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!