Folies Bergère, Fleur de Lotus, 1893, by Jules Chéret
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
The lettering is drawn by the same hand and in the same ink as the figure, so type and image never separate into a picture with a caption stuck on - the modern poster's founding move. Chéret sandwiches the picture between two red lines, venue at the top and show at the bottom, which gives a viewer crossing the street a reading order without a single rule or box. Colour is a hierarchy: one saturated warm figure, everything behind her drained to ghost-grey, so the eye cannot land anywhere else. The repeated silhouettes are motion drawn as a sequence rather than a blur, cheap to print in a single flat tint and far more legible at distance than modelling would be.
Steal this when
Use this when the thing you are selling is an experience with no product shot - an event, a show, a place - and the job is to make one figure move at fifty paces. Draw the words in the same hand as the picture, bracket the image top and bottom with them, and drain everything that is not the hero to a single flat neutral.