Ten designers who turned the printed wall into the century’s most public art, from Belle Époque Paris to postmodern New York.

The modern poster and modern graphic design were born together, out on the walls of the street. When color lithography made large, cheap, vivid printing possible in the second half of the 19th century, the city itself became a gallery, and a new kind of artist emerged to fill it: someone who thought in images and words at once, who had to stop a hurrying stranger in a single glance. For the hundred years that followed, the poster was where graphic design did its boldest thinking, absorbing every movement from Art Nouveau to Constructivism to postmodernism before the screen finally took over. To trace the poster from the 1890s to the 1990s is to watch a whole art form invent itself in public.

This list gathers ten designers who each changed how that art was made or seen, not merely who made the prettiest pictures. We chose influence over fame and breadth over sameness: French lithographers and Russian revolutionaries, Swiss rationalists and American showmen, spanning a century and half a dozen countries. A couple of them, including the man who fathered the whole medium, may be new to you even though you have seen their descendants everywhere. They appear in no particular order.

1. Jules Chéret

Father of the modern poster

Before Chéret, a poster was mostly a block of type with a small picture attached. He reversed the priority, perfecting a three-stone color lithography that let him splash whole Paris walls with joyous, whirling women so recognizable they were nicknamed the Chérettes. Across a long career he produced well over a thousand designs and, in 1890, was awarded the Légion d’honneur for what the citation called the creation of a new branch of art. Every designer here is in some sense his heir. Start with his effervescent posters for the Folies-Bergère, where the modern advertising image is visibly being born.

2. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

1864-1901

Lautrec took Chéret’s medium and gave it a serious artist’s eye: flat planes of color, boldly cropped figures, and the compositional daring he learned from Japanese woodblock prints. His first poster, “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue” of 1891, made him famous overnight and settled an old argument by proving a poster could be as ambitious as any painting. In roughly thirty posters made before his death at thirty-six, he fixed the image of Montmartre nightlife for good. Start with that Moulin Rouge design, then the amber lamplight of “Divan Japonais.”

3. Alphonse Mucha

1860-1939

The Czech designer defined an entire style almost by accident, over a single Christmas week in 1894, when he was the only artist on hand to make a poster for Sarah Bernhardt’s play Gismonda. When it appeared on Paris walls on the first of January, 1895, its tall, narrow format, halo of arabesques, and serene goddess of a heroine were so new that imitators soon called the manner simply le style Mucha. He became so bound to his own decorative language that he spent later decades insisting he was more than an ornamentist. Start with Gismonda, then the four panels of “The Seasons.”

4. Lucian Bernhard

The object poster

While Paris still swirled with Art Nouveau, a young man in Berlin stripped the poster down to almost nothing and changed advertising forever. His design for Priester matches, made around 1906, showed only two matchsticks and the brand name on a plain field, and that radical act of subtraction launched the Sachplakat, the object poster. It taught the century a lesson still central to branding: a single image plus a single word can beat any amount of illustration. Bernhard also designed durable typefaces that carried his name. Start with the Priester poster and marvel at how little it needs.

5. El Lissitzky

1890-1941

In revolutionary Russia, Lissitzky fused abstract art and political urgency into a new visual grammar of diagonals and pure geometric form. His 1919 agit-poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge,” a sharp red triangle driving into a white circle, turned three shapes into propaganda and became one of the most quoted images of the century. His restless experiments with typography and photomontage traveled straight into the Bauhaus and the Dutch avant-garde, seeding modern layout as we know it. Start with the Red Wedge, then look at his page designs, where type stops sitting in rows and starts to move.

6. A. M. Cassandre

1901-1968

The Ukrainian-born Frenchman, born Adolphe Mouron, gave Art Deco its poster style: bold geometry, softly airbrushed volume, and lettering built into the picture rather than dropped on top of it. His 1935 poster for the ocean liner Normandie, a colossal black prow seen head-on against a calm sea, is among the most reproduced travel images ever made. He was also a serious type designer, drawing the faces Bifur and Peignot. Start with Normandie, then find his 1932 Dubonnet sequence, an early piece of visual storytelling told across three widening panels.

7. Josef Müller-Brockmann

1914-1996

More than anyone, Müller-Brockmann codified the Swiss International Style, the mathematical grid and clean sans-serif type that still governs how the world lays out a page. His concert posters for the Zürich Tonhalle in the 1950s translated music into pure geometry, none more famous than the 1955 “Beethoven” of nested black arcs. His writing, above all the manual Grid Systems in Graphic Design, became required reading in studios everywhere. Start with the Beethoven poster and notice how order itself becomes the emotion.

8. Saul Bass

1920-1996

Bass reinvented two forms at once, the movie poster and the film title sequence, by insisting that a whole story could hide inside one strong symbol. For Otto Preminger’s 1955 The Man with the Golden Arm he reduced a drama of addiction to a single jagged, paper-cut arm, and Hollywood never looked at its advertising the same way again. He went on to design some of the most recognizable corporate marks in America, proving the poster mind could rule the boardroom too. Start with The Man with the Golden Arm, in poster and title form both.

9. Milton Glaser

1929-2020

After decades of Swiss rigor, Glaser brought wit, warmth, and joyful historical borrowing back into American design. His 1966 poster of Bob Dylan, a black silhouette crowned with ribbons of psychedelic hair, was folded inside a hit album and reached a generation of teenagers at once. A co-founder of Push Pin Studios and of New York magazine, he went on in 1977 to draw the I heart NY logo, probably the most imitated mark ever made. Start with the Dylan poster, then notice how much of modern design still borrows his generous, eclectic voice.

10. Paula Scher

Born 1948

Scher dragged the poster into the postmodern era, filling the frame edge to edge with layered, jostling type that reads like a shout instead of a caption. In 1991 she became the first woman made a principal at the design firm Pentagram, and her 1990s identity for New York’s Public Theater, built on rowdy bands of wood-type lettering, became one of the most copied looks of the decade. She showed that typography alone, densely packed and full of attitude, could carry a whole poster. Start with her Public Theater work, where words behave like a crowd.

Final thoughts

What links these ten across a hundred years is a single discipline: to say the most with the least, to a viewer who will not stop walking. Whether the tool was a lithographic stone, a mathematical grid, a paper cutout, or a wall of wood type, each of them understood that a great poster is an argument won in about a second. Together they carried graphic design from decoration to communication and then back to full-throated expression, and every logo, album cover, and screen you look at today still runs on the grammar they wrote.

Any ten leave out names that belong in the conversation. Paul Rand, who turned the corporate trademark into a kind of modern folk art, and Jan Tschichold, whose 1928 manifesto The New Typography reordered the printed page before his covers later civilized the Penguin paperback, both came close and would anchor a list drawn a little differently. Take these ten as an opening rather than a verdict, and if one name here is new to you, follow it, because that is the whole point of this series. You can explore the field further in our graphic design pillar across CreARTivity.