Abram Games- Maximum meaning, minimum means

On my travels I stopped off in Halifax, near to Leeds to go to the Abram Games poster exhibition in Dean Clough Mill. It included over 70 posters, sketches, original works, product designs and films. There were a variety of posters ranging from the ATS recruitment poster that is a WW2 icon to ones for the Festival of Britain and promotions for Guinness, Shell and London Transport.

Games makes words and lettering an inextricable part of the image he is creating, irradicating the need for lines of explanatory text. He combines essentially different objects to create striking new pictorial logic. He so cleverly expresses important issues and messages in such a simple way through the use of just a few objects to create something symbolic. For example, Games combined a spade with a ship in a ploughed field which also looked like a rippling ocean (see image below)...

The point of this poster was to tell people to use spades, not ships and grow their own food. A strong message sent to the public by using just a few simplistic objects. The design is elegant but also extremely impactful and conveys everything you need to know in one concise statement.

'Maximum meaning from minimum means' was Games motto and therefore he would always work out his designs at the size of a postage stamp. The exhibition displayed many of these initial designs and ideas which made me appreciate the amount of work that had gone into each individual poster.

Games argued that all posters looked small from far away so his compositions should be bold and uncluttered. I felt that the poster he designed for Guinness in the 1950s was perhaps the most extreme example of this. It is made up of a simple letter G that also contains a smiley face and a pint. This poster was in fact one of his own favorites...

A poster I found most impactful was one named 'Freedom from Hunger'. It was very shocking but still beautifully crafted and the image still sticks in my head now. The poster combines a sheaf of wheat with a child to make it look like it's emaciated, insinuating that the skinny wheat grains are the child's ribs. He has so ingeniously brought together the problem and the solution in one high-impact symbol.