900+ WPA POSTERS - FREE and LEGAL IMAGES for Print on Demand, Graphic Design (Commercial Use)

you may have seen these old vintage posters occasionally online they're called wpa posters and that stands for works progress administration now there are over 900 of these posters available online and you can get high quality free designs that are completely in the public domain and that means that they're totally free and totally legal to use for any graphic design project even selling them online so let's go explore the bygone era of wpa posters i love old vintage posters and one of the problems you might run into is it's tough to find these collections so this collection of 932 posters are sitting in the library of congress but it can be a little bit tricky to find it so the first thing i'm going to do is just show you how to locate it so here's the library of congress's website is just loc.gov and if you type into the search window on the right hand side wpa posters i'm going to get back some different results and what you want to do is click on the first one wpa posters and then you're going to get this like search window back where there's a whole bunch of different things and it's like it's almost too much right it's like there's all these links on the left and there's all these things there's events there's collections so what you want to look for is the collection of the wpa posters so it's not necessarily the first result but when i click on this collection of wpa posters that will bring back the collection here and you see featured content about this collection again there's just like almost too much stuff right so i hate to complain about a free resource but it's like where's the actual collection here's the collection items at the top if you click on the collection items you'll see there's now 947 posters sitting in here that's one way that you can access the collection there's another way you can get there as well so i'm going to start the same it's going to be on the library of congress which is loc.gov i'll type in wpa posters exact same as before now when i scroll down i'm not going to click on this collection that we see here but i'm going to click underneath it's the web page posters prints and photographs division and when i click on that i'm going to get to this kind of like old looking web page and it says searching in the collection blah blah blah so i'm going to click this by the people for the people posters from the wpa 1936-1943 and when i click on that i'm going to get to another page in the library of congress and i'm going to see there's searching search this collection there's about this collection if you just want to see the actual collection it's kind of buried right there it's view all and when i click on view all i will see 932 results so you may want to go in the first way you may want to go in the second way but either way you're going to see over 900 pictures which are old vintage illustrations these are all completely public domain and let's take a look at a few of them this will be cool if you're using this view on the library of congress there's a couple different views you can see over on the right hand side there's grid gallery and list if i click on list that will just give me each individual item if i click on gallery that's kind of nice it's like a little bit of a you know bigger thumbnail and then if i click on grid that will get me the smaller view that i was looking at before so i'm actually going to click on the gallery view and i'm going to scroll down there's also pages as well there's 932 results and they're split up into different pages so you can go next page and you can scroll through with the little arrow buttons the left arrow is just to the left of number one and the right arrow is just to the right of number 47. so if you find a picture that you like you can just simply click on it and open it up and it'll give you a greater detailed view i like to right click on it and just open in a new window so i've just got a couple here that i've clicked on and opened up in a new window this is pretty cool this is an old theater poster now anything that i click on it'll give me the digital id it'll give me the repository and then it actually gives me a little about this item as well so when you click on about this item it will give you what it is so here's the summary poster for federal theater project presentation of the devil passes at the libero theater santa barbara california showing a hooded figure looming over an image of a man and that's that poster there so there's two reasons that i can think of that you would usually use a poster like this or download this image one would be you just want to use the image as is clean it up in photoshop or some sort of graphic design software and then you could just hang it in your house you could sell it you could have it as part of your project the other thing is you would use this as reference if you were making your own type of poster in that style so you just download this image i'm just clicking right clicking here and just clicking save image and i can save it and then i could use this as a template if i'm you know having my own theater production and i wanted to use a similar style here's another one this is the mason opera house is having a show about dracula you can see the prices they're really swanky seats are 55 cents and if you just want the cheap seats those are 20 cents and so that's kind of nice a little graphic there and again i mean this is an original you know poster that sits in the library of congress so the scans on them they may require some cleanup in graphics software this is a poster for the grand canyon national park and if you're wondering what the wpa was it's like a government agency that did a lot of these propaganda posters but they weren't just war propaganda there was also like parks health you know community minded things like that so this is the one of the wpa posters for the grand canyon there's another travel poster here these are quite popular this is for lassen volcanic national park and these just look great as is there's no reason that you have to necessarily try to modify it to any great extent you could just you know use this as a high quality copy go to a print store like a staples or a walmart photo center and you could get a nice high quality copy printed for your house or you could clean this up a tiny bit if you wanted in photoshop for example and sell this if you want it as a high-end print and there's a few businesses out there that do that they sell these public domain prints and they've just made them a little bit more dynamic so you could recolor this for example in photoshop pretty easily if you wanted and have some variants this is another one yellowstone national park again this is completely free it's public domain and what i like about it is that because it's on the library of congress's website generally speaking the library of congress's website has public domain images but if you really want to see and make sure that it is you just click on about this item and you can scroll on down and you can see what the actual copyright is on this on this image so here's the rights advisory no known restrictions on publication and that's pretty standard because for you know public domain photos it means that they've fallen into the public domain meaning the public owns them [Music] here's another theater poster wpa federal theater presents it can't happen here the reason i would like this sort of a poster is you could remove the text and clean it up and you could just have it as a base design as well or again you could use it as a template i really like stencil work simplistic minimalistic designs this is always good advice this one says t keep your teeth clean and again you could use this as is or you could remove the text at the top and the bottom and then you could make your own bathroom poster based on this this is a pretty simplistic design and but that's the beauty of it is that these are you know vintage and somebody who's maybe a baby boomer would want to buy a poster like that for their house because it brings back memories maybe of when they were a kid here's another one it says don't mix them this is whiskey and gasoline and this is a public service poster that would have come out back in the day to obviously you know discourage people from drinking and driving now despite all my complaining about the library of congress and their website they do have a cool thing over here the second way you can search for it when you go into the library of congress's collections page they've got filters along the left hand side so let's say you were really trying to drill down on a specific location like let's say you wanted to see los angeles for example i don't care about new york i don't want to see illinois i can click on los angeles and that will give me 64 results that are all specific to los angeles you're going to get a lot of like hollywood posters that sort of thing i could also you know go back up i could go back a level and i could say i'm going to click on just the new york ones and that will give me new york like broadway posters could be like new york based artwork this is a really nice one i've seen this one before this is the city of new york and municipal airports and what i really like about this design is that you could simply remove the text below and you could make another city using these airplanes so it's a city of new york municipal airports but why not change it and say city of wherever you live municipal airports and you could create 50 or 60 variants of this very easily and then you could even have very specific things about the city like maybe top attractions or the name of the airport this is a great design because it's all the text is sitting on top of one color so you could easily remove all of this down at the bottom now if you want to download these it's pretty easy to do so there's a download option where you can click here on the lower left and you can say jeep jpeg jpeg jpeg well this is just a different quality of the three the bigger the size there's also a tiff option as well so you've got a few different options and then when you want to download it you just click go and then it will just give you the pretty high res photo or illustration i really really like this one it's probably my favorite poster just because it's so versatile you can change it and make it all you know into any city you wanted here's another one that i like this is curing juvenile delinquency in the slums and it's you know regardless of how you feel about the government of the united states or you know any of this stuff you can't argue with the quality of the print i mean it's pretty high quality you know you can zoom in here with the little plus button and you can see here federal art project usa work wpa there's like the nice little logos and stuff on here which is kind of cool so again that's a common sort of trendy art print that you would have in your house because it's real it's historical and you know sometimes it looks a little bit antiquated and outdated which is the whole point of having vintage art up in your house now i'm going to provide the links in the video description below but if you're watching this on television and you don't want to grab the links not a problem you can just go into google and you can type in wa poster collection and then it's library of congress what will happen is the first result that comes back will be that actual collection i'm just going to click on the first result and that will bring you to this main page that may look familiar the hard part when you get to this page is there's so many links it's buried right there underneath the search button view all and then when you view all that's when the 932 results come up and then you can modify your views as needed remember you've got multiple pages down at the bottom as well there's actually 10 pages of posters here so if you're scrolling through and you're not seeing what you're looking for you can go to any individual page or just click the little arrow button and that will take you to page number two and so on and so on lots to see hours and hours of old vintage beautiful posters from the wpa i hope you guys found that helpful i love looking at old vintage stuff as always please do leave me a comment or a question and thank you so much for watching

Channel: Crafty Stax

Views: 2,939

Keywords: free and legal images, public domain photos, library of congress, crafty stax, print on demand images, free images for t-shirts, pictures for t-shirts, redbubble tips, print on demand tips, teepublic tips, t-shirt niche ideas, wpa posters, government posters, library of congress posters, vintage propaganda posters, united states propaganda, world war II posters, world war ii propaganda posters, free and legal posters, free vintage posters, vintage new york, print on demand

Id: lslK6wj07v8

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021