Here is a claim I want you to argue with.
A poster and a postcard are the same design at two different sizes. If your postcard falls apart when you hold it at arm’s length, or your poster falls apart when you shrink it down to the size of your hand, the problem was never the size. The problem is that the design never decided what matters most.
Then. Josef Müller-Brockmann.
Müller-Brockmann was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland, in 1914 and opened his own studio in Zurich in 1936. In 1950 he made the first of many concert posters for the Tonhalle, the concert hall in Zurich. The series became known as Musica Viva, and over the years the posters got more and more abstract. He used shapes, scale, rhythm and repetition to translate the structure of the music, with no illustration and no decoration. He went on to write Grid Systems in Graphic Design in 1981, and his favorite typeface was Akzidenz-Grotesk.
In a 1995 interview with Eye magazine, he said that in his work he always aspired to “a distinct arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements, the clear identification of priorities.” Read that last part again. The clear identification of priorities. That is hierarchy, and it is the whole job. Before color, before texture, before any clever idea, he decided what gets seen first, what gets seen second and what gets seen third, and then he built a grid to hold that order in place.
Josef Müller-Brockmann, background (Wikipedia)
Reputations: Josef Müller-Brockmann, the Eye magazine interview, Winter 1995
Now. Mike Joyce, and Swissted.
You met Swissted in the Weeks 1, 2 and 3 post. Here is a closer look. Swissted is an ongoing project by Mike Joyce, a designer who runs Stereotype Design in New York City. He takes vintage flyers for punk, hardcore, new wave and indie rock shows and redesigns them as International Typographic Style posters. Every one is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk medium, not Helvetica. And every single show on the site actually happened.
Think about what a show flyer was. It was small, cheap and made for one night, and it had to get a band name, a venue and a date across fast. Joyce keeps that same information and rebuilds the hierarchy with a grid, one typeface and a lot of space. In 2018, ten Swissted prints were added to the permanent collection of Poster House, right here in New York City. Open a few and ask the same question each time: what do I see first, and how did he make that happen?
The Swissted shop, with 150 designs to browse
A rabbit hole, if you want one.
Jules Chéret is called the father of the modern poster. He was a French lithographer who made vivid color posters for Paris cabarets, music halls and theaters in the late 1800s. In 1895 he became the editor of a series called Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, which means the masters of the poster. It was made up of smaller reproductions, about 16 by 11 inches, of work by ninety-seven artists, and it was delivered to subscribers in packages of four every month until 1900. Somebody figured out a long time ago that people want a poster in their hands, not only on a wall.
Postcards have their own odd history. The earliest known picture postcard is a hand-painted card the writer Theodore Hook mailed to himself in 1840 with a Penny Black stamp. The picture is a caricature of post office workers, and he probably did it as a joke on the postal service. Another detail you can use: early postcards had plain backs, and the divided back, with one side for the message and the other for the address, came to American cards in 1907. Whoever designed that back was solving the same layout problem you are solving right now.
If you want to see posters in person, Poster House is a museum devoted to them, and its Exhibitions page lists what is on view and what is coming up, including Sculpting Sound, Günther Kieser’s Music Posters, listed to open on November 12, 2026.
Jules Chéret, background (Wikipedia)
Les Maîtres de l’Affiche (Wikipedia)
Postcard, history and terms (Wikipedia)
Your move this week.
Open your postcard front in Photoshop. If you still have the poster from Assignment #1, you can try this on that too. Zoom out until the design is about the size of a postage stamp, and write down, in order, the first three places your eye lands. Does that order match what you planned? If not, change the size or the weight of one element and look again. Save both versions, since the assignment asks you to iterate anyway.
Bring one answer to class: what did your eye land on first, and was it what you meant it to be?
