Background
The National Parks speak for themselves, so long as you get a chance to visit. For the National Parks Service, then, the task of getting Americans and people from around the world to go to our 60+ national parks are one of their most important tasks. Today, the National Parks have a unified design system, the much heralded Unigrid System, that affords all of their materials a consistent style. But before the introduction of this design system in the 1970s, the NPS still produced beautiful work.
I chose to analyze a Yellowstone National Parks silkscreen print poster from the 1930s. A little background: coming out of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a number of large public works projects across the US to both provide jobs (and paychecks, thus stimulus) to the large numbers of unemployed people, and to focus them on issues of national importance. One of those public works projects was the Federal Art Project, that stepped in to “spread the word” about the US National Parks after another public works project, the Civilian Conservation Corps completed preservation projects at the parks (read here for more background). I visited Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons this summer and came back with a renewed sense of appreciation for the parks and the NPS who maintains that great treasure of ours.
Grid System and Heirarchy
Even before the unigrid system formalized a design system across the NPS, this public works artist — who is still anonymous — adhered to a grid as well. As is apparent in the illustration below, all text occupies the top and bottom 20% of the poster, leaving the rest of the poster available for illustration. Old Faithful Geyser occupies the left half of the page, while the set of services provided by the park rangers lives in the right half of the page, forming a jigsaw-like contrast. The Parks logo is dead center, as is the center line of the “W” in Yellowstone. Even though this is a hand-drawn illustration, there is a very clean, organized aesthetic that accompanies the soft, organic feel of the rest of the poster due to the artist’s use of a grid system.
The grid serves to aid the composition and visual hierarchy of the poster. The big, blue skies of Yellowstone sweep across the page, while Old Faithful, the most popular attraction at the park, plays the starring role with its signature massive eruption. The dark contrast at the bottom of the page further reinforces the prominence of Old Faithful and allows the text to catch the eye second.
Remember, the poster is a part of a marketing campaign to help the American people both discover the National Parks and boost morale during a tough time. The poster very effectively captures the grandeur and simplicity of Yellowstone at once while passing along important information about the services offered by the US Federal Government - an important political objective for FDR.
Color
Part of the effectiveness of the poster is its color scheme. The colors gradually flow across a gradient from a dark stone blue at the base of Old Faithful to off-white steam spouting into the sky. The sky blue and text work well together— the text feels like it is cut out from the sky, just a transparency of the deeper blue. Text, lighter sky shading and shadowing for Old Faitfhul’s spout are all the same shade of blue, which lends a consistency and peacefulness to the illustration.
Typography
There is only one font used in the poster— Natura, which you can see below. The letter “A” is among the most distinctive letters in this generally stylized text, and focusing on the A shows how handmade this poster really is. Although the text is all the same font, it varies in size among the various headers and footers. However, as you can see in annotations 1, 2, and 3 as well as 4, 5, and 6, even when the letters are meant to be exactly the same, they vary a bit in width. In the age of digital printmaking, this sort of “error” would need to be intentional, otherwise it would likely not occur. In the 1930s era of analog (but still mass-produced) printmaking, this was unlikely to be intentional, but is nevertheless charming.
