Sachplakat

The Sachplakat (object poster) is a distinctly German invention. A reaction to the excesses of Art Nouveau, this minimalist poster genre was founded by Lucian Bernhard and promoted by Ernest Growald in 1906 as a method of advertising products on the increasingly cluttered Berlin poster hoardings. Sachplakat is the reduction of a selling message to a minimum number of elements—usually the product, a logo or trademark, and a bold line(s) of type, often in hand-drawn block letters. This method, which was practiced by designers of the Berliner Plakat who were featured in the magazine Das Plakat, was championed by the leading German foundries, who rushed original and copied versions of the block letters into production. Although the young Bernhard did not fancy himself a type designer per se, when he saw that his distinctive lettering had been made into a typeface, he decided to enter the business himself. He gave his name to many faces issued by the Flinsch and Bauer type foundries. Another key proponent of this approach, Louis Oppenheim, was compelled to protect his original lettering by designing typefaces for H. Berthold & Co. The typefaces Bernhard, Oppenheim, and others created for advertising prior to World War I were not entirely Modern. Although some were sans serif, others were based on Blackletter and roman scripts. The typical Sachplakat faces were bold and often expanded, and included small fat serifs.