We believe posters are important and the art of poster design should be celebrated.

Launched in 2014, the International Poster Competition has received 56,000+ entries from over 100 countries and is recognised as one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary posters.

Influencing us every day, posters offer windows into exciting worlds of culture in multi-layered communications distilled into one captivating image, or series of images. Aside from what posters symbolise, and the role they play in different cultural landscapes, they also impact us personally. Posters have the power to quickly capture our imaginations, impact our emotions and influence our behaviours.

Posters have been utilised for centuries to inform, promote, provoke and celebrate, however what is considered a poster today may be open to interpretation. Is a poster displayed on a screen still a poster? Is a poster which is not rectangular still a poster? Is a poster which is predominantly filmed or animated still a poster?

Our aim is to organise an open-minded platform led by questions, not answers. While the format of this project is a competition and inherently critical, our focus is also on celebrating art, championing design and platforming talented people.

The humble format offers a challenge for demonstrating capabilities from a creative, technical, and critical perspective as a foundation of graphic design and visual communication. While poster content, styles of communication, and applications reflect changes in the wider world, the role they serve remains the same; inform, promote, provoke, and celebrate. We hope to evolve with these changes and open up definitions and understandings of what posters are and can be.

Each year a curated selection of acclaimed poster entries from the International Poster Competition are showcased in the International Poster Exhibition and published in the International Poster Book.

Through the competitions, exhibitions, and books we hope to spread a passion for posters and encourage appreciation for the artistic, technical, social, and societal value of posters while contributing to the legacy of what we believe is an incredibly important medium.

If you share our passion for posters and would like to share your writing, views or ideas, please let us know. We would love to hear from you. Over the years we have included commentary from creatives and writers in the International Poster Books and we are looking to build an archive and growing resource on posters as INTL evolves in the future.

Between 2014 and 2018 the International Poster Exhibition was hosted in Glasgow, Scotland as part of Graphic Design Festival Scotland. The exhibitions included inspiring work by some of the world’s leading creative agencies, independent artists, designers, and students from all over the world, side-by-side in an arena of colour, type, form, and imagery. The exhibitions were designed by Warriors Studio.

In 2022, the International Poster Exhibition returned for a special one-day showcase as part of Poster Night, in conjunction with International Assembly at SWG3, Glasgow.

In 2019, the International Poster Competition was showcased on newly developed digital platform Olympia Gallery. 2020 was postponed due the pandemic, and Olympia Gallery relaunched in 2021.

In 2022, together with Nam Huynh and Sebastian König, INTL launched Poster World, a new approach to digital exhibitions, using an augmented reality app. You can explore International Poster Exhibition 2022 wherever you are in the world, framed by unique and interactive billboards immersed within your surrounding environments.

Renders by Nam Huynh.

Each year, all of the posters selected for exhibition are published in the International Poster Book along with exclusive interviews, jury’s comments and commissioned texts. You can order these books in the INTL shop.

Each year, a new jury is selected to examine the posters submitted to the competition along with INTL creative directors, Warriors Studio.

The jury is selected based on their contribution to the contemporary graphic design scene and their outstanding poster design work.

In 2016, we introduced a new system for creating the jury, where the winner(s) of the previous competition would be invited to participate as a jury member of the next competition if they desired. Winners have included students, independent professionals, and creative agencies.

Thank you to all previous jury members: Felix Pfaffli, Warriors Studio, Espace My Monkey/Morgan Fortems and Pierre Vanni, Adrian Shaughnessy, Tony Brook, Erich Brechbühl, Unfun, Lamm & Kirch, Étienne Hervy, Koos Breen, Jamie McIntyre, Jaemin Lee, Letterform Archive, Aurelia Peter, Shiva Nallaperumal, Spassky Fischer, The Rodina, Mark Bohle, Nam Huynh, Shinwoo Park (Paperpress), Juhi Vishnani and Vrints-Kolsteren.

We are now looking for jury members who can offer a more diverse perspective throughout the competition. If you would like to be considered as a jury member, or would like to recommend somebody, please let us know. We extend this welcome especially to creative communities in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia.

You can enjoy the winning selections from previous International Poster Competitions between 2014–2019, and discover the designers of the winning works above. Congratulations!

On the last competition:

The 2024 competition received 2,341 submissions from 85 countries and since launching in 2014 has now received more than 56,000 from over 110 countries. 180 submissions designed by 140 designers were selected for exhibition and publishing in the International Poster Book 9 (2024).

The 2024 jury included Balmer Hählen from Switzerland, Syndicat from France, Wanwai Shum from China based in the Netherlands, Sometimes Always from Brazil but based in France and Warriors Studio from the Scotland, United Kingdom.

You can discover all 180 posters selected inside Olympia Gallery – where the exhibition opened on November 29th 2024. olympiagallery.org and in the Poster World app.

You can take a closer look at all 180 selected posters in the 2024 International Poster Book. The book is packed cover-to-cover with inspiring work, exclusive interviews, and comments from all of the jury members, and a discussion on what makes a poster a poster. Available from intl.international/shop