Designing the New Nation: Graphic Design, Multimodal Discourse, and Soft Power in Pakistan's Tourism Posters (1955 to 1968)

Abstract

Aim of the Study: This article recovers and analyses a neglected corpus of postcolonial graphic design, fifteen tourism posters issued by the Government of Pakistan between approximately 1955 and 1968 and held in the David Pollack Vintage Posters archive, reading each poster as both a designed artefact and an instrument of analogue nation branding.

Methodology: The study triangulates Barthes's semiotics of denotation, connotation, and myth, Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar of representational, interactive, and compositional metafunctions, and soft power theory as developed by Nye, Anholt, and Manor. Produced by the Bureau of Tourism, Karachi, and the Department of Tourism, Rawalpindi, designed principally at the Pakistan Institute of Art and Design, Karachi, and printed lithographically by Ferozsons Ltd., Nazeer Printing Works, and Packages Limited, the series constitutes one of the earliest sustained graphic design programmes of the Pakistani state.

Findings: Analysis demonstrates that Pakistani designers synthesised Swiss compositional discipline, French affichiste gouache rendering, and indigenous Mughal, Islamic, and Bengali iconographies into a coherent national house style, while distributing that style unevenly across the bi-territorial state. West Pakistan was rendered through architecture, archaeology, and modernity, and East Pakistan largely through wildlife, craft, and Mughal relics.

Conclusion: The article makes three contributions. It restores a non-Western corpus to the canon of mid-century modernist design history, it extends Manor's dramaturgical model of digital diplomacy backward into the print era, and it demonstrates that graphic design analysis offers an independent evidentiary register for questions usually answered through political and economic sources.