Event symbol poster

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.

The big idea

The flood story played for laughs: a white-bearded Noah rowing an ark crammed with a giraffe, zebra, elephant and donkey tells the audience this is A Human Comedy.

The offer

The W.P.A. Federal Theatre Negro Unit's Noah at the Lafayette Theatre, Seventh Ave. & 131st St., with the telephone number Tilling. 5-1424. No date or price is printed.

Lines from the ad

NOAH

A HUMAN COMEDY

W.P.A. FEDERAL THEATRE NEGRO UNIT

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.

The emotion

Written to Amusement. It makes the Say move.

White-bearded Noah rowing an ark crammed with a giraffe, zebra, elephant and donkey turns the flood into the joke, and A HUMAN COMEDY lands the play's point with it.