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National Parks collage

Written by

John Freeman

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I love National Parks and I love Deco style – these cool Deco typefaces and the graphic style of Deco poster art!

I know I like this stuff but I’m not even sure I’m calling it be the right name … is is Deco?

The images

The eight posters left to right, top to bottom are:

  1. Yellowstone National Park
  2. Lassen National Park
  3. See America – Arches National Monument
  4. National Parks Preserve Wildlife
  5. See America – Welcome to Montana
  6. Grand Canyon National Park
  7. Zion National Park
  8. See America – Carlsbad Caverns National Park

They are all 1930’s vintage.

The ones that I find the most striking are Posters 1, 2, 6, 7.

All four of my faves are all for the “Ranger Naturalist Service“, and they all use that deco font that I love so much!

“The Ranger Naturalist Service refers to the historical educational branch of the National Park Service established in the 1920s.”

The overall effort was the See America campaign! From the Share America website:

“The See America campaign was developed by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era agency that put unemployed people to work and, with this project, also encouraged tourism. There were 14 original designs for the posters”

The designs and colors in all of the panels are really quite striking.

OMG!!! Here’s to you Google!

I googled “typeface of National Park posters“, which is a pretty weak question, but it was good enough to produce the answer!

A modern company is selling a rendition of that font and calling John Muir Sans!

They are from “the WPA Era”.

Only 14 original silk-screen national park poster designs were produced during the WPA era between 1938 and 1941.

  1. Coronado National MemorialThe puzzle
  2. Grand Teton
  3. Grand Canyon
  4. Yosemite
  5. Yellowstone Old Faithful
  6. Yellowstone Falls
  7. Glacier
  8. Mount Rainier
  9. Zion
  10. Crater Lake
  11. Lassen Volcanic
  12. Wind Cave
  13. Great Smoky Mountains
  14. Boulder Dam (Lake Mead)

Anyway, this puzzle has a variety of cool colors, and some very cool fonts. It is set up in eight distinct panels, so the cool orange color that may have caught your eye right off, is probably only occurs in a single one of those eight panels! I’m guessing that this puzzle is gonna go pretty easily….

Love those colors, love that font!!
Love the colors. Love the cowboy vignette!
Love that 30’s hiking gear!
  • The VERY first thing to catch MY eye is the green on green text of the Zion panel.
    • Whoever set up the typefaces here this went hog-wild on the word “ZION”!
  • Second was the black on mauve text of the Grand Canyon panel
    • and the black on darker mauve text at the bottom of the Lassen panel
    • and the yellow on brown text at the top of the Lassen panel.
      A lot going on in the Lassen panel! 🙂
    • and the gray on black text at the bottom of the Yellowstone panel.
  • Those panels are the “30’s Deco style” ones that I’m so crazy for!

Then I started laying out and it went pretty quick!

I am 3/4 the way done.

  • 1,2 totally done!
    • 1 – loved all that blue and white, and the wonderful deco lettering
    • 2 – loved that rasberry color and the strange yellow sky,and the cool deco lettering
      • There has been no active eruption such as the artist depicts in human memory!
  • 7,8 almost totally done – just missing 1 and 2 pieces respectively
    • 8 – All those deep, dark blues with a little splashes of white were really fun.
      • “See America” is a pretty boring font.
    • 7 – This one was really fun!
      • I love the actual formation in the image, and I love the deco-ish way the rock faces are depicted .
  • 3,4,5,6 all need some work!
    • 4 – is the best pice of graphic deign in the page.
      • The deep red sunset shading into lighter orange beneath
      • The artful-ness of the two sheep against the sunset, their lifelike postures …
    • 3- the one next to it, the See America one with the holes in the rocks was also fun
      • The deep, dark reds and the lighter reds were fun.
      • I like how the gray tree-color sets off the reds.
    • 5 – This one is pretty simple a little boring, just black and white.
    • 6 – This one turns out to be the absolute hardest panel by far!
      • All those grays and rasberry’s are so noisy! It’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on!

That rasberry color is kind of a unifying theme for the puzzle!

  • the light raspberry background to the text in panel 6
  • the darker rasberry background to the text in panel 2 color
  • that color is also echoed in the lighter red-browns in panel 3