Tag: automobile

1928 Aston Martin International poster

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I’ve always seen this poster as a very English design, and I have stolen the headline from that quintessentially English novel ‘The Wind In The Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908. In this passage from chapter two Toad is trying to persuade (or perhaps coerce) Ratty and Mole to join him in an adventure in his latest acquisition, a gipsy caravan. He stands proudly in the stable-yard at Toad Hall and declares, “Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!” But he will soon be abandoning the caravan in a ditch, having just been driven off the road “with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound” by a speeding automobile, and by the end of the chapter Toad has “ordered a large and very expensive motor-car.”

In this Aston Martin poster I have illustrated, in a very English style, a more gentle approach to motoring pleasure than that envisaged by Toad, but at the same time creating an image evoking the freedom of the open road, something very close to Mr Toad’s heart.

For further details of this and other posters in my collection please navigate here.

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Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia poster

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I first stumbled upon a picture of this lovely Vittorio Jano designed Alfa Romeo 1750 some years ago in an Italian Alfa Romeo book, and wanted to use the image as reference for a new poster. But I needed some background information about the car’s achievements to feed me ideas how I might build the design, and not being an Italian speaker I looked to the internet. And here I found a wonderful story about the 1930 Mille Miglia event in which the charismatic Italian driver Tazio Nuvolari (pictured on the right) cheekily overtook his great rival Achille Varzi, also driving an Alfa, by sneaking up in the dark with his headlights turned off, only turning them back on after he had passed Varzi. Of course, I couldn’t resist using this excellent yarn as the basis for my design, despite the fact that eyebrows are raised among the cognoscenti as to the accuracy of this version of events. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

The Coppa delle Mille Miglia is run over a figure of eight course starting out from Brescia to Rome and back to Brescia; a distance, as the name suggests, of close to a thousand miles. And after sixteen hours of racing Nuvolari beat Varzi by seven minutes to win the race.

This particular poster has been my most popular design by a considerable distance and is still selling well. If you’d like further details of this and other posters in my collection you can find them here.