The Art of Persuasion

Sunday was the second day of the National Army Museum’s special exhibition ‘The Art of Persuasion’. The exhibition is a collection of World War Two posters by Abram Games created for either a British military or civilian audience, and sometimes both.

Walking round the exhibition there is nothing subtle about the messages being conveyed and yet Games’s designs (many almost 80 years old) are playful, often with layered visual gags although they don’t detract from the message but they do provide a ‘stickiness’ to the poster.

He described his mission as;

“The hoarding is ‘the art gallery of the man in the street’, posters should be selected like pictures in a gallery.”

I’m old enough to remember a more graphic approach to mass poster messaging. It’s harder to think of recent examples (Virgin trains stands out). Barack Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster is probably one of the better ones - conveying a freshness of approach and all the leverage that the single word could bring to the body politic.

Ultimately, Abram Games messaging objectives were linked to a much higher purpose than simply ‘buy this thing now’ - they were about a nations very survival and that made them more impactful but there is no possibility of confusion when reviewing his work and in some respects that’s missing from a lot of outdoor advertising today.

Less really is more - sometimes it’s easier to persuade with simpler messages rather than complex ones.

I like to think about this as the heart-head-heart principle - the emotional start and finish can be based on hope or fear but they will be the drivers that linger once the viewer has moved on from the underlying facts.

The Art of Persuasion runs until 24th November 2019

National Army Museum

Royal Hospital Road

Chelsea

London

SW3 4HT