Game art is designed to be seen on a screen, which means it is usually built for impact at speed: high contrast, strong silhouettes, saturated colour, and a clear focal point. That is close to a specification for good poster art, and it explains why this material transfers to a wall so naturally. Where the […]

Boxing gives photographers something very few sports do: stillness at the centre of violence. Two figures, close together, waiting. The images that survive from the sport’s history are rarely the punches; they are the moments before and after, when the drama is entirely in the posture and the face. The drama of the static frame […]

Football produces more photographs than any other sport, and most of them are unusable as wall art: thirty people in a scramble, a blurry ball, a stadium seen from too far away. The ones that work are specific. A single figure, a clear silhouette, a crowd behind it turned into texture. What makes a football […]

Sports photography has one thing going for it that almost no other genre does: the moment. A dunk, a fadeaway, a celebration caught mid-air. Basketball in particular produces frames with a natural graphic shape, because the action happens in the air against an open background. Reading the moment The best basketball images are not crowded. […]

The concert poster of the nineteen seventies is a product of a specific set of limitations: cheap offset printing, a small budget, a promoter who needed something on a wall by Friday, and a designer willing to experiment. Those limitations produced some of the most inventive graphic work in music history. What the era got […]

Words on a wall are a different craft from pictures on a wall. Type has to be legible at a distance, it has to hold together as a composition, and it has to say something worth reading more than once. Done well, a typographic print is the most versatile piece of wall art there is; […]

Abstract art has one advantage over every other kind of wall art: it does not need to be recognised. A room does not have to be about music, film, or sport to carry it. The only questions are colour, scale, and how the piece behaves against the wall behind it. Working out what the wall […]

Travel posters from the first half of the last century were made to sell tickets, and the result was a form of art that had to be simple, persuasive, and readable from a moving train. Nearly a century later those constraints are exactly why the images still work on a wall: no clutter, no ambiguity, […]

Japanese animation and comics have produced one of the largest bodies of illustration in the world, and the range is wider than most people expect. There is clean digital cel work, hand-inked line art from older series, painterly background illustration, and dense panel pages taken straight from the printed page. Four distinct looks The first […]

Animated film art occupies an unusual position in the poster world. It is illustration, so it carries detail; it is also landscape painting, so it carries atmosphere. Few bodies of work balance those two things as gracefully as the imagery associated with Japan’s best-known animation house. Landscape as the subject The defining quality of this […]