Practical guides and art history from the VORAROSA atelier: poster sizes, framing, gallery walls, and the stories behind the prints.
The founding manifesto welcomed "any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex". In its first year more women applied than men — and the school's response was to invent a women's class and route it into weaving. The work they made there outlasted almost everything else.
Read the guide ↗For about thirty years the Victorians were convinced their wallpaper was killing them, and the wallpaper was green. William Morris publicly dismissed the whole thing as hysteria. His family fortune came from one of the largest arsenic producers in the world. The truth is more awkward than either side wanted.
Read the guide ↗In 1896 Susan B. Anthony said the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. She was talking about a machine that let a woman leave a house alone, without asking, and made the corset impossible. The poster designers noticed immediately.
Read the guide ↗Every poster size we print, converted to centimetres and inches with its price — plus why A2 and 50×70 cm never share a frame, how to size art to a sofa, and the exact height to hang it.
Read the guide ↗Every size in the catalogue is a stock frame size, so the frame should never cost more than the art. The exact size pairings, mat borders in centimetres, when acrylic beats glass, and how to flatten a rolled print without heat.
Read the guide ↗The gap between frames should be 5-8 cm, and the whole group has to read as one rectangular block hung at a single centre line. Three tested layouts with exact centimetres, plus which VORAROSA categories combine without fighting each other.
Read the guide ↗Three phrases do most of the work in art-print listings, and only two of them can be verified. A plain-language breakdown of paper weight, ink chemistry and the word Giclée — plus the specs that are pure decoration.
Read the guide ↗The lesbian paperback boom of 1950–1965 produced some of the strongest commercial illustration of the century, painted under censorship rules that dictated how every story had to end. A history of the genre, its artists, and how to hang the covers properly.
Read the guide ↗Basquiat's three-pointed crown was a coronation for jazz musicians, boxers and writers — and it became the most collected motif in contemporary art after a 1982 canvas sold for $110.5 million in 2017. Here is the history, and exactly how to size, frame and place a street art print at home.
Read the guide ↗The Bauhaus existed for only fourteen years, yet its three shapes and three colours still govern how modern posters look. A history with dates and names, plus exact sizes, frames and hanging heights for putting that geometry on a wall today.
Read the guide ↗Trellis, Daisy, Acanthus, Strawberry Thief, Willow Bough: the five Morris patterns that matter, what makes them structurally work, and exactly how to hang botanical prints without turning a room into a sample book.
Read the guide ↗In 1908 the WSPU assigned itself purple, white and green and became the first political movement to run a colour identity like a brand. A century later, every protest placard still follows the four rules the suffrage studios wrote.
Read the guide ↗