May 20th, 2026

Celebrating Melbourne Design Week with Vintage Posters

“Widmer claimed a practice of basic design, grounded in reduction, coherence, and legibility. Every form, every colour, every proportion carried meaning.”

– Centre Pompidou

To mark Melbourne Design Week, Letitia Morris Gallery pulled together a selection of graphic design posters that show off the minimalism, colour and typography of the 1960s and 1970s. The spotlight fell on two European designers, Jean Widmer and Friedemann Hauss, whose work grew out of the Swiss design tradition and its belief that good design should be clear, useful and quietly beautiful. Their posters are a reminder of how much power sits in a simple grid, a strong symbol and a well chosen colour.

‘Paris Construit’ – Jean Widmer

What Is Melbourne Design Week

Melbourne Design Week is one of the largest design events in the Asia Pacific region, a stretch of exhibitions, talks and installations that celebrate design in all its forms. It is the kind of occasion that invites you to look again at the objects and images we usually take for granted. For a gallery that deals in vintage posters, it was a natural moment to show how the design thinking of half a century ago still shapes the way we see things today.

Rather than chase the newest work, the gallery looked back to the 1960s and 1970s, a period when a particular way of designing reached its peak. The posters chosen share a family resemblance. They are clean, confident and economical, and they prove that restraint can be every bit as striking as excess.

Jean Widmer

Jean Widmer and the Art of Reduction

The gallery gave pride of place to Jean Widmer, a designer born in 1929 who built his career in Paris. His philosophy can be summed up in three words that guided almost everything he made: reduction, coherence and legibility. Every element in a Widmer design had to earn its place. Nothing was there for decoration alone.

Widmer drew heavily on Swiss typography and minimalist principles, always putting function ahead of ornament. He favoured clean grids, bold symbols and strong, unified visual identities, and he became especially associated with cultural institutions and public projects. Two of his works featured in the gallery’s selection, “Georges Pompidou” and “Paris Construit,” both showing his gift for saying a great deal with very little.

‘PRISUNIC ETE 70’ by Friedemann Hauss 1970

The International Typographic Style

Widmer’s approach did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of a movement that took shape after the Second World War, when Swiss and German designers pioneered what became known as the International Typographic Style. Their aim was communication that felt neutral and objective, free of the persuasive flourishes that had come before. It is the same design language that shaped the mid century Qantas travel posters by Harry Rogers, which shows how far these ideas travelled.

To get there, they relied on a handful of tools that still underpin graphic design today. Modular grids brought structure. Asymmetrical layouts brought movement and interest. Sans serif typefaces brought a plain, honest clarity. The combination produced work that was harmonious and easy to read, and it spread far beyond Switzerland to become a genuinely international language of design. When you look at a Widmer poster, you are looking at that language spoken fluently.

Friedemann Hauss and Prisunic

The second designer in the spotlight was Friedemann Hauss, a German who moved to Paris in 1967 after studying graphic art in Basel, one of the great centres of Swiss design education. His featured work was “PRISUNIC ETE 70,” created in 1970 for the French retailer Prisunic.

This was a summer fashion advertisement, and it did its job out in the open. It appeared across Parisian streets and in the subway, where thousands of people would have passed it every day. The design was admired enough to win the prize for outstanding poster design in 1970, a fitting reward for work that had to be both commercially effective and genuinely good looking. It is a lovely example of how the discipline of Swiss design could be turned to something playful and popular.

Why These Posters Still Speak

What ties this selection together is a shared belief that good design does not need to shout. A clear grid, a single strong image and a considered use of colour can carry a message further than any amount of clutter. That lesson has not aged. If anything, it feels more relevant now, in a world crowded with visual noise, than it did when these posters were first pasted up.

There is also something satisfying about seeing this work in its original printed form rather than as an image on a screen. These posters were made to be experienced at full size, with real ink on real paper, and a lot of their character lives in that physical presence. The scale, the crispness of the type and the flatness of the colour all read differently in person, and they carry a quiet authority that reproductions tend to flatten out.

Celebrating them during Melbourne Design Week was a way of connecting the past and the present, and of reminding us that the best design tends to last. For anyone who loves this era, the pieces are available to view and to purchase through Letitia Morris Gallery.

May 14th, 2026

Spotlight on Boris Bucan

Boris Bucan

Boris Bucan is one of Croatias most respected and highly regarded artists. His works offer the viewer an opportunity to experience a true master of poster art; often incorporating surrealist elements in his work, Bucan often uses colour and psychedelic patterning to attached the viewers attention.

Boris Bucan is one of Croatia’s most respected and celebrated artists, known for posters that blend surrealist imagery with vivid colour and bold, almost psychedelic pattern. Born in Zagreb in 1947 and trained in the early 1970s, he built a career that moved fluidly between fine art and graphic design, creating striking work for theatres, galleries and national broadcasters. His large scale posters, often finished with metallic gold and lettering that runs along the edges, are highly collectable and instantly recognisable.

Early Life and Training

Boris Bucan was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1947, and the city stayed central to his story. He completed his formal artistic training in 1972 at the Academy of Fine Arts, where his studies stretched well beyond traditional painting. He worked with photography, film, video and graphic design, a broad grounding that shaped the way he thought about images for the rest of his career.

That mix of disciplines mattered. It gave him a habit of moving between mediums without much fuss, and it pushed his work out of the quiet of the gallery and into the noise of everyday public life. For Bucan, an image was not something to be hung and admired in silence. It was something to be seen on a wall, in a street, in the middle of a city going about its business.

From the Gallery to the Street

Bucan first drew serious attention in the late 1960s with a series of public installations around Zagreb. At the time, taking art out of the gallery and placing it in shared public space was a pointed gesture. It questioned who art was for and where it belonged, and it fit neatly into a wider current of artists across Europe who were asking the same thing.

This instinct for the public and the direct never really faded. It is one reason his posters feel so confident. He was comfortable with scale, comfortable competing with the visual clutter of a city, and comfortable making work that had to grab a passerby in a second or two. A poster, after all, does not get a second chance at a first impression.

A Designer for the Stage

Alongside his fine art practice, Bucan worked steadily and seriously as a graphic designer. He produced pieces for galleries, for theatrical productions, for Croatian Radio and Television, and for the National Theatre. Theatre in particular seemed to suit him. The drama of the stage gave him licence to be bold, strange and expressive in ways that a more conventional brief might not allow.

His standing in this field was high enough that he represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale with a group of theatre posters, one of the most prestigious platforms in the art world. To be chosen for that stage says a great deal about how his peers viewed him, and about how far a well made poster could carry an artist’s reputation.

It is worth remembering the setting he worked in. The former Yugoslavia had a remarkably strong poster tradition, and its designers enjoyed a creative freedom that produced some of the most inventive graphic work in Europe during those decades. Bucan was a leading figure within that scene, not an outsider to it, and his posters carry the confidence of an artist who knew he was working at the front of his field.

The Bucan Look

What makes a Bucan poster a Bucan poster? Scale is the first thing. He thought big, and his compositions have a commanding physical presence. Then there is the surrealist streak, the sense that ordinary forms have been bent slightly out of shape into something dreamlike. His colour is rich and unafraid, often pushed into psychedelic territory that catches the eye from a distance.

The finishing details are where his signature really shows. Metallic gold accents give his posters a glow that shifts as you move around them. Lettering frequently runs along the very edges of the sheet rather than sitting politely in the centre, framing the image and turning the type into part of the composition itself. Put those elements together and you get work that is unmistakable, and that holds its own against almost anything else on a wall. If you enjoy this kind of bold graphic design, it sits comfortably alongside the mid century work featured in our Melbourne Design Week selection.

Collecting Bucan

Letitia Morris Gallery holds several of Bucan’s recognised and sought after posters, available to view and to purchase. For collectors drawn to bold graphic art with a genuine sense of history, his work offers a rare combination. It is the product of a serious fine artist, it carries the energy of the theatre and the street, and it looks superb on a wall. These are posters that reward a long second look.

They also happen to be forgiving pieces to live with. Bucan’s images are graphic enough to anchor a large room, yet their colour and pattern sit comfortably alongside both modern and more traditional interiors. Framed well and kept out of harsh direct sunlight, an original poster of this kind will hold its colour for many years, which is part of what makes it such a rewarding thing to own rather than simply to admire. To see what is currently in stock or to ask about a particular piece, contact the gallery.

View our entire range here: Boris Bucan