Midland railway of England - 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 service is never described; the passenger is. Penfield sells the railway as a class marker by drawing only its customers, so the buyer reads status first and transport second. The luggage labels do the factual work a body copy block would otherwise do - they state the route, and they date the journey as already made, which is a subtler claim than a promise. Setting the name as a descending three-line stair in the empty upper corner exploits the negative space left by the walking figures, so type and image interlock instead of competing, and the flat orange ground unifies them into one silhouette that survives reduction.
Steal this when
You sell a commodity service where the real purchase is identity - transport, banking, membership, business class. Draw the customer, not the service, and let a small prop carry the factual claim.