Australian Qantas Original Posters!
These posters are designed Australian artist Harry Rogers (1929-2012). Harry designed many different poster series to promote Qantas as Australia’s premier international carrier from the 1950s through 1970s.
From the series on animals, commemorating Qantas’ inaugural round the world service in the 1950s. Qantas first issued this series as screen-prints in the 1950s, using a Constellation plane in the upper right corner as part of the design.
Australian poster artist, Harry Rogers, studied at the East Sydney Technical College, Darlinghurst (now the National Art School), before he became a household name in the poster world. His love of animation is reflected in his poster designs. As a freelance designer, Rogers enjoyed a long and productive association with Qantas, designing the Qantas logo-font in the mid-1960s and devised many different poster series from the 1950s through to the 1970s which promoted Qantas as Australia’s premier international carrier. Qantas remained Rogers’ main client for more than 3 decades from the early 1950s through to 1985.
After World War II, designers in Switzerland and Germany pushed design into a cohesive movement called Swiss Design, or the International Typographic Style. These designers sought a neutral and objective approach; one that emphasised the subject by simplifying the images to a motif or simply a combination of colours. They constructed modular grids of horizontal and vertical lines and used them as a structure to emphasise elements in their designs. These designers preferred photography (another technical advance that drove the development of graphic design) as a source for imagery because of its machine-made precision. They created asymmetrical layouts, and they embraced the prewar designers’ preference for sans-serif typefaces. The elemental forms of the style possessed harmony and clarity.
