Lucerne—Switzerland’s poster town—has a vibrant graphic design scene, which in recent years has become known for its sophisticated posters well beyond the country’s borders. Professional colleagues are in awe of how a relatively small city can produce so many well-designed posters. Lucerne posters can be found in many exhibitions. To give one example: in 2015 alone, twenty-six of the hundred best posters from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland came from Lucerne and the surrounding area—in other words, more than a quarter of all the awardwinning works. What’s behind this? Is it coincidence or a preponderance of designers of above-average talent in a comparatively small area? The book Poster Town tracks this phenomenon with a wealth of images and texts and creates a record of Lucerne’s poster designs for posterity. The content of the book is archived and showcased in an extended form on the website www.postertown.ch
Text: Bettina Richter, Pirmin Bossart, Martina Kammermann, Marc Schwegler
