Research Guides: GPHD 125: Graphic Design Systems: Visual Research: Posters

Researching Visual Material

From the Library:

Artstor
Artstor is database of millions of images with a suite of tools for teaching and research. Geared toward the visual arts, Artstor also has images from across the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences.
As of August 2024 all Artstor content has been moved to the JSTOR platform.

Rock & Roll Poster Collection at Sac State
The University Library's Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) department holds thousands of rock posters from events in the Sacramento area. Learn more by reading the article at the link, and come into SCUA to look at the posters!
Royal Chicano Air Force Posters at Sac State
The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) is an artistic collective based in Sacramento, California, and was founded to express the goals of the Chicano civil rights and labor organizing movement of the United Farm Workers. SCUA has a collection of their posters available for your research.

Check out these online guides from other university libraries:

Here are a few examples of posters in online collections:

Posters in the Library of Congress Digital Collections
The Library of Congress holds multiple collections of posters for historical research and inspiration. You'll also see other collections on this list, such as "Popular Graphic Arts" and "Printed Ephemera: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera" (contains posters, playbills, leaflets, etc.)
Imperial War Museum: Posters of Conflict (VADS)
The collection includes work by leading twentieth-century designers from Britain and abroad, and is an essential resource for looking at the development of mass communication, propaganda, publicity, commercial art and graphic design.
AIGA Design Archives Collections
Browse the list to access visual collections. Those of interest may include: "The Poster Show," "Information Graphics: Design of Understanding," and "Graphic Explanations: Charts, Diagrams, Graphs and Maps."

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AdAccess
The Ad*Access Project, funded by the Duke Endowment "Library 2000" Fund, presents images and information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955. Ad*Access concentrates on five main subject areas: Radio, Television, Transportation, Beauty and Hygiene, and World War II.

Don't Forget Books!

Posters: A Global History

Designed to Sell: Turn-of-the-Century American Posters in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Design for Obama. Posters for Change: a Grassroots Anthology

Show Posters: the Art and Practice of Making Gig Posters

Latin American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics

Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California

Videos

Films on Demand is one of the Library's streaming video resources, and contains many videos on design-related topics. A quick search will retrieve both full films and segments that match your keywords. Here are a couple of examples of results of a search with the terms "graphic posters."

Last Updated: Feb 6, 2025 2:21 PM