Herman Miller is selling vintage posters, and we want to buy all of them

Herman Miller is best known for its streamlined, modern furniture, but lately its vintage graphic design has been getting a closer look. Since 2021, the company has been selling framed editions of posters that once used to hang in showrooms to sell its furniture. Now, the company is back with a new set of posters to ogle (and buy).






Some of the design getting new life this year include brochure covers by designer Tomoko Miho that the company used between 1960 to 1962, which will be released as posters in green, blue, and pink colorways this spring. The cover of a 1978 issue of Ideas, Herman Miller’s former magazine, is also getting reissued. The rainbow-colored cover art by Linda Powell originally illustrated a story about the exponential rate of growth and change faced by organizations, Herman Miller says. Today, it will look great on your wall.



Two of the newly available posters come from “The Big Book,” a 44-page wall-mounted showroom catalog. This year is the 50th anniversary of Chadwick Modular Seating, one of the company’s modular sofas, and designer Steve Frykholm demonstrated the furniture’s versatility in 1981 with a poster showing a top-down view of the seating snaking in, out, and around the canvas. Another poster designed by Barbara Loveland for the Wilkes Modular Sofa Group (“The Modular Sofa Group. Make Of It What You Will.”) was part of the catalog and is also now a poster. The red, white, and blue Action Office 2 poster was designed by John Massey, who Herman Miller credits as key to creating its corporate identity.



[Photo: courtesy Herman Miller]



The seeds of this year’s reissues started last year when the company put together a graphics exhibition for Milan during the 2023 Salone del Mobile fair to celebrate Herman Miller’s 100th anniversary, brand creative director Kelsey Keith tells Fast Company.



The exhibit was “a way to tell the story of Herman Miller through its two-dimensional design,” Keith says. “We applied the same thinking when selecting which posters to reintroduce: surfacing gems from our past, recontextualized for the present day, as a way to communicate Herman Miller’s values and history of collaborating with serious design talent.”



Since launching the reissues in 2021, the company (which just rolled out a new logo) has turned its graphics archive into a new revenue stream. The first set of 15 was like a greatest hits collection. Subsequent releases have included work like Frykholm’s company picnic invitation from 1971 showing a close-up illustration of a watermelon, which is in the Museum of Modern Art.