Vintage Travel Posters Are Cool Again

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.

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.