I’ve been looking at a lot of 1950s advertising for design cues for posters. In regards to technology, it seems that electric toasters and refrigerators were the craze back then– a little difficult to adapt to bicycle.

However, the design elements cross over easily enough. The fonts used were quite different from today– some fancy sans fonts and hand painted ones. There were often rounded geometric shapes such as elllipses and boomerangs. And of course, the colors. Here are a few handy links for palettes:
Palette 1
Palette 2

Of course, paint swatches from the 50s are also handy:
Suburban Modern Sherwin Williams Swatches #1
Suburban Modern Sherwin Williams Swatches #2

And finally, a handy CYMK to RGB color value converter.
Without further ado, here’s a poster created using the above resources.

I remember watching Forbidden Planet in college. That was a decent movie, a bit silly now (especially the music) but it’s still well rated on imdb. Many of its other 50′s sci-fi B-movie brethren never fared so well. While the movies were bad… there were also the posters.

All the absurdity of these hastily made, far fetched movies summarized in one extremely loud poster– monsters, screaming women, military men, and ludicrous speech bubbles. I guess it was hard to make a scary poster back then because usually some text in the poster had to explain just how scary the movie was.

Well, here’s our own scary thought: electric transportation.