Travel Trends

Vintage Travel Posters Are Cool Again


Family at the coastal village

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Elissa Leibowitz Poma
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    Vintage travel posters remind us of a time when travel was glamorous — and they make for some really attractive artwork for your home or office.

    Retro posters have made frequent appearances in the marketplace over the past few months, perhaps partly inspired by last year’s 100th anniversary of the U.S. National Park Service.

    In the 1930s and '40s, the U.S. Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project commissioned artists to create works of art as a way to put them back to work after the Great Depression. The effort included a series of posters promoting U.S. National Parks that have been so popular over the years that modern artists have created replicas. You can purchase prints on various websites, including

    Ranger Doug’s Enterprises

    and

    AllPosters.com

    .

    Meanwhile, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory teamed up with professional designers to keep people dreaming of visiting far-off planets in the future. They created a series of retro-inspired travel posters to 14 different planets, including Jupiter and the extrasolar planet of Kepler 16b. The posters are available to download and print for free on

    NASA’s website

    .



    Related: How to Share Your Travel Photos and Experiences



    If you’d like to decorate your home with posters of places that only exist in the pages of books or on film, there are a number of new artworks available. Artist Steve Thomas created stylistic posters of destinations that were included in the horror fiction writings of 20th-century

    author H.P. Lovecraft

    .

    And the Etsy store

    Magic Mushroom Paper Company

    sells a trio of Star Wars-inspired travel posters, plus ones from “Doctor Who” and the Harry Potter books, among others.



    Related: 8 Things Not to Bring Home from a Trip