Content Creator at Platique
Reading time: approx. 6 minutes
You’ve surely seen them before: those elegant, color-saturated travel posters depicting steamships plowing through azure waters or mountain panoramas gleaming in geometric simplicity. They come from an era when advertising was still art—and when travel itself sounded like a promise.
What few people know is that original copies of these posters are now as rare as they are expensive. And when you do find them, they’re usually yellowed, torn—and in formats for which frames are now almost impossible to find. This is precisely where the story of Platique begins.
The interwar period was, visually speaking, one of the most fertile eras in design history. Shipping companies like the Hamburg-America Line, railway companies, tourist offices—they all competed for the attention of a burgeoning middle class of travelers.
The result: posters that expressed more with just a few shapes and colors than many paintings. Horizons were geometrically simplified. Skies glowed with fields of color that no photographic film could ever capture. Lettering became design elements.
Artists like Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Ludwig Hohlwein, and Edward McKnight Kauffer developed a visual language that transcends its time—and inspires us more today than ever before.
The style of this era has many names: Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, Bauhaus-influenced. What unites all these movements is the conviction that good design needs no ornamentation – only the right shapes, colors, and proportions.
Old posters often don’t fit into today’s standard frames such as 60 x 90 cm or 70 x 100 cm.
Anyone wanting to buy an original travel poster from the 1930s quickly encounters three problems:
Digital reproductions do exist – but most suffer from low-quality scans, a lack of understanding of the original, and cheap paper. The spirit of the original is lost.
At Platique, we decided against simple scanning from the very beginning. Instead, we reconstruct: We analyze the visual language of an era—its color palettes, compositional principles, and typography—and recreate motifs that capture the essence of the original without being mere copies.
Specifically, this means:
Mass printing needs to work for many. Our printing needs to work for you. Every order is freshly produced – this ensures consistently high quality and avoids excess inventory that would ultimately be destroyed.
In our experience, three things make a travel poster from the 1930s timeless:
1. Reduction
The best posters show the essentials – a horizon, a ship, a mountain peak. No noise, no superfluous detail. This reduction is more technically demanding than it appears.
2. Vibrancy of color
The color palettes of this era are bold: deep blues next to vibrant ochre, heavy black next to delicate cream white. They are not “photorealistic” – they are stylized. And that’s precisely why they still work today.
3. Typography as a design element
Letters on travel posters are never just text. They are part of the composition. The choice of typeface, its size, its placement – all of this is a design decision.
Our Historical Wall Art collection is constantly growing. You can find current designs – including posters for legendary shipping lines like the Hamburg-America Line or Nordic ferry companies – in our shop. All designs are available in several formats, as posters on matte premium paper or as canvas prints.
