I used to think vintage travel posters were just pretty pictures of beaches and mountains.
Turns out, the visual language these designers created between roughly 1910 and 1960—give or take a few years depending on who you ask—was actually a carefully orchestrated system of psychological triggers wrapped in bold colors and impossible geometry. The Art Deco movement hit travel advertising like a freight train, and suddenly every railway company and steamship line needed posters that screamed modernity and speed and escape. French designers like A.M. Cassandre were layering streamlined forms with dramatic perspectives that made you feel like you were already moving before you even bought the ticket. The typography alone—those thick sans-serif letters stretched across Mediterranean skies or compressed beside Alpine peaks—communicated something about machine-age efficiency that ornate Victorian fonts never could. I’ve seen original Cassandre posters in museum collections, and honestly, the physicality of them is startling: these things were meant to be read from across a crowded train station, not studied up close on Instagram.
The Color Psychology That Actually Made People Buy Tickets to Places They’d Never Heard Of
Here’s the thing about those impossibly vibrant color palettes: they weren’t random. Designers working for companies like the London Underground or the French railways understood—maybe intuitively, maybe through trial and error—that certain color combinations triggered specific emotional responses. Deep blues for oceanic crossings suggested both luxury and the sublime terror of crossing the Atlantic (wait—maybe terror is too strong, but there was definately an edge to it). Warm oranges and yellows for Mediterranean destinations promised sunshine in a way that actually made British office workers believe they could escape the fog.
The lithographic printing process itself shaped these choices. You were limited to maybe four or five colors per poster, so every hue had to work overtime. Designers like Tom Purvis simplified landscape forms into flat planes of color that somehow captured the essence of a place more effectively than photographic realism ever could. I guess it makes sense: your brain fills in the details, makes the destination even more idealized than reality.
Geometric Simplification and the Strange Power of What You Don’t Show
The real genius was in the elimination. These designers stripped away everything except the core visual idea—one skier on an impossible slope, a single steamship cutting through stylized waves, a mountain reduced to three triangular planes of color. Roger Broders’ French Riviera posters from the 1920s turned Nice and Monaco into geometric playgrounds where architecture became colored blocks and palm trees became dark silhouettes against gold skies. Anyway, this wasn’t just aesthetic preference; it was functional communication designed for split-second recognition.
Perspective got weird too.
The viewpoints these artists chose—looking up at towering ships, looking down at Alpine villages, that dramatic diagonal composition that appeared everywhere in the 1930s—created a sense of aspiration and adventure that straight-on views never achieved. The human figures, when they appeared at all, were usually tiny or stylized to the point of abstraction, because the destination was the star, not the traveler. I’ve noticed that contemporary travel advertising has lost this restraint entirely; now it’s all about the person having the experience rather than the place itself, which feels like we’ve completely inverted the premise. The typography often integrated directly into the landscape—letters becoming part of mountain ranges or ocean horizons—in ways that modern designers still try to imitate but rarely pull off with the same confidence. There was this sense that every element had to justify its presence, that every line and color and word was working toward a single unified emotional punch, and honestly, that kind of disciplined clarity feels almost impossible in our current visual culture where more always seems like the safer bet.
These posters weren’t trying to document reality—they were building mythologies.
