White Glue On The Front Page

This poster was made in 2005 by Swiss designer Niklaus Troxler for the Willisau Jazz Festival, which he founded and directed until 2009. The poster is made from an issue of the new York Times, which famously uses Times New Roman set at 8.7 points. Times New Roman is a transitional font, with bracketed serifs. The text of the newspaper is relegated to the background, and in the foreground is the principal information of the text, which is handwritten.

This poster, targeted towards jazz aficionados, is a visual metaphor to the zeitgeist of jazz: improvisational and anti-linear.

It is also an interesting high jacking of the easily recognizable form of the newspaper. Indeed, the newspaper format has been polished over the years to attract our eye. The composition of it forms a kind of symbol, a cliché that we can identify as a newspaper just by catching a glimpse of it on the corner of our eye.

I think another factor that makes this poster interesting is that it is doubly hard to read: the newspaper text is obscured by the handwriting, which is written in white on a mostly grey background.  Our eye is drawn to it because of the newspaper format and is forced to stay because of our curiosity.

The background for this blogpost is another poster by Niklaus Troxler for the festival.