EARLY HILLMANN

This week on the brand new episode of our design podcast The Poster Boys, Brandon and I discuss the work of one of our very favorite poster artists, German designer Hans Hillmann. I first posted some of Hillmann's posters a while back (see those here), and this week we've been loading up the Poster Boys site with all of our favorite Hillmann designs (see those here). But here I wanted to post a few of Hillmann's early posters, where he enjoyed rendering his subjects in black painted illustrations on bold colorful backgrounds-- a trick for cost saving during the silkscreen process back in the early days working with film distributor Neue Filmkunst. Later, his work evolved to display a masterful mixture and back-and-forth between illustrative and photographic styles; Look for another post of more of my favorite designs this week. 

SATURDAY EVENING POSTER

Hans Hillmann, The Man in the White Suit, German movie poster, 1966

HANS HILLMANN

Not long ago I was introduced to the poster art of German designer Hans Hillmann thanks to Adrian Curry's great Movie Poster of the Week series, and now I can say that he's one of my biggest design heroes and, hopefully one day, one of my biggest influences. I don't need to go into Hillmann's accomplishments as a designer, illustrator and teacher as they are many, and a great overview of Hillmann's life and work can be found in Lars Muller's brilliant new A5-series title Hans Hillmann: the Visual Work. Hillmann's work is simple, bold, elegant, funny, clever, and striking. I particularly love his juxtapositions of different scales in a single image, and the way in which his prolific output lent itself to a marriage with only one or two simple typefaces. Here are some posters of his that I could find on the web, but if you like what you see, click the link above and pick up that book-- an essential title for any artist or film lover's library. I LOVE THIS MAN.