Dedication, Will Rogers Field, Oklahoma City, June 28, 1941
The pattern
This still is filed under Event symbol poster.
Define
A symbol or allegory that makes an event feel like a destination. Not a timetable. A magnet.
Mechanism
Attraction by emblem. Date and venue ride under a picture that already means come.
Verdict
We are filling a room, a night, or a run of dates
Why it works
The portrait is the headline: the poster spends its whole top half on a recognisable face and lets the words behave as a caption, which works only because the name being honoured was already known to every reader. The script setting of Will Rogers against the rigid caps of DEDICATION and FIELD imitates a signature, so the name reads as a person inside a phrase that is otherwise bureaucratic. Flat separated colour blocks build a modelled likeness with four screens and no halftone, the standard Federal Art Project method for putting a portrait on a wall poster.
Steal this when
You are announcing something named after a person whose face the audience already knows. Give the portrait the top half, set the person's name in a script that reads as a signature, and let the institutional words sit in plain caps around it.