The Golden Age of the Poster, 1880-1918

This collection of posters compiled by the library at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design is an amazing trove of turn-of-the-century design and illustration.

In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost. Skilled illustrators and graphic designers — such as Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — quickly began to exploit this new technology; the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1890s through the First World War) was the spectacular result.

• design
• posters