Victorian Era Advertising!

This image from :Thinking with type: a critical guide for designers, writers, editors, and students by Ellen Lupton, published by Princeton Architectural 2010

This week’s blog post focuses on Victorian era advertising.  My example of a Victorian era advertisement is a poster for a steamship cruise.  In the era the majority of advertising was done with posters and/or by word of mouth, the poster was made to further promote a specific occurrence.  I found my example by looking in one of my textbooks for another course, Typography, I had remembered reading something about different decorative font choices earlier on so I flipped trough the book and found the picture that accompanied the article.  The design is very ‘In your Face’ and ‘flashy’, typical for most work around that time.  The type choices include large, decorative fonts all piled up on top of one another.  This was popular in the Victorian era because typefaces only had a certain amount of letters that could be used at one time.  For the period I believe the artwork would have been of fairly good quality, but today it would contain many ‘faux-pas’.  The first thing that attracted me to the piece was the very large, aggressive text.  This then led me to the different intricacies in the individual typefaces an eventually the on the poster, which, I guess, was is the whole point of a poster!

Cheerio