The lotos, a monthly magazine of literature and art education, April (1896) - 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 figure-ground reversal is the whole trick - the flower is the unprinted paper and the leaf is solid ink, so the poster gets maximum contrast from one colour and reads as a silhouette at street distance. Setting the subtitle directly into the black mass turns copy into texture, so a long descriptive line does not fight the image for attention. Switching to red only for the price, month, year and address builds a hard second layer for the information a newsstand buyer needs, letting the sheet be scanned for facts after it has been noticed for the picture. Running the stems out through the bottom rule breaks the frame the same way a Japanese print does, which keeps a dense, heavily bordered sheet from feeling boxed in.
Steal this when
Use this when you have one colour beyond black and a lot of information to carry. Reverse the hero shape out of a solid mass for the attention layer, bury the descriptive line inside that mass, and reserve the second colour exclusively for price, date and where to get it.