The poster holds an unassuming yet highly impactful place in the history of art and design. Created as public display ephemera for a variety of purposes – from product advertising to political campaigning – posters have long provided an economical and visually powerful mode of public communication. Although poster design was already somewhat recognized within the art world of the early 1900s, its importance as a political tool was established by the ubiquitous government-sponsored poster art of the two World Wars. These posters, both in America and abroad, served a unique and challenging purpose, to “make coherent and acceptable a basically incoherent and irrational ordeal of killing, suffering and destruction that violates every accepted principle of morality and decent living” (1). To do this successfully required refined artistic skill and ingenuity from a broad range of artists. War posters of all countries and eras are remarkably similar in their foundations,
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