A series of Aim Higher days in January 2010. I've done blogs with some of these students before, so now we're moving to my specialist subject - posters!
Studying WW2 posters since my A-Levels, completed PhD in 2004, so seen as the world’s expert on these posters. Have transferred a lot of my knowledge into communicating digitally – often think a webpage is quite like a poster – need to get the information across quickly.
How many have seen this poster – also been subverted! Love subverted designs…
PhD focused particularly upon the posters produced by MoI… This cartoon by Fougasse – well known then, and his posters are collectors items.
On the board – 2 minutes to sketch out ideas – must it be on paper, etc.?! Does it need to be mass produced? Does it need to be in colour? Does it need to have text? Images, etc? Remember – doesn’t work alone – usually just one of many media, so what might a cohesive strategy look like?!
Need to make a “Call to Action” First poster – tells you where to go for more information, shows what the women are doing by replacing the men, and uses a quick slogan with an emphasis on NOW to encourage action… Second poster – more ideological – aimed at older men Third poster – was seen as ‘too glamorous’ and might attract ‘the wrong kind’ of girls, so was banned – therefore making it very successful!
The first of these was ‘name calling’, which would give a bad name to items, ‘individuals, groups, nations, races, policies, beliefs and ideals’ (hereafter ‘product’) in the hope that the audience would reject, rather than rationally consider, them. The second was ‘glittering generalities’, where viewers were expected to associate, without questioning, products with a concept such as ‘democracy’. This would assume that the propagandist understood the term in the same way as the viewer. The third was ‘transfer’, whether the authority, sanction and prestige of something the audience was likely to respect or revere (such as science or religion) was applied to the product being promoted. This could be used both positively and negatively as, for example, the Nazis racist policies were rationalised by both science and religion. Bartlett notes that social prestige could be externally conferred onto propaganda from a ‘social institution which is already widely revered in their society, or which has already established some permanent character of unchallenged authority’. Symbolism used in propaganda was largely borrowed from established institutions, rather than being a product of the propaganda itself. The fourth propaganda device of the IPA was the ‘testimonial’, where a respected or hated person would endorse or refute a product. Often a form of celebrity endorsement, the IPA asked viewers to question what qualifications such celebrities had for giving an endorsement. The fifth was ‘plain folks’, where the propagandist would attempt to convince the audience that their ideas were good because they are just ‘one of the people’. For example, in the Second World War, Churchill, unlike Hitler, generally appeared in public in civilian clothes, rather than a military uniform. The sixth was ‘card stacking’, which involved the selection and use ‘of facts and falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements to give the best or the worst possible case for an idea, program, person or product’. The seventh was the ‘band wagon’, which would appeal to the innate desire to ‘follow the crowd’. Viewers, usually within a particular group, would be shown that ‘everyone else is doing it’, and ask why they are not.