In public spaces – restaurants, stadiums and the showrooms of global consumers, the poster has been replaced with flat screens with LED or LCD display. Soon all our urban spaces will be a ticket to the light show. Gone are the days of plain paper, digital is the new medium of communication and the new poster. If you examine the most urban metropolitan areas in the world; England – Piccadilly Circus, America – Time square and Japan - Tokyo you find the sunlight is replaced with ever expanding buildings which illuminate at night. The ways of the humble poster are now yielding to moving pictures. The classic billboard is being replaced with a commercial illustration polluting our eyes at every corner we turn. To know where we are heading we need to know where we came from. The traditional poster is slowly disappearing and will soon be a nostalgic memory that will return when the occasional flickering screen freezes. In the grand old days a billboard was simple; you rent land where the billboard will go and then you find advertisers to rent the billboard from you for the month. The art of putting up an advert was not an easy task; firstly a four-colour plot printer would print different sections of the billboard, this would be assembled on-site and jammed together with glue to form a puzzle of beauty. Replacing it was a special ritual involving two to four men, a ladder, a bucket of glue and a wallpaper brush. It wasn’t just a question of slapping a new poster on the old one either; first a layer of white paper had to be applied to prevent the previous work showing through, then you would sit in a daze trying to figure out how this conundrum of papers would work itself together to form a picture. Today we live the transition phase; the hybrid era of posters. There are many hybrid forms of posters and moving pictures out there such as the flat, glass screen-like cases seen next to roadsides in which images roll past replacing each other, each visible for just a few seconds before the next one comes along. Another hybrid system example is roller-blinds, with the image made up of thin strips rotating to form a new image. Inevitably, they’re all heading in one direction all moving to one digital “pixel” world. A new world of one screen with a million voices for the advertisers to voice their products and share a platform.