Exhibition poster for Unser Fünfjahrplan [Our Five Year Plan]

"It was 1951 and Klaus Wittkugel had just designed a poster that was going to get him into trouble. As head designer for the German Democratic Republic’s Office of Information, the graphic designer was tasked with creating a poster for an exhibition about the Five Year Plan, which highlighted the GDR’s Soviet-style economic goals. Wittkugel’s poster had an army green background with sans serif numbers '1951-1955' that appeared to be advancing like soldiers. It was simple: clean lines and heavy type. The poster was, by most objective standards, totally benign. After the exhibition ended—and it was considered a wild success—the local newspaper of record ran a piece condemning Wittkugel’s work, writing: 'An abstract, intellectual play with numbers and format takes precedence over depictions of people and clear symbols… This ever-dominant formalist approach to visual communication continues to find its expression in other experiments that show a hatred of mankind.'"—https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-lost-story-of-soviet-germanys-most-famous-graphic-designer/