Jane Avril (serpent poster) - poster
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 negative space is the design. Roughly half the sheet is untouched paper, which makes a black silhouette read as a single shape at any distance and gives the eye nothing to do except follow the S-curve of the body. The serpent doubles as decoration, as the line that carries the eye from hem to face, and as a shock device that made the image memorable without depicting the act. Setting the name small in ordinary type rather than display lettering is the confident move: the picture is asserted as the recognisable thing and the words are only a caption confirming it.
Steal this when
Steal this when the person is the product and their look is already distinctive; commit the whole surface to one silhouette and let the name shrink. Also steal the single-ornament trick when a flat dark shape needs one line of movement running through it to stop it reading as a blob.