You’ve probably all seen posters for fictitious tourist destinations made in the style of vintage (say, ~1930s) advertising posters. Examples include this (link is to Etsy) poster for Star Wars’ Mos Eisley. NASA’s JPL has published an entire range (link to JPL website) of motifs in this style for various celestial bodies.
These posters have become really common, and it seems every (existing) second-rate real tourist destination now has them on postcards etc. Is there a name for this style? Does anybody know when and how the trend started?
Retro to what is rarely clearly specified. It’s also contextual — a retro travel poster is implicitly understood as having a different period aesthetic compared to a retro album cover, for example.
The style is commonly known as the “REA” or “WPA” style as it was used for promotional posters for the Rural Electrification Administration and Works Projects Administration, although it originated and is most commonly associated with the promotional campaign for the National Parks Service by the Chicago Art Institute-trained Dorothy Waugh. The simple color palette (often just 4 or 5 colors), stylized figures and objects, and often exaggerated sweeping views made the style easy to produce and cheap to print, as well as distinctive.
The modern ‘retro’ trend for this goes back at least to University of Redlands astronomer and artist Tyler Nordgren’s collaboration with the National Park Service for their “Half The Park Is After Dark” campaign, and more recently for the solar eclipses. Nordgren made a series of posters for various US National Parks promoting astronomy and stargazing opportunities, and also produced a short series for fictional “Planetary Parks” for Mars, Pluto and various Galilean and Saturnian moons. Nordgren, unsurprisingly, is also an advocate for the Dark Sky Preserve movement.
Since then, other artists have taken up the style (as well as Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne) to create retro-fictional, alt-sci historical, and solarpunk style posters and artworks. JPL’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau put out a series of Visions of the Future for various planets and moons, and made the image files available for public use which are more of a kind of Art Deco-ish solar punk style which I find generally a little too busy but still interesting.
Retro relative to our post-MadMen-age advertising ways, harkening back to pre-1960s – they variously incorporate elements of Art Moderne, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and styling tropes from mid-20th century commercial illustration.
This is a phenomenal post. I’ve previously tried to get AI image generators to produce these types of posters, but without those specific bits of knowledge I was never able to quite nail it. Thanks very much!
In addition to the excellent post by @Stranger_On_A_Train I’d like to somehow use the concept of pastiche, though the wiki article does not reference art/pics.
The late great artist Bruce McCall did a lot of old style stuff, including travel posters at times. The label for his work seems to have been “retro-futurism”.
He did stuff from The National Lampoon to The New Yorker with quite a few covers. His books are quite interesting. I especially like the one he did with David Letterman. He did a TED talk on his style.
“Retro-futurism” isn’t so much a specific style as a genre, and could be anything from Buck Rogers-inspired Raygun Gothic or a Moderne-flavored Dieselpunk to a Syd Mead-esque Midcentury Modtech or even now an ‘Eighties-style Cyberpunk with ‘hackers’ using chunky keyboards and sporting colored mohawks conversing with Max Headroom-type animated AI. Essentially, any defined style that was considered ‘futuristic’ back in the day and is now obviously dated but transferred into the present or near future qualifies as “retro-futuristic”.
One of the styles I’ve noticed recently in National Park gift shops is the “geometric art print”. They remind me of a set you’d see in a Wes Anderson movie.
Another type of iconic tourist art are those postcards that read "Greetings from [city name]. I’ve seen newly created billboards or murals that copied the form. I used to wonder who created those and recently learned it was a guy named Curt Teich.
Some of his nature pictures remind me of the Group of Seven, influential artists from Canada caturing the northern wilderness. (Although their works seem more about brush strokes than posterized bright colours)
(They also did not escape parody, National Lampoon once published “Tommy Thompson’s last painting” which looked abstract until you realized it was the bow of an overturned canoe and an artist palette and brushes floating - Thompson disappeared canoeing in northern Ontario…)
Posterization is where the different shades are separated to a few specific shade levels. I don’t know if there’s a specific name for when those shade levels are then made into more distinctive colours, like the Obama Hope poster.
You have been tricked there. They are actually the same place. Buckinghamshire is pronounced Hampshire, just as Mousehole is mow-zel and Alnwick is an-ick. Presumably the Hampshire book was designed for foreign tourists.
Although this may be slightly less factual than most responses to Factual Questions.
