Isn’t it ironic that posters shouting Keep Calm had military connotations at a point in time?
In 1939, a poster series was commissioned by the British government to boost the morale of citizens in the build up to the war with Germany.
The Design Brief
The posters had to be uniform in style and feature simple and striking typeface. The only graphic element would be the crown of King George VI. The posters had to have just two colours – background and font colour.
Three designs went into production. The first two were distributed up and down the country and put up on railway platforms and shop windows.
But the third couldn’t make it to the billboards; this was the Keep Calm and Carry On design.
It never came to be officially issued and remained largely unseen by the public until a copy turned up more than 50 years later at a second hand bookstore, Barter Books, in northeast England. The owner-couple, Stuart and Mary Manley picked it up among a rickety rack of books at an auction. Mary Manley hung it on the bookstore’s wall and it became so popular among the customers that a year later they began to sell copies and merchandise with the slogan.
Since then, the poster has seen numerous parodies, becoming an iconic poster of this century, never mind that it was meant to go viral 76 years earlier.
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