Visual Marketing Advertisements During the Cold War
During the holidays I visited the Cold War Museum in Plateliai, Lithuania. It is famous former Soviet Union's complex of ballistic missile silo launch. Walking through the complex my eyes were caught by the political propaganda exposition. It seems that communication in the USA and Soviet Union was really aggressive and seriously directed against each other.
But it's not about politics and a situation at that time, my point is more about visual communication in poster style and how effective it was. For example Soviet Union was communicating about public interest and good of all. You can see how the visuals are clear, minimalistic and easily understandable. All posters have one message and picture which shows how people should act and how to think about one or another situation. It was strong propaganda against another country, but without a crystal clear visual it would be more difficult to understand how I (as a citizen of that country) should act. Let's look at it.
How you can see in each poster the message is very clear, and no interpretation is needed. Let's see now the communication in another country. In the USA was a different kind of ideology where the person was most important not the community. All posters were about persons differences and uniqueness. The main message was that you as a person can change everything. Let's see how it looks like from another perspective.
As you can see the messages in the posters is also tremendously clear and almost one picture could say everything without using the words. USA saw Soviet people as a human without a face and uniqueness. All posters, talks about the problems of those days and making you strongly believe what is right to do/think according the poster.
So the lesson of all of this is that visual communication was extremely strong in those difficult times, and it helped for two biggest continents bring important messages to the public and make them believe in one or another truth. The power and value of visualization are timeless, and these legendary posters proves it.