postersinamsterdam.com is a website showing a growing collection of posters that are and were displayed in the city of Amsterdam from 2002 till the present. Currently containing more than 3000 posters. It forms an inspirational design source for designers worldwide. It shares the quality and diversity of the designs of the posters. It promotes the designers of the posters by mentioning their names and placing links besides the posters to their design studios.

Posters hang in Amsterdam for a brief period of time. Mostly one week or maybe two. After that the posters are out of sight and maybe only exist in the archive of the designer of the poster. This project started out as a personal archive of Jarr Geerligs in 2002. While the collection grew inside the hard drive of Jarrs computer the intent grew to share it with other designers worldwide. In 2006 the archive was placed on Flickr and contained roughly 400 posters at that time. In the years following a small group found the collection, but the problem was that the archive on Flickr was too much tugged away for people to find. That is why Jarr Geerligs created the website postersinamsterdam.com around it in 2011. The website gives the collection an own face and makes it more accessible. It uses the content from Flickr and loads it in to display it in a more visual direct way. This helps to browse quickly to see if there is something you like.

BACKSTORY:
As a designer myself I know the importance of a personal inspirational archive. The thing is that I think that you can show one picture to a group of designers and all designers will be inspired by that picture in a different way. So why not share your personal inspirational archive with all designers? This is a thought that came up after reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay by Eric S. Raymond about open source programming.

SELECTING THE POSTERS:
When I bike through Amsterdam I make a selection of the posters I take photographs of. I leave a lot of posters un-photographed because they do not meet up with my criteria. Criteria like: Has there been effort put in to the making of the poster? Is there an Idea? A concept in the poster? Does it have nice typography? Is it playful? Does the poster have a nice picture? Does it have impact? And so on.

CATEGORIZING THE POSTERS:
Some times the lack of a poster becomes a poster. That is why I created a category called the non-poster: http://www.postersinamsterdam.com/non-poster.html There are more categories. Like ‘Posters with mainly one face’, ‘Posters with a lot of red’, ‘Posters with masked people’ and more. One category shows my personal favorites. By dividing the collection in these different categories I put an extra point of view to the project.

I wanted to make the site in such a way that design minded people could easily browse the posters without to much clutter of useless information and cherry pick what they want to see. Here for I had to find a way to load pictures from Flickr to the site. I found a solution in Java Script functions called Request.Flickr at t:https://github.com/thinkphp/Request.Flickr. I had to dive into the code and figure out with trial and error how to be able to modify the presentation of the output. I decided to use one of the standard thumbnail sizes of Flickr of 160×240. I used that size as a grid for the postersinamsterdam.com website.

In november this year the collection shows an overview of posters in Amsterdam for a whole decennium. I believe there is cultural value in that because there is no other organization that has been documenting and preserving this very temporary medium so immensely and for so long.

I believe the collection is appreciated by the design community and modern culture seen the interviews I got passed year. I was interviewed on TypeToken.net, in ELLE à Seoul of September 2011 and in Mike Patterson his magazine For The Love of Posters. All about postersinamsterdam.com. The following blogs worldwide mentioned the project after it was fully operational in may 2011: creativereview.co.uk, formfiftyfive.com, design.org, aisleone.net, file-magazine.com, siteinspire.com, nalden.net, designlov.com, typographicartstuff.com, weareplural.com, threefifty.ca, temp-magazin.de, aa13.fr, jdehaas.com, typographicartstuff.com, husmee.com, websmagazine.net, blendup.com.br, lostateminor.com, designinabox.com.br, mif-design.com, ozi.com.br, ok-periodicals.com, shillingtondesignblog.com, www.jaymug.com, blog.jess3.com, eyespired.nl, in10.nl, fontanel.nl, blogduwebdesign.com, createfreethinking.blogspot.com, blog.ideatransplant.com, whatmademelook.tumblr.com and more.

Postersinamsterdam is a permanent contributor to amsterdamadblog.com’s sidebar.
Recently the project recieved the status of Special Honoree on the 16th Annual Webby Awards for Best Cultural Blog: http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current_honorees.php?media_id=96&category_id=706&season=16.
All resulting in a growing number of site visitors, Twitter followers and Facebook likers.