Our Thing of the Month October is an advertising poster for a typewriter of the company Adler from the year 1912.
The designer is Lucian Bernhard (1883 – 1972) – one of the most important graphic designers in the German Werkbund and inventor of the “Sachplakat”.
The illustrator and Bernhard specialist Hubert Riedel commented on the poster and the placement of the typewriter: “On a poison-green background, it was set diagonally in black into the horizontal sheet. Over the entire width of the poster in a square, also framed in black and dark pink, the name Adler in white stood large in upper and lower case letters and was easy to read from some distance. Only the address of the Berlin representation (and sales outlet) of the Frankfurt am Main-based factory was shown at the bottom right of the poster.” This reduced representation, which only showed the product and the name of the company, soon became known throughout the world as the Berlin style, and Bernhard moved the functional poster into the spotlight of modern advertising graphics.
From: Made in Germany – Politik mit Dingen, No. 4 of the publication series Schaukasten, ed. Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge, 2017
