Édouard Marpeau's conference on logos and posters

Logos, advertising posters and films are visual media that are part of our lives, the former as representative elements of corporate communication and the latter as a major and long-lasting medium for promoting works on the big screen.

THE LOGO IS EVERYWHERE

Who doesn’t have logos in mind? Certainly not many people! No-one would dispute that, because logos are so much a part of our lives. Already used by the Greeks for their hidden correspondences, this creative symbol became universally used from the 1950s onwards. It was then that companies really began to measure the impact of a symbol that they now use across the board as part of their commercial strategy.

Many logos have become famous, such as those of Google (the most popular in the world), Nike, McDonald’s, Chanel, Ford and Coca-Cola, to name but a few.

Édouard Marpeau, graphic designer and Head of the Professional Graphic Design Cycle at ESMA Toulouse, shared the secrets of this small image with the students from the Hérault region in the same section : “This graphic object is the fruit of many little anecdotes : shapes, colours, developments, hidden messages, history etc.”

He drew up a historical picture of the logo, “the creators behind the most famous logos, but also their graphic evolution, plagiarism and other unusual stories”. A detailed review of the great history of the logo!

“LOGO: A MUST FOR A GRAPHIC DESIGNER”.

Édouard Marpeau pointed out that “the logo as we know it today is fairly recent, since the industrial revolution in the 19th century, which gave rise to our mass consumer society, was the starting point for modern commercial communication, an obligatory stylistic exercise for any self-respecting graphic designer”.

Montpellier Graphic Design students will be able to use this knowledge to give free reign to their own creativity during their course and in their future professional careers.

the poster, cinema’s preferred means of promotion

Édouard Marpeau then gave a second lecture, this time devoted to advertising posters and cinema, which have always been linked by a common destiny.

He reminded the ESMA students that “advertising, as it was then called, really took off in the 19th century with the industrial revolution and the emergence of the consumer society. Cinema, for its part, was the fruit of numerous innovations throughout that same century, culminating in the invention that would make the Lumière brothers famous in 1895”.

Historically, posters have been the preferred means of promoting cinema since 1896, when Marcelin Auzole designed a poster for Le Jardinier et le Petit Espiègle, better known as L’Arroseur arrosé. “Since then, the cinema poster has continued to follow the artistic trends and currents of all the eras through which it has passed, right up to the present day. It has gone from being a simple advertising tool to a collector’s item prized by fans and specialists of the genre.”

THE POSTER AS AN OBJECT OF WORSHIP AND POPULAR CULTURE IN THE NOBLEST SENSE OF THE TERM

The cinema poster is a testament to the creativity and diversity of the 7th Art: posters for Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) are among the most famous.

From the 50s to the 80s, many artists specialised in this medium, including Saul Bass (posters for the films Vertigo and West Side Story), Roger Soubie (poster for Ben Hur, among others) and Drew Struzan (The Thing, Star Wars, etc.). But now the supports have changed !

Edouard Marpeau concluded by pointing out that “the means of promoting the cinema have changed a great deal, from the simple poster to trailers and then to social networks, the main channel for disseminating the release of films in cinemas. But the poster is still very much alive, the subject of original creations and limited editions, and has become an object of worship and popular culture in the noblest sense of the term. We all have a favourite poster, sometimes out of nostalgia, but always out of love for the cinema.”