To explore the role of Second World War propaganda posters in British culture, I think it’s really important to understand how these images are used on the internet today. To do this, I am testing ways of tracking the different…
Tag: poster
When I first started studying the publicity posters produced by the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War, I went to the National Archives and looked up every document that might be related to the design and distribution…
I want to highlight one particularly interesting response I received from a volunteer who completed my research survey. This volunteer raised an interesting point about how English slogans have amazingly similar parallels in other languages. Responding to a question about…
An important part of my research project is to understand the potential meanings that people can draw from Ministry of Information propaganda posters of the Second World War. By investigating how people interpret these images and what thoughts and memories…
Recently we’ve seen a bit of a craze for infographics: they are appearing in dedicated coffee table books on every subject, you now find them frequently in newspapers, magazines and online articles and all over social media. It is likely that social media has had some influence on this, since infographics make it easier for complex and often dull information to be shared within an eye-catching 140 characters with just a couple of clicks. Additionally it is now much easier to produce infographics with the availability of easy-to-use free software.
However, people have always wanted to share information with the public and visual images have always been a successful method of attracting attention. While that word ‘infographic’ only began to appear in the second half of the 20th century, they have existed in media under other names as soon as printing technology allowed them to.
One period when these kinds of images came into their own was during the Second World War, when graphic design techniques were flourishing and information needed to be controlled and disseminated quickly and successfully.
The spread of rumour and gossip has always been a topic of concern for governments in need of public cohesion and obedience. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the British government displayed exactly this concern and took action…
Posters provide striking and familiar visuals that illustrate, decorate and inform the public about the Second World War. The Imperial War Museum displays these posters in some of its exhibits as you might expect, but they also appear as reproductions…