Join the ATS ("The Blonde Bombshell")

Why it works

Abram Games, then a corporal in the Royal Engineers, set out in 1941 to fix the dowdy image of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army. His answer was a stylised profile of a young woman in the new ATS cap, blonde hair and red lipstick against a dark ground, above three words: "Join the ATS". The model was Doreen Murphy, an ATS member. Nicknamed the "Blonde Bombshell", it worked: the National Army Museum says it encouraged women to enlist, and a press cutting shows them queuing beside it. Then the MP Thelma Cazalet-Keir objected in Parliament that recruits should be drawn by patriotism, not glamour; the poster was withdrawn, most of the 10,000 copies were destroyed and a plainer design featuring a serving private replaced it. It is studied as a lesson in the tension between effectiveness and propriety in public-sector advertising, and as an early classic by the designer who became Britain's only official war poster artist.