Marque PKZ

Otto Baumberger designed over 200 posters, in a wide variety of different styles. Burger-Kehl & Co, a clothing store in Zürich, asked him to design this poster in 1923. It presents the inside of the collar and part of a man’s jacket with photographic precision. The herring-bone design and the label are shown very realistically and in great detail. The depiction is strikingly asymmetrical. Typography and image form a unity. This work is an example of a Sachplakat, or ‘object poster’, an advertisement featuring one single object. New developments at the Wolfensberger printing press, brought about in part by Baumberger himself, greatly improved the printing process, making it possible to create images that were much sharper. Reproductions of the original design became increasingly accurate.