Atral Advertising Posters

Pharmaceutical product advertising poster for Atral Laboratories. The pharmaceutical industry exploited this advertising vehicle intensely, with very appreciable graphic results, especially when it needed to present new drugs that, of course, had stiff competition from other brands. The excellence of the graphic communication of national pharmaceutical companies, such as the Pasteur Institute, Delta and Atral, was due to the hiring of professional graphic artists who left their mark on simple pieces such as these blotters, which can be found, lacking of explicit dating, between the fifties and sixties. José Cambraia was the director of Atral's design department. Atral Laboratories were born in 1948 from a modest pharmacy located in the Alcântara neighborhood and were precursors in the manufacture of antibiotics in Portugal. Cambraia excelled in the combination of graphic resources, in figurative metaphors that signaled the occurrence of maladies or their cure by the intervention of the drug, complemented by text cards, a decorative element appreciated by designers since the nationalist propaganda of the 1930s.