Vintage Travel Posters
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Selling New Zealand: The Railroad Posters That Made a Nation Want To See Their World
By Ben Marks — In the 21st century, we refer to someone who has grown up with computers, smartphones, and the internet as being “digital native.” Back in 1840, when representatives of Queen Victoria and more than 500 Māori leaders signed the Treaty of Waitangi, one of New Zealand’s founding documents, the pākehā from England who were settling in New Zealand might have been described as “railroad native.” After all, the landscape of their former island nation was beginning to be crisscrossed with railroad...
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Māori Modernism: The New Zealand Artist Who Put the Islands' Native People First
By Ben Marks — Sitting more than 1,000 miles off the eastern coast of Australia, New Zealand is one of the most far-flung places on the planet, which probably explains why New Zealand was the first nation on Earth to make a tourist agency an official part of its government. From its earliest days as a British colony (1841-1907), New Zealand's non-native settlers and indigenous inhabitants alike promoted the island-nation's attractions to pretty much anyone who would listen, as we learned recently when we...
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Go Canada! When Gorgeous Graphic Design Lured the World to the Great White North
By Ben Marks — On November 7, 1885, when Canadian philanthropist Donald A. Smith drove a ceremonial last spike into his country’s transcontinental railroad at Craigellachie, British Columbia, almost 3,000 miles of tracks were finally joined as one. Given Canada’s immense size and inhospitable climate compared with its southern neighbor—whose shorter, 1,907-mile transcontinental railroad was opened in 1869—the completion of Canada's transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of a vigorous global...
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If 'Pan Am' Takes a Nosedive, It Won't Be For a Lack of Authentic, Vintage Props
By Ben Marks — When the 2011 fall television season made its noisy debut in September, two shows stood out for their potential to generate the same level of retro-cool buzz as "Mad Men." One was NBC's "The Playboy Club," which explored the lives of Playboy bunnies in 1960s Chicago—it was quickly cancelled. The other was ABC's "Pan Am," which followed four stewardesses based in New York City in 1963. After posting impressive numbers for its pilot episode and despite receiving generally good reviews, the...
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David Lance Goines Discusses Perfect Poster Design
By Maribeth Keane — I don’t collect posters. I don’t collect anything. I started making posters one at a time by hand in high school just for specific events, basically got going when I was a freshman. I still make them today, but they’re printed on a printing press now. I’ve made 221 posters, not including the ones I did in high school. Fundamentally, I believe that in order to be effective as opposed to artsy and not really effective at all, a poster has to be extremely simple. The Shepard Fairey posters...