of best rock and roll posters of all the time. Cause I think it should be. There was a guy by the name of Bill Graham who was a promoter in San Francisco in the mid to late 1960s. And he managed this theater in San Francisco called the Fillmore Auditorium. And he kind of became the guy to promote, and kind of launched a career of a bunch of like really well-known bands or bands who eventually went on to become really famous. One of them is this band called the Grateful Dead. And he apparently—

Quinn: Never heard of them. [laughs]

Betty: Yeah, he apparently managed them. Or he apparently held this show in 1966 that was the best Grateful Dead show of all time, apparently. I, again, I've never gone to any of them, so I wouldn't know. So not only did the Fillmore Theater, you know, promote these bands. They also were known for creating really interesting posters, especially of psychedelic rock bands. So this next poster that I put in the show notes is actually a poster that was designed by Bonnie McClean, who was at the time Bill Graham's wife. And she designed a lot of the posters over the period of time that the Fillmore was in business. So this one is quite different from what we saw, from the previous examples we saw, what do you notice is the difference?

Quinn: Yeah, so this is very sixties. It looks like it is designed to be viewed while under the influence. I don't love it. I gotta be real with you. Not a big fan of 60s design styles overall, but yeah, mostly—so the colors are… I do, I think the colors are interesting. I think they're nice. It's like a green, like kind of a light green background. And in the light green background there's a large face taking up one portion of the poster and then over the center of it, there is this abstract orange blue, kind of like feather design. Is that supposed to look like something that I am not picking up on? Or is it just like a feather abstract design.

Betty: Oh, I think it's supposed to be a peacock.

Quinn: Oh… this is like a Rorschach test. Okay. But then the real kicker of this poster is that we've got this peacock allegedly kind of taking up the middle and the bottom, right? And then this green face next to it taking up most of the top right. And the the rest of the poster is taken up with text, but not normal text. It's that style of texts where the words are in blue and the letters are drawn in a way they take up the rest of the space. So they're all like flowy and squished together. And you can, you can read them, but only if you really try. This is not a poster designed to be read quickly.

Betty: Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I did read that apparently it was intentional for the words to be really difficult to read. And this poster actually isn't even the worst one. I saw some examples of ones where it was just absolutely impossible to read or maybe you really have to be under the influence to read it. I'm not sure, I didn't test it out. But yeah, it's supposed to be like, I guess the idea is if you can read it, then you're like in the in-crowd or something, I don't know. But apparently Bonnie MacLean was actually inspired a lot by art nouveau designs. And that's, I'm assuming that's like where the swirls are. And also, you know, the bird peacock design, like that's supposed to be the art nouveau influence but you know, set in this psychedelic atmosphere. But yeah, like I think I can definitely see the criticism is that as a poster presenting information, it's not great because you, you like have to be really up close and it takes a while to actually figure out who's playing. But apparently it is a part of the Museum of Modern Art collection.

Quinn: I definitely… I can see how it is very representative of the time. And I can see the design elements that go into it. It's just not something that's to my taste. 

Betty: Yeah. no, that totally makes sense. And you know, like I'm not a huge psychedelic rock person either. So I, if I saw a poster like this, I probably wouldn't, I'd be like, oh great. I'm sure someone else would really enjoy that show.

Quinn: I think that there are probably attracting the correct crowd, so that's great.

Betty: Yeah, that’s the thing. It's got a very specific target audience. And speaking of specific target audience, I feel like the next one has an even more specific target audience. The next example of a poster is an example of a punk rock poster from the 1970s. And so punk rock, you know, it's kind of known for, similar to psychedelic rock, but like in a different way, like it's quite like counterculture and the contents of a lot of punk rock music, as well as the way a lot of these musicians presented themselves, like was meant to be very shocking. And I think that kind of comes through in this poster, which I think I should warn that may be, it may seem offensive to certain people. I'm not really sure. It was, it was a thing. 

Quinn: Yeah. I don't think I felt adequately prepared to click on this image.

Betty: Sorry. I probably should have warned you.

Quinn: No that’s okay, I just, I feel like despite the different styles of the posters we looked at so far, they all have been fairly straightforward. This is not straight forward. It's kind of like—I struggle to call it graphic. But I guess, okay. I'll just describe it. And I will say it's definitely designed to be provocative. And it's another thing like you, like you referenced it is to attract a certain kind of a crowd and even to attract a certain kind of notoriety. So it's an illustration of a pineapple on a cross. Like a, like a crucifixion. It’s a pineapple who's got big eyes and a really big mouth, but also arms and legs, being crucified. So there's that. And then there's other people, humans, not pineapples, humans being crucified in the background of this. It doesn't look great. It's also, the colors are very interesting. The sky is purple and the land area is more yellow, everything's in yellow brown, and it's very dull. And there's also an illustration of a man holding a spear, which I'm just looking at this for the first time, and I don't know the background of this band, or if there's any context for this, but this definitely comes across as a very racist depiction. So I don't know about. Yeah, there’s a lot going on here.

Betty: Yeah it definitely like I, you're right. Like I think the idea is meant for it to be shocking. And I don't actually know very much about this band either. It's a band called Psychedelic Pineapple and this was designed by the artists John Seabury. I think this particular, the imagery of the pineapple on a crucifix is also the cover of one of their albums, if I'm not mistaken. And the, like this particular poster is in color. But I read that most of the posters that they would put on the street would be a black and white version of this because, you know, that was just cheaper to print. So this is an example of a poster that some people ended up taking off the street and saving them to be collected. I'm assuming because they're fans of Psychotic Pineapple. But maybe they also think it's just a really interesting design, even though it is quite offensive, I would say.

Quinn: I could only assume that they are hitting their target audience with this and/or generating outrage response to it in a way that was probably quite helpful to them as well.

Betty: Now that we've gone through, you know, the 1800s and most of the 1900s we are, we've come to the end of the 20th century. And the next example is a poster that was designed for this tour called the Spice World Tour by this musical group called the Spice Girls. I presume you may have heard of them. 

Quinn: I… here’s the thing. I've just clicked on it and saying that this poster was designed seemed like a stretch.

Betty: I actually felt similarly when I saw this too. Because this was one of the posters we were talking about with the gallery guides and before talking about this poster, we were talking about, oh, you know, what is a concert poster meant to do? It’s meant to advertise the concert and it should have the name of the band and stuff on it. But when I saw this, I'm like, I can barely read what that says.

Quinn: Graphic design is my passion. Literally—okay. So it's a vertical poster that the top third of it are just five separate photos of the Spice Girls cut out in vertical strips. Why didn't, why isn't it a group photo of them performing? Do they not have access to images of the Spice Girls for the poster? Anyway, whatever. The bottom two-thirds it's, it says Spice Girls vs Wembley stadium and they're like big letters and the Union Jack flag is behind them. So it's, you mostly can't see the Union Jack flag, but where the letters are it shines through. So you can tell that it's behind them. And then there's just a bunch of text, backin Britain, blah, blah, blah dates and times all through the bottom. It takes up, all this text takes up so much space. Who did this?

Betty: Yeah. I mean, I do find it funny that because the Union Jack, a part of that flag is white, this text also on a white background. Like that's one of the reasons why I think it's difficult to read because a part of the text just blends into the background. And plus it's so busy cause the Union Jack is not a very simple flag. I mean, it's simpler than the American flag, but it just doesn't look very good as, you know, the background of blocky text. But I do love, and this is probably not the graphic designer’s fault, but this is the fault of the people who came up with the title for this show. So apparently these were advertising the two shows, two of the last stops of the Spice World tour, which is that they came back to the UK to to perform their last few shows. And so they call it “Backin’ Britain” as in “B A C K I N” one word apostrophe Britain. Which is like, I think intentionally grammatically incorrect, I'm assuming. And I think maybe there were hoping the show would advertise itself because apparently like, I don't know if the two Britain shows were the most popular, but it ended up being completely sold out and apparently the 1998 Spice World tour is still the highest grossing tour ever by a female group. Maybe they were just like, these people are so popular we don't need to design a great poster because people would just show up anyway.

Quinn: It’s impossible to get people not to go to a Spice Girls concert in 1998 so I can see why they phoned it in. But yeah, wow. 

Betty: The last example I have, I would like to get your opinion because yeah, it does seem like, I mean, obviously there are good and bad examples of concert poster designs. But you know, we did just see one that was not the best. Speaking of tours that never ended up happening. So the last example I have is the tour called Map of the Soul by the, that was supposed to be held by the South Korean group BTS for 2020. It was, I believe it was initially postponed to 2021, but then this year in August they announced that they were just canceling this tour altogether because of COVID-19 concerns. And it just probably isn't happening for the foreseeable future or maybe ever, I don't know. But you know, we still got a concert poster design. So what do you think of this 2020 musical poster design?

Quinn: Well, it's much better than the Spice Girls. No, this is very pretty. It's a very contemporary poster and it's also quite simplistic in a way that I think works well. There are seven members of BTS, so I can imagine they have difficulty sometimes creating poster designs, but instead of doing what the Spice Girls did and just giving up they actually made a very nice poster design. And so it's all seven of them and it's designed to make it look like they're basically standing on a lake. So they all have like very nicely complimenting colored outfits. And they're all standing like posed dramatically and looking at the viewer, and then you have their distorted reflections in the lake. All of the colors are purples and blues which is quite pleasing. And then they're just wearing basically simple white and dark blue outfits. And then at the top, it just says BTS Map of the Soul tour. And then this is my question is because there's only one location. So was this a, was this a poster for the Seoul stop or did they just, were hey only planning on going to one place? [laughs]

Betty: No, it was definitely a world tour, but I think this was a, if I'm not mistaken, it was supposed to be the first stop maybe. And maybe it was just the particular version that I found had this location on it. Or maybe it was canceled and they only had time to design the first poster.

Quinn: I mean it totally makes sense to have a poster for the one location to advertise the location. It’s just funny because the way that it's set up where it, it it's almost looks like it’s in the style of movie crawl credits, because it's very horizontal and there's a lot of space that you could put more rows, but it's just the one row. So it's almost like it's a fake-out of having tour stops on this poster, which is what gave me pause on that. Yeah, it's very nice. I  imagine that if I was in the Army, I'd be very thrilled by this poster. I think it’s very well designed. I don't know if it's like going to go down in history or anything, except maybe, it's one of those canceled posters. So maybe it actually is going to be very famous as you know, one of the biggest, if not the biggest band in the world's canceled COVID poster.

Betty: Yeah, we've seen some posters, you know, that are quite busy with a lot of text. And I think this kind of calls back to some of those original poster designs that we saw from you know, Jules Chèret and the ones, you know, from when lithography was first invented, cause those were quite simple and it just kind of had a picture of the performer and a couple of words on it. And you know, this is, even though this is, you know, modern, it's got photographs instead of drawings, it kind of has that simplicity it did once have.

Quinn: Everything is cyclical and we may have much better cameras and the ability for more high-quality graphics, but, you know, certain design elements, such as how much fricking text do we want on this poster? It's going to go in cycles, it looks like.

Betty: So, yeah, that was all my examples, but yeah, I'm sure probably a lot of people have their own favorite concert or theater or maybe even, you know, like theatrical performance posters. So yeah, feel free to let us know what some of your favorites are.

Quinn: All right, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Pictorial. Our first episode of 2022, happy new year! You can find all of our show notes today at relay.fm/pictorial. And you could also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @pictorialpod. You can also follow me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: You can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also have a YouTube channel Pictorial Podcast where we will upload video versions of our podcasts. Usually a few weeks after the audio version has come out. So for this one, you'll get to look at all the concert posters as we talk about them.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!