He designed his first elegant script, Bernhard, in 1922 while traveling from Germany to New York on a steamship. It was LathamвЂ™s notion that Bernhard also be shuttled around the country to promote his own work and perhaps convince American art directors to consider modern design as an alternative to the overly rendered, often saccharine, painted illustration that represented American practice.Д«ernhard had developed typefaces for Flisch and Bauer Type founderies in Germany, including a transitional bold brush script. Despite his poor mastery of English, Bernhard accepted. Roy Latham, who ran a lithography firm near Albany, New York, proposed the Bernhard speak before various art directorsвЂ™ clubs in New York and elsewhere about advertising and logo design. He promised more but the Great War put a temporary halt to his output.ДЄfter the war, the avowedly apolitical Bernhard gladly accepted an invitation to come to the United States in 1922 for an unspecified time.

In 1913 BernhardвЂ™s first typeface, Antiqua, was released by the Flinsch Foundry in Frankfurt it was a good book face. When the formidable Berthold Type Foundry issued a вЂњblockвЂќ letter in 1910 that looked suspiciously like BernhardвЂ™s own poster lettering, he was force to seriously design his own alphabets to protect his inventions. In 1920, he was mad the first professor of poster art at the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts.Д«ernhard also made inroads into German typography. Within ten years his elegant new studio employed around thirty artists and their assistant. By the ripe old age of twenty-three, he had become so sought after that he was compelled to open his own studio. He did, however, produce countless images for a range of different German (and later foreign) products. Although his subsequent designs were good, Bernhard never really surpassed PriesterвЂ™s serendipity in any of his other poster. The poster had major repercussions.Д«ernhard capitalized on the Priester success. Bernhard jumped at the opportunity, and with precious little time to produce his own entry, he made some instinctive design decisions, removing all but two matches and the brand name, Preister.

One in particular sponsored by the Priester Match Company, awarded 200 marks (then about $50) to the winner. Poster competitions were routinely sponsored by Berlin business establishments to identify new talent for the expanding advertising industry. Though Munich was the center of the more вЂњradicalвЂќ German graphic arts, Bernhard decided to go to Berlin, where the wonders of industrial production and commercialism were manifest. Bernhard later said that he recalled вЂњwalking drunk with colorвЂќ through this exhibit. Also on view were maquettes for the economical advertising posters done by the famed Beggarstaffs, James Pryde and William Nicolson, which exerted a strong influence on the young LucianвЂ™s own poster making. As a teenager, Bernhard visited MunichвЂ™s Glaspalast, where he saw a major exhibition of European Art Nouveau applied arts, including the wildly colorful cabaret and theater posters of Jules ChГ©ret, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Alfonse Mucha. From his studio in New York City (he left Berlin in 1922), he developed some of the most recognizable American business advertising and trademarks, for such clients as CatвЂ™s Paw, ExLax, and Lucian Bernhard, the вЂњinventorвЂќ of the sachplakat or object poster, designed more thank thirty-five popular display typefaces, including many with his own name, including Bernhard Gothic and Lucian (the specimen sheet is above and below).Д«ernhardвЂ™s formative years (born in 1883) coincided with the explosion of Art Nouveau and Jugendstil. Over the course of his career, which progressed from the turn of the century to the 1950s, Lucian Bernhard became a prolific designer not only of innovative posters but of trademarks, packaging, type, textiles, furniture, and interior design. No one had yet heard of its young creator, who, thanks to this poster, was to influence the genre of advertising know as the Sachplakat, or object poster. Before Preister, persuasive simplicity was a rare thing in most advertising: posters, especially tended to be wordy and ornate. Its composition is so stark and its colors so starling that it captures the viewerвЂ™s eye in an instant. The Priester Match poster designed in 1906 by Lucian Bernhard is a watershed document of modern graphic design.

Bernhard gothic bold