Vintage Poster Archives
Guinness Goodness! 1962 | R. Peppé Vintage Beer Poster
Guinness Goodness! 1962 | R. Peppé Vintage Beer Poster
Couldn't load pickup availability
A smiling man in a cobalt-blue suit balances a pint of Guinness on his head as his green felt hat lifts free. One arm raised in greeting, the other implied by the suit at the frame edge, the figure fills the lower two-thirds of the poster. Above him, in slab-serif capitals, the headline runs 'GOODNESS!' in black and 'GUINNESS!' in deep red, both at a scale that reads across a street.
Designed by Rodney Peppé in 1962 for Guinness through S.H. Benson, the London agency that had run the Guinness advertising account since 1929. Peppé joined Benson as an art director around 1960, fresh from training at Eastbourne School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. The Guinness and British Petroleum posters he produced in this period were his earliest professional illustration work, predating by several years the children's books that brought him wider recognition. The printer code 'G.A/P.D.U. 2362' in the lower margin identifies it as a registered Guinness Archive design. The 'Goodness! Guinness!' exclamation reworks the foundational 'Guinness is Good for You' slogan, the campaign S.H. Benson had built from 1929 onward, into a punchier street-poster format suited to early-1960s British advertising.
The illustration technique sits squarely in the mid-century British commercial graphic tradition: flat areas of saturated colour with a hand-applied crayon texture on the suit and hat, clean cream ground, no shading, no perspective tricks. The wit is entirely structural, a single visual idea, fully resolved.
Reproduced from the archival source as a fine art print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. The matte surface holds the cream ground and the saturated cobalt without glare, staying faithful to the original offset lithograph's flat quality.
