IBM built up a reputation for design excellence, whether it was a computer or, as this book shows, employee communication. There are just over a hundred interesting posters in this book, a good selection of the more than five hundred produced in the fifteen-year life of the design studio at the IBM Boulder, Colorado building.
Three internal staff designers, John Anderson, Tom Bluhm, Ken White and photographer Rodger Ewy created these posters for staff noticeboards. These weren't ad posters with big budgets for design, photography, or illustrations, instead, the designers had to come up with visual ideas that worked for a range of themes like health and safety; security; product announcements; events; quality and excellence; management development; savings bonds. Obviously, some themes are difficult to illustrate so several posters are just typographic. For example, a security poster just said 'Badger the Badgerless' or for equal opportunity 'pEOple. Within all of us. Equal Opportunity
The posters were all the same size, fifteen by twenty-one inches and printed silkscreen or litho in Denver with runs of up to two thousand and distributed to various company buildings around the US. The book has most of the posters one to a page with some background material about the program and the three designers fill the first few pages. Roger Ewy sums up the success of these posters because so many of them were removed by the staff to take home.
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