With our Poster 2023 competition in full swing, we’ve received so many artistic, colorful entries that there’s something for everyone to hang on their walls!
Starting off, we have “Re_: Restart, Revive, Recover” (above, left), submitted by Michael Braley of Braley Design, based in the United States. This entry was initially created for the Madrid Gráfica, a competition hosted in Madrid, Spain. Organized by the Madrid Business Forum, the Madrid City Council, and DIMAD, it aims to show the value of graphics in visual communication, culture, and the economy in our society, and does so by inviting the best of graphic designers around the world to enter their work into a wide and varied exhibitions program. With the competition in its fifth year, the design theme for 2021 was “Restart, Revive, Recover”, fitting giving the chaos that was 2020. Against a black backdrop, three different colored lights overlap each other. In the center is another smaller image, also of lights but using other colors. It suggests almost a “restart” of the initial image, like how many are trying to restart their lives after Covid. In the end, Braley’s poster was selected as one of the top 100.
Swiss designer Stephan Bundi designed “Die Marquise von O…” (top right) for the Theater Orchester Biel Solothurn’s production of the play of the same name. Based off the novella The Marquise of O, written by German writer Heinrich von Kleist, the show centers around the widowed Marquise O, who finds herself pregnant after an attack on her family’s home during the Napoleonic Wars. Despite her proclaiming her innocence and that she doesn’t know who the father is, she is cast off by society and left to fend for herself. By means of a newspaper ad and help from her still loving mother, the father is tracked down, the two are married, and they eventually fall in love. However, that doesn’t change how the illegitimate birth after being raped brings the marquise into an almost insoluble conflict. Bundi uses a palette of different blues to color the baby carriege, but offsetting the coolness are the red carriege tires, which are interlocked to symbolize both how the child ties the Marquise to her rapist as well as their eventual “marriage ties”. With such a striking image, it makes sense it was also used for advertisements and the program brochure.
