When I moved to Minnesota in 1986, I brought this giant poster with me:
It was an in-store display at a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., circa 1985. It's permanently mounted to a light-weight, rigid material, and it's about 6x9'. (This image of the poster doesn't show its full height — there's more of the desk, plus a Safeway logo, hiding below the edge of a table in my basement.) If I remember correctly, it was hanging from the ceiling in the store and I asked someone in store management if I could have it when they were done with the campaign. I don't remember how they ended up giving it to me. Maybe I found it in the dumpster. Who knows, but I know I didn't steal it.
If you're attuned to fashions, you can guess its vintage from the woman's hairstyle, blouse, earrings, and particularly glasses. If you know anything about how graphic images (of many types) used to be produced, the tools she's working with are also a clue, though less time-specific.
I think she's supposed to be doing some kind of drafting or creating an architectural drawing, but I liked it because the tools are very similar to the ones I used for keylining (paste-up). I had a Mayline on a drawing table almost exactly like this one. I had a proportion wheel identical to the one shown.
I also liked the type in the headline. It's Plantin, an oldstyle typeface I had become aware of not too long before then. It's set in a quintessentially mid-1980s way, with tight letter spacing and tight line spacing. I thought the whole thing looked so cool at the time.
It's hard to remember why I felt obsessed enough with this poster to go out of my way to snag it from the store and then carry it across this big country, but I did. Obviously, I must have felt as though she represented me at least somewhat.
Now it lives in my basement. If it stays there long enough, some day it will be a rare piece of 1980s ephemera. Maybe it already is.
1 comment:
This image made me think of 20th Century Women, in which Annette Bening’s character is the only female drafter in a room of men.
I’d like to ask a college class what kind of work the woman in the poster is doing. My guess is that very few students would be able to say.
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