A 50-year goldmine of design: AIGA New York unveils its poster archive to the public

Reflecting on the poster archive with with former presidents of AIGA NY Juliette Cezzar and Chelsea Goldwell

It’s Nice That (INT): We’d love to know if there any stand out posters in the collection for you?

Chelsea Goldwell (CG): Personally I feel a connection with Sagmeister’s fresh dialogue poster. I remember this point in my career and the evolution towards making things that felt more hand done and human. But they’re all so interesting to see. Having been on the board and being actively involved in the events planning committee, the posters make me think about how these were likely opportunities for these designers to express themselves freely and have fun, and that makes me really happy.

Juliette Cezzar (JC): I love them all, particularly the ones from the late 1990s optimistically trying to figure out how the field’s relationship to the computer would change aesthetics. What we didn’t know is that work like this would never be made again, not because the aesthetics were out of date, but because technology changed how we communicate. By the mid-2010s, every message had to magically shape-shift into every single medium at every scale. Instagram and TikTok would be at the top of the hierarchy, valuing raw UGC and algorithmically proven attention strategies over anything that actually takes time and talent to make.

These changes also meant that the previous regionalisms we used to have, where visual design looked different if you were in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York, pretty much disappeared. When I was at AIGA NY in the mid-2010s, this is something we talked about quite a bit: what did NY even mean? We answered that with Making the City, which was a broad collection of projects over several years that directly worked with and impacted neighbourhoods.

INT: What do you think the archive says about the spirit of design in New York? What makes the city’s creative scene so individual and distinct?

CG: It’s curious, inspiring, ambitious and excellent. The best designers in the world are in New York. The people here are always doing something to feed their own creative spirit – tinkering, writing, researching, collecting, discussing, making. It’s a contagious and exciting energy to be a part of.

JC: The design spirit here has always been one of ‘I’ll do what I want’, of being able to do what you want with the people you want to do it with, for the audience that matters to you. This has been possible only in New York in part because New York is not a one-industry town like LA or San Francisco. We have everything here that matters for design – publishing, tech, finance, education, entertainment, hospitality – and every kind of studio, agency, consultancy and shop.

CG: People here value design in a different way to other places. It’s not a nice to have but a necessity. Design is a powerful tool that can influence change and culture — New Yorkers have always understood and embraced that.