The Los Angeles Poster Co.
The visual style of The Colby Poster Company, the iconic Los Angeles street poster printer was known for its hand-set type and vibrant neon colors.
The Colby Printing Company was established in 1948 in Los Angeles as a community-based operation that specialized in producing striking street posters for various local events including street fairs, concerts, and political campaigns. The company was known for using hand-set type blocks, which would be arranged on a plate, covered in ink, and then machine-pressed onto large sheets of paper.
Part of what made Colby Posters stand out as unique is the employees who created them who were not professionally trained in graphic design. Their lack of formal training resulted in a bold, minimal, and unexpected aesthetic, with the use of mixed typefaces and all caps. This approach gave the company’s posters a distinctive and personal touch that set them apart from the mass-produced posters produced by larger printing companies.
Colby also pioneered the use of bright neon paper stocks as a way to catch the attention of motorists in the car-centric culture of Los Angeles. For this reason, they also came up with what would become another signature paper stock of theirs: the split fade gradient.
As the company grew, the visual style of the Colby Poster became closely tied to the city’s vibrant arts and counterculture scenes, and it played a key role in the marketing of iconic events that helped shape the landscape of the Los Angeles music scene. Almost every band of the 70s and 80s seems to have had their own Colby Poster at one point!
In addition to music, The Colby Poster Co. was a favorite of visual artists who saw a unique value in the bold and impactful visual style of their posters. In 1962, artist Ed Ruscha used Colby to create an exhibition poster for what was the first museum survey of American pop art. More recently, The Hammer Museum collaborated with artist Julia Luke to create the exhibit poster for their survey of new Los Angeles art, “Made in LA”.
Truly, Colby Poster Printing Company has played a significant role in shaping the street aesthetic of Los Angeles, sometimes in unexpected places — I recently found this collection of posters from the venue Skateland USA which famously gave NWA their start.
The Colby Poster Company Closed shop in 2012, due in large part to the increasing role of digital spaces for marketing events. However, the legacy of their distinct visual style still reverberates throughout the city; Concert promoters and printers continue to plaster poles and walls with event marketing which seems to echo the visual style pioneered by The Colby Poster Company. Sadly, this new generation of printed materials seems to lack the unique tactile quality, aura, and authenticity of those original typeset posters.
But what truly does remain in the countless examples of cool poster designs. Hopefully, by valuing the work that was done at the shop while it was still in operation, we can ensure that the Colby legacy remains intact.
