Manifesto for an Unreadable Poster

Legibility is a contract. Some posters are right to break it.

A concert poster you decode in four seconds has charged you four seconds of attention — and attention, once spent, becomes memory. The Weingart students knew it; the punk flyers knew it; every theatre poster that made you tilt your head knew it.

Rules for breaking rules:

1. Earn it — chaos with a grid underneath, or it is just noise.
2. One transgression at a time. Break the baseline OR the contrast. Both is a tantrum.
3. The information must survive. Barely. Barely is the art.

Type that fights back is type that gets remembered. The rest is signage.

The grid we are breaking: muller-brockmann-three-posters.