Beauty For All

The Tourist & Trade pictorial section of the Seattle Sunday Times on July 12, 1936 featured a few of the city's noteworthy vistas in an article titled "Beauty For All To Share."

This shot looking north on Lake Washington Boulevard was an alternate to the one used, taken from the same spot a moment later. The caption read: "A glimpse of the nationally famed drive that follows the shore of the lake for several miles, with new vistas and beauties opening up at every turn."

It's nice to say that's still the case 82 years later though the I-90 Floating Bridge would be added to the shoreline seen through the trees just four years later.

A New/Old AYPE Poster

This is a "Then & Again" of a different stripe, though it still combines things from the past and the present.

I've always been fascinated by the Alaska-Yukon Pacific Exposition, the elaborate fair hosted on the grounds of the present-day UW campus in 1909. More info about the AYPE.

I've run across some nice printed ephemera over the years but I've always wanted a poster I could hang on the wall. A few promotional items come close but nothing was exactly what I wanted. So, I gathered some source images and assembled my own.

This was mostly done compositing source material in Photoshop with a lot of tweaking and rebalancing to get the texture and colors right. I did the typography but based it very closely on a ticket from 1909. The airship draws upon photo reference from the AYPE with a little hand retouching and color by me. That lead to making the sky much taller on the main aerial view. I also scaled up Mt. Rainier a bit and fixed numerous holes and stains on the original image.

Some of the items I used to create the poster.

There are plenty of design ideas that would make this poster more dramatic and eye-popping, but those often draw from the last century of design and layout thinking. I was trying to stay faithful to how they might have designed it in that era. I think it mostly accomplishes that.

So, there you go -- A new/old AYP Exposition poster!