Lester Beall

LoC zapis · slika 1024 px

1. What it is — a poster for the REA, the agency that brought electricity to American villages. The audience is rural households, some of them barely literate. The series runs from 1937 to 1941. Format is 101 × 76 cm (LoC, gift of Beall). The signature "BEALL" stands upright in the top left corner. Technique: MoMA holds two copies and catalogues them differently — 220.1937 as a lithograph, 753.1983 as a screenprint; the Merrill C. Berman (MCB) collection also as a screenprint. (Lithograph: printing from a flat plate on which only the greasy drawing takes the ink. Screenprint: ink is pushed through a stencil through a fine mesh — it gives a thick, solid, flat coat.)
2. Composition — reading of the work: the plane is divided horizontally into two fields — blue above (sky), red below (ground). The dividing line sits at about 56% of the height. Over it stands an enormous white light bulb, upright, right of centre, about 60% of the format's height; its black base enters the red field. A house sits on the horizon line, left of centre: a small black silhouette with white windows. From it, thin white rays fan out to the right — light from the windows (as the LoC description also has it). The scale ratio of house to bulb is about 1 : 8. The agency's lettering is white, directly on the red, with no separate band. Everything is frontal — no perspective and no modelling (shading that gives volume). Construction: two colours, three elements, one word.
3. Colour — reading of the work: exactly three — blue, red and the white of the paper. No halftones and no shadows. The American tricolour works doubly: it signals a national programme and gives the strongest contrast at a distance.
4. Typography — reading of the work: the word "LIGHT" sits inside the bulb itself, dark blue — not beside the image, but in it. The typeface is heavy condensed capitals with slab serifs: an Egyptian/slab-serif of the American wood poster-type kind. (Capitals = uppercase letters; condensed = narrowed; Egyptian = a typeface with thick, rectangular serifs.) AGI and Communication Arts explicitly name 19th-century wood type as Beall's material. Below, "RURAL ELECTRIFICATION ADMINISTRATION" — white condensed grotesque (sans serif) in capitals (grotesque = a typeface without serifs), across the full width. Two typefaces: old wood type for the word-object, modern for the signature. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — light. Not "the electrification programme", but the thing a person gets. The three-second, five-metre test here is not an exercise but a condition of the task.
6. Why exactly this way — an audience that may not read, a space without urban context, cheap colour printing. All three constraints push toward the same solution.
7. What would kill it — a sentence. The moment an explanation is added, the poster becomes a leaflet and loses the only audience it has. The second killer: drawing a bulb that glows — yellow, glow, gradient. This bulb does not glow; it is light, because it is a white plane on a dark ground. The effect would kill the sign.

Principles: One image, one word Flat colour reads at distance Extreme mismatch of scale Word inside the image There is no diagonal here: the composition is strictly vertical and horizontal, and movement is carried by the rays.

LoC zapis — Here It Comes · slika

1. What it is — a continuation of the series, but with photography instead of a flat sign: Here It Comes, When I Think Back, Our Lines, It's Fine for Us, Now I'm Satisfied. The titles are user speech, not a message from the state. The Library of Congress blog (2024) splits the REA posters into three series: the first — benefits (flat sign); the second — progress, photomontage of real people; the third — electricity at work. Technique varies within the series: It's Fine for Us (1939) is a screenprint (MCB), When I Think Back (1939) a lithograph, 97,1 × 75,7 cm (MoMA 8280); Here It Comes is 101 × 76 cm (LoC).
2. Composition — reading of the work: the same pattern repeats through the whole second phase. (a) The surface is split into two-three flat colour fields, often unequal, with one dominant. (b) Over them is a cut-out black-and-white photograph of a man in the field — no background, like a sticker. (Photomontage: an image built from cut-out photographs.) (c) A band in a contrasting colour carries a first-person sentence. (d) At the bottom stands the agency name. On a few posters one of the colour fields is flag stripes. Benchmark Here It Comes: an orange field is cut by a white diagonal wedge widening to the right. The cut-out lineman — black-and-white, full figure, in climbing boots with spikes — pulls a wire: a black line running diagonally across the whole format, from the left edge to the right. The band with the sentence here is horizontal and yellow; the diagonal is carried by the wedge and the wire. On the white field there is a small orange bird. At the bottom, directly on the orange, sits the agency signature in two lines. The wire is literally a vector: it arrives left to right, in the direction of reading. The photograph doesn't blend into the background — it is deliberately pasted on, and that gives the energy.
3. Colour — reading of the work: two to three saturated flat colours (orange, yellow, blue, red) and a black-and-white photograph. The photograph stays grey; colour always belongs to the graphic. Same division of labour as in work 03.
4. Typography — reading of the work: the sentence always lives in a band; the agency signature stands free on the colour field, as on Light. On Here It Comes the sentence is a bold black grotesque (sans serif), each word capitalised. The signature is a wide bold serif or slab serif in capitals (serif = a typeface with serifs), below which is a small tracked capitals line reading „U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE“. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — the shift from here's what you get to here's what your neighbour says. That is a change of rhetoric, not of style: testimony instead of promise.
6. Why exactly this way — by 1939 electricity had already reached some; now what's being sold is the experience of the first users. The task changed, so did the means.
7. What would kill it — a retouched, idealised photograph. The witness has to look like a witness.

Principles: Photomontage plus poster colour Design for an illiterate audience Cut-out figure without background Text always inside a shape Series as identity Arrow and diagonal as motion (only Here It Comes — the wire)

Series template: colour fields + cut-out figure + band with sentence + signature in a fixed place. The figure, the colour and the sentence change; everything else stays. The same holds for every series, and for the video series: variable and fixed have been separated from the first piece.

1. What it is — a poster about kitchen electrification. Offset lithograph and screenprint, 101,6 × 76,2 cm (MoMA SC157.2010, gift of the designer). (Offset: lithography in which ink from the plate transfers to a rubber blanket and then to paper — allows a fine halftone of a photograph.) Per MoMA's record, the goal was to convince households to switch from traditional fuels to electricity, and REA deliberately borrowed the techniques of commercial advertising.
2. Composition — reading of the work: a black-and-white photograph of a woman taking a pan out of an electric range fills the lower two-thirds. Behind her and above, across the whole surface, runs a regular halftone of large red dots on white — reads as wallpaper or a kitchen oilcloth. (Halftone: a grid of dots print normally uses to simulate greys and mid-tones.) Over the top third lies a blue band tilted about 8° with the title. At the bottom is a narrow red band with the agency name. Three layers, each with its own job: photograph (proof) + halftone (home) + band (message). The halftone here isn't a tonal reproduction but a drawn ornament, used as a flat colour.
3. Colour — reading of the work: red, blue, white and a black-and-white photograph. Three-colour; per the museum record, modernisation is presented as a matter of national interest. The photograph stays uncoloured — colour belongs to the graphic, not to the proof.
4. Typography — reading of the work: „A Better Home“ white in the blue band, lowercase with capitalised initials, slightly slanted. Reads as soft, like handwriting, but it's set type. Below „RURAL ELECTRIFICATION ADMINISTRATION“ in tracked capitals, under which small „U.S. Department of Agriculture“. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — a better home, not better infrastructure. Benefit is translated into the kitchen, and it's done through a woman at work — the audience recognises itself in the scene, not in the programme.
6. Why exactly this way — the sheet is printed with two techniques. The usual split in such a combination: solid flat surfaces by screenprint, photograph by offset. That's why the colours sit flat, as if cut. Which surface on this sheet was printed by which technique can only be seen on the original.
7. What would kill it — a pastel palette. The message depends on the colour being hard and unambiguous, like a sign.

Principles: Flat colour reads at distance Halftone dots as ornament Photo is evidence, graphics is the voice A band carries the message

Halftone as decoration, not as tone: the dots are too coarse to reproduce an image, and that's exactly why they work as material. The same move today produces dither as style (dither: an arrangement of dots or pixels used to fake tone with few colours) — here it's from 1941.

1. What it is — a poster for the United States Housing Authority (USHA, the federal agency for social housing) against slums. Lithograph, 100,3 × 74 cm (MoMA 89.1944, gift of USHA).
2. Composition — reading of the work: two photographs in one frame. Lower half: a red-toned photograph of run-down houses — a slum street, poles, mud. In the upper half a large shape is cut out, resembling a hand or a door handle; through it you see a yellow-toned photograph of a tidy apartment building with a tree-lined street. The new home is, then, "cut out" of the old one. Across the lower half runs a thick white X from edge to edge. At the top is the title; along the edge of the cut-out is written "USHA". Construction: before and after in one image, plus one stroke over what is being cancelled.
3. Colour — reading of the work: duotone by zone — the old is red, the new yellow, the sky blue, the X and title white. (Duotone: a photograph printed in one or two colours instead of grey.) Neither photograph is in natural colour; colour here is a judgement, not description. The same procedure is used by Matter, but here colour carries a moral charge.
4. Typography — reading of the work: "Cross Out Slums" at the top — a light white sans serif (grotesque), lowercase with capitalised initials, tracked, in a single line across the full width. The title is calm; all the pressure is carried by the X. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — the simplest possible graphic move carries the whole political message. In three seconds: something has to be removed. What matters is that the X is over the bad, not over the good — and that the good is inside the cut-out, as what remains once the bad has been struck through.
6. Why exactly this way — a state campaign, an enormous print run. Every colour is one more lithographic plate, and each one raises the cost of printing; the move has to be a single one.
7. What would kill it — two interventions instead of one. Two signs = none.

Principles: One image, one word Duotone as judgement Before and after in one image Cutout as a window into another image

AGI zapis · slika 1600 px · PGDA, broj 2

1. What it is — quarterly professional journal of the Upjohn pharmaceutical company for physicians and pharmacists; published 1941–1957. Format 9 × 11 1/4 in (22.9 × 28.6 cm), four-colour offset, wire-stitched (PGDA). Per Heller (PRINT), Beall does the covers from 1944 to 1948; editor Dr. A. Garrard Macleod gives him freedom to experiment with photography, montage, illustration and typography. The benchmark is the cover on the cancer theme; AGI dates it to 1948. Bottom right is hand-signed "Lester Beall" — the cover's authorship is his. Notes on sources: PGDA for issue 2 lists Will Burtin and Lester Beall as art directors (the art director runs the visual side of an issue). MCB also holds issues 1949–1951 (Scope: Basic Science Review). Who did which issues after 1948 has not been established.
2. Composition — reading of the work: three layers. The base across the whole plane is a dense collage of 19th-century engravings of human heads — portraits, profiles, hairstyles — pale grey-green. Over that, in the middle, a thin black wire globe with meridians and parallels, spanning almost the full width. Over the globe are two crabs, red and yellow, overlapped like transparent plates: where they intersect, orange appears. On the equator of the globe is the word cancer. On the right is a green arc, like a slice of the globe; top left is the logotype. The eye enters on the red crab (the most saturated mass, left of centre), slides along the yellow one to the right and stops on the word. Reading order: people (who it hits) → world (where) → cancer (what).
3. Colour — reading of the work: the base is document tone (grey engraving); red and yellow are flat, saturated and belong only to the mark. The overlap yields a third colour without a third printing plate. Same division of labour as on the REA posters: the document stays uncoloured, colour is the voice. The green in the logotype and arc takes up too little area to enter the measured palette.
4. Typography — reading of the work: the logotype SCOPE is a typographic collage — S solid green, c red outlined (only the contour), smaller and dropped, O solid green, P solid black, E green outlined. The letters are of different heights, with no shared baseline. Dada and wood type in five letters. Against this, cancer is a calm letterspaced lowercase italic, black (italic = slanted type, close to handwriting). Loud logotype, quiet title. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — cancer is a world problem and has a face. Latin cancer means crab — the animal the disease was named after. Beall draws the word, not a tumour. To the professional audience he gives an idea, not a diagram.
6. Why exactly this way — physicians don't need the disease explained. The cover must be a sign that the journal is serious and current. The editor gave him freedom (Heller).
7. What would kill it — medical illustration (cell, tumour, anatomy): it becomes a textbook. Second killer: opaque colours — the crabs would hide behind one another; the overlap is what gives depth and the third colour.

Principles: Transparent layer as depth Rebus forces performance Photomontage plus poster colour

Issue 2 (PGDA): a black boomerang-like shape with about ten coloured "little windows" — One carrier, many units Colour marks difference, not mood. Authorship of that issue is shared with Will Burtin.

MCB zbirka · slika

1. What it is — poster for the ocean liner SS United States: lithograph, 76 × 55.5 cm, around 1952 (MCB). The ship has sailed since 1952; the year 1951, cited elsewhere, is the start of the contract, not of the poster. From 1951, through the agency J. Walter Thompson, Beall does all the line's promotional material for four years — posters, menus, napkins, bed linen — and makes at least six posters for it. Notes on sources: this fact is second-hand — auction descriptions (Swann, Poster Group) cite Beall's monograph.
2. Composition — reading of the work: five horizontal zones. At the top a black band with the ship's name and route; below it a cream field with text; then a fragment of the ship — only two tilted red funnels and a piece of white superstructure with a row of windows; then the black mass of the hull; at the bottom a blue band with the line's name. Across the middle runs a thin red-orange line: it starts bottom left, loops around the text and exits as an arrow top right, over the edge of the black band. The loop frames the claim, the arrow throws it out of the format.
3. Colour — reading of the work: cream, near-black, red-orange and blue — a three-colour scheme again. The funnels and the arrow are the same colour: speed belongs to the ship.
4. Typography — reading of the work: everything is condensed bold grotesque in capitals. The hierarchy has four levels — FASTEST the biggest, then the ship's name and the line's name, then LESS THAN 5 DAYS TO EUROPE, then letterspaced small lines (route, air conditioning). One typeface, a wide range of sizes. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — fastest — and immediately proof in a number: less than 5 days to Europe.
6. Why exactly this way — by 1952 the ship is already competing with the aeroplane; the poster sells speed, not comfort. Beall doesn't draw the ship but movement: the tilted funnels and the arrow carry direction, and the ship is only the cut-off proof that it's real. This is drastic cropping — a frame that cuts off most of the subject.
7. What would kill it — a realistic side view of the whole ship: it becomes a postcard. Beall precisely avoids that — the ship is a fragment.

Principles: Flat colour reads at distance Arrow and diagonal as motion Drastic cropping

1. What it is — letterhead of his own studio (printed writing paper with the sender's name and address): letterpress, 25.4 × 18.4 cm (MoMA 1153.2015, Elaine Lustig Cohen Collection). (Letterpress: an impression from raised type and blocks.) Preserved as a letter to Alvin Lustig; Brodovitch has an identical piece, also a letter to Lustig. The letter's content is itself a document: Beall, for the Advertising Creative Circle of London, is collecting American ads for an exhibition alongside the International Advertising Conference (7–13 July 1951) and asks Lustig for four examples. Here Beall works as curator. The address on the letterhead is 580 Fifth Avenue, New York — in May 1951 the studio is still in the city (see biography).
2. Composition — reading of the work: only two elements. Top right a large monogram LB (monogram = mark made of initials). Along the left edge, vertical bottom to top, the address in one line. Between them is a blank sheet for typed text. The mark top right and the address bottom left hold a diagonal balance across the void; nothing is centred.
3. Colour — reading of the work: two — L black, B blue; the address blue. The paper takes up about 80% of the surface (measured).
4. Typography — reading of the work: LB is a very bold classicist serif of high contrast — thin serifs, massive vertical strokes (classicist serif: type of the Bodoni type, with a large difference between thin and thick strokes). The address is italic, all lowercase, including the name ("lester beall"). The letter's text is typewritten. Specific typeface not confirmed.
5. Message — one's own identity as proof of ability. For an independent designer this is the only portfolio that arrives by post.
6. Why exactly this way — two colours, small format, frequent use: the system is tested on the cheapest carrier. The vertical address doesn't take width away from the typeface — all the space stays for the content.
7. What would kill it — the address centred in a header below the mark. The sheet would gain a "head" and lose its tension; the letter would begin lower.

Principles: Identity is a manual

AGI zapis · znak 1600 px

1. What it is — identity for International Paper Company: a mark and a graphic standards manual. Cooper Hewitt explicitly credits him as author of the manual; AGI calls him an early innovator of the manual as the main tool of identity. PRINT and LogoLounge cite Richard Rogers as co-author of the mark.
2. Composition of the mark — reading of the work: a thick black circle, and inside it a single unbroken line that simultaneously draws a tree and the letters I and P. The crown is a triangle; the trunk is a vertical stroke that is at the same time an "I"; the left diagonal line closes the "P". Everything is the same stroke weight and everything touches the circle. The triangle also reads as an arrow pointing upward. The mark works in one colour, at small size and in negative — which was the brief. Per Wikipedia, it had to be simple enough to be stencilled onto both timber and lumber headed for processing.
3. Colour — the mark is single-colour. The palette of the system from the manual is not known from the available sources.
4. Typography — the mark has no letters other than those built into the drawing. For the system's typeface, the design studio Trekk, which had the manual in hand, cites Venus Medium Extended; another source does not confirm this.
5. Message — the company as one voice in a hundred places. The message is not in the mark but in consistency.
6. Why exactly this way — a large corporation with many plants and print shops cannot run on taste; it has to run on rule. Hence the manual.
7. What would kill it — delivering only the mark. Without the manual the identity falls apart on the twentieth application — and that is the only application that counts.

Principles: Identity is a manual One stroke, two meanings Mark works in one colour

The mark is not eternal: International Paper used it for 63 years. In 2023, for the company's 125th anniversary, it was replaced with a new mark by the agency Sia/Addison (PRINT, LogoLounge). Not even the best mark survives every change in a firm.