Priester

Why it works

Two matchsticks and one word. Entered in a Berlin poster competition sponsored by the Priester match company, Lucian Bernhard's design threw out everything except the product and the brand name. The judges were unimpressed and binned it; a late-arriving juror, the printer and sales manager Ernst Growald, pulled it from the wastebasket and it won. It is studied as the birth of the Sachplakat, or "object poster": the idea that in a crowded street a poster must be grasped in an instant, so the object and the name should do all the work. At a time when posters tended to be wordy and ornate, its starkness was the shock. Steven Heller calls it a watershed of modern graphic design, and the Cooper Hewitt credits it with launching the style Bernhard went on to pioneer, pairing a single image with a brand name and nothing else. Every minimalist product poster since is in its debt.