Noah, a human comedy, WPA poster, 1936
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
Silkscreen forced the designer to work in flat separated colours, and the answer was radical simplification, every animal reduced to one silhouette and one flat tint. The subtitle A Human Comedy is doing the positioning work, it pre-empts the assumption that a Bible subject means a solemn evening. Type is hand-drawn to match the woodcut flatness of the animals, so lettering and image read as one surface rather than caption over picture. The response device, street corner plus telephone exchange, is set at poster scale so it is legible from across the avenue, which is where this was read.
Steal this when
Use this when a familiar or heavy subject is being treated in an unexpected register, and let a subtitle plus a comic image do the repositioning in the first second. Also the model for cheap multi-colour production where flat separations and hand-cut type are the budget rather than a style choice.