The Poetry of Sight: the endangered practice of designing posters

Saturday, January 10, 2026

the endangered practice of designing posters

Poster / Roy R. Behrens © 2019
Above Roy R. Behrens © 2019, Poster (a collection of twenty-five bird posters). There are few things I enjoy as much as designing posters. I've created scores of them, especially in the past decade. Most often I've designed them (without charge, pro bono) for nonprofit organizations whose causes I want to help to support. But the opportunities have all but disappeared these days. Printed posters seem almost to have come to be an endangered species. Where would we display them? And for what purpose, since it is far easier to post and share the image and notification on various social media sites. Yet (to my mind) there are few things quite as beautiful as an exquisite poster on a wall. Above is what one might regard as a "metaposter," since it is a single poster made up of an arrangement of multiple posters for a local wildlife preservation site (Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Waterloo / Cedar Falls, Iowa). Too bad this practice is now passé.

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Wilbert Snow, Codline's Child (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974), pp. 37-38—

There were no septic tanks and no sewers in our village. Each home had a backhouse that had to be cleaned out once a year. For three years, when I was between ten and thirteen, I did this chore for [a woman neighbor named] Fronie. Each time she gave me five dollars, and five dollars to me then was far more than five hundred would be to me now. In those days no lime was thrown over the dung to make the task easier for the shoveler. Each time I became deathly sick, but I needed the five dollars so desperately that I saw the job through. I have no words to express the horror of those two or three hours each year. I would lie on my stomach and throw up when there was little or nothing to yield. After the job was over, I would go to the Mill Cove for a swim and to Patten Point to smell the fragrance of fir trees and bayberry bushes.

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