Design historians have been portending the poster's demise for at least four decades. And by most accounts, the computer screen should have been the final nail in its coffin. And yet, the paper medium endures as a powerful means for a graphic designer to demonstrate his visual mastery.

How Posters Work, a new exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, details the techniques designers use to make arresting posters. Even as the screen has supplanted paper as the dominant medium, the same tricks that make a killer poster still apply to any graphic confined to a rectangle. Here, we pick our favorite techniques, along with the exceptional posters that illustrate them.

Simplify

You've heard it often enough: Good design is simple design. For this 1969 poster, Malcolm Grear uses bold, abstract lines to represent the unmistakable curves of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Assault the surface

Most posters use an image to tell a story. Posters that get burned, smudged, or torn become part of the story. By splattering paint across a photo, or burning a poster—as seen in this Saul Bass print for the 1961 film Exodus—the poster emphasizes its materiality as well as its message.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Manipulate scale

In a 1970s series for furniture company Herman Miller, Steve Frykholm illustrates giant detail shots of picnic ingredients (corn on the cob, pie, watermelon seeds) to comic effect. The posters were all made to promote a summer parties thrown by the company. Looking at the watermelon seeds—each the size of a human hand—it's easy to imagine you're an ant at the picnic, gazing up at the staple of a warm-weather lunch.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Overlap

By overlapping text, designers can play with our perception of depth. Stacking opaque words over one another creates a sense of background and foreground, whereas transparent letters make it possible to stack text while preserving legibility. Massimo Vignelli does the latter here, in his technicolor ad for Knoll Textiles. The letters sit on top of one another, but the eye can easily make out the company name.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Overwhelm the eye

The psychedelic designers of the 1960s flouted the strict rules of modernist type in favor of wavy hand-lettering and vivacious color combinations. This sensational effect was used to promote relaxed ideas in music, sex, and youth culture. A couple of decades later, Keith Haring also opted to overwhelm the eye, but instead of finding inspiration in psychedelia, he drew from New York's graffiti culture.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Double the meaning

Designer Wiktor Górka created a visual pun for his poster for the 1972 film Cabaret, which takes place in a Berlin nightclub in Nazi-era Germany. By fusing together four women's legs (presumably belonging to Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli), he formed a swastika.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Make eye contact

It's hard to look away from a penetrating. Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram, disarms the viewer with her Nude Nude Totally Nude poster, advertising a 1996 play at the Public Theater in New York. In it, two thickly lashed eyes pop with surprise, grabbing your attention.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Make a system

Organized along a grid like a newspaper or storyboard, posters can achieve a pleasing feeling of symmetry and balance, as is the case with Ivan Chermayeff's The Invisible City print for the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1972. Because designers traveled all over the world to attend the conference, Chermayeff wanted to nod at many nationalities at once. He pulled it off by lining up luggage tags in neat rows.

Matt Flynn for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Focus the eye

Lucian Bernhard for Adler. Adler Typewriter, 1909–10. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Lucian Bernhard's print for Adler Typewriters is one of the oldest posters in this survey, illustrating a simple premise: Guide the viewer's gaze. Bernhard's design is a predates the archetypal Apple ad presenting a hero shot of the newest, shiniest product. It's a powerful way to tell viewers that nothing else deserves their attention.