Vratislav Pecka, better known as Posterlad, created the Posterlad project to redefine how we perceive and interact with posters. His approach to the poster is aesthetic and ideas driven, rather than promotional and advertorial. On the Posterlad website, Vratislav says "the project is all about pleasing the viewer's eye. Because the world needs good looking things". And who could possibly disagree with that? The project has been a huge success, receiving awards and critical acclaim, and Pecka's style is hard to forget once you've laid eyes on it.
Your Posterlad project has been brilliantly received - what lessons have you learned about turning your passion into a business?
Thank you! I actually never planned on making the PosterLad project a business. I mean, I have had an online store for about three years now. Back then I made it mainly because of the fact that twice a month someone asked me on Instagram "Where can I buy this?". It went on like that for 2 years and all of sudden before the summer last year, people started buying more and more. At that very same time, thanks to corona, I did not have to spend that much time on clients work. So I invested a lot of time into learning something about e-commerce, I built a new online store and started taking the whole business side of it much more seriously than before. I am constantly learning something in terms of running an e-commerce business.
Where do you take inspiration from for your work?
Most of the time, I just start making a poster just like that, I don't necessarily seek inspiration before I make something. In general, I love looking back at Bauhaus school designs and thanks to that I guess you can see it has had some influence on what I do.
You talk about “approaching poster design as fine art”. Do you have any fine art inspirations?
Yeah, I think poster can be so much more than just a medium presenting some event. When it comes to fine art, there are so many artists I follow or like to read about. Jan Kaláb, Morag Myerscough, Felipe Pantone, Peter Tarka or Marco Vannini to name some of the best ones. In general, I don't always seek inspiration in terms of visual inspiration, but sometimes I like to observe these artists' personalities – what they are like, how they present themselves, are they nice? For me, that is as important as the quality of their work.
Do you have any thoughts on the line between graphic art and visual communication?
I think a good visual communication is true art. For instance, when I get to my designated gate at the airport without thinking too much about the navigation system, that is art.
What is the ideas process behind a Posterlad design?
For the Grafik Editions poster I just wanted to change things up completely. Usually, I use very geometric layouts, perfect circles, perfect rectangles, etc. This time I just started drawing these lines very randomly and then I realised they could overlap each other, so I kept drawing until the final design happened. I always spend the most amount of time on tweaking the colours, this was not an exception.
Do you have any plans for future projects you can tell us about?
I do have couple of exciting collaborations going with some brands that I will announce soon. I definitely want to keep doing more collaborations like that and also dive into the cryptoart world a little bit.