Graphic designers: Back away from the computer and head to the Ballyhoo! Posters as Portraiture exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. In the sixty displayed postered portraits, one can see an evolution of graphic design and advertising, with each era screaming its identity through fonts, colors and graphic techniques, as well as the obvious context of the featured face. Keeping true to the NPG’s mission, all 60 posters are about Americans or American films, however many of them were produced in Europe to promote overseas releases. In addition to the numerous film ads, the exhibit also highlights circus posters from the late 1800s, war propaganda, and the $100,000 reward poster for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices (which, interestingly, screams “100,000 Reward! THE MURDERERS,” only naming Lincoln and Booth in very small type beneath).

Curator Wendy Reaves urges viewers to “look beyond posters as propaganda and advertisements and ask biographical questions.” Thomas Alva Edison, pictured left, is a woodcut print promoting demonstrations of Edison’s phonograph. Despite Edison’s lack of presence at the demos, his portrait takes up 40 percent of the space, thus keeping Edison’s reputation in the public eye. The text on the poster recalls an era of excitable, eccentric advertising speak, reading “Edison’s phonograph or talking machine: It talks! It sings! It laughs! It plays cornet songs,” displayed in characteristically old fashioned fonts—a look that current designers often emulate to communicate an outdated feeling.

Thomas Alva Edison by Alfred S. Seer Engraver courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.