Tree of Peace – poster, United Nations, Henry Eveleigh, 1947

In 1947, Montreal illustrator Henry Eveleigh’s Tree of Peace won first prize – and a $1,500 award – in an international poster competition for the newly formed United Nations.

Eveleigh’s concept combined the symbolic power of planting and growth with a branching leaf structure that allowed for the equal representation of each participating country. The result was a visual metaphor that was both clear and far-sighted – rooted in nature, yet capable of accommodating multilingual expression.

Each poster had to display the names of participating nations in one of twenty different languages – and alphabets. To achieve this economically, Eveleigh drew on an old circus-poster trick: the multicolour tree was printed in bulk, and the bottom portion – left blank – was overprinted locally. The solution was elegant, economical, and genuinely international. The poster remains one of the earliest examples of multilingual and multi-script typographic design on a global scale.

While today Henry Eveleigh may be best known for his partnership with Carl Dair in the Eveleigh-Dair studio, this poster stands on its own as a quiet example of modernist idealism and typographic intelligence. – Rod McDonald