Vintage Poster Archives
Paul Colin Sic 1950s | Vintage Advertising Poster
Paul Colin Sic 1950s | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A yellow figure and an orange citrus-peel creature face each other across a flat sky-blue ground, each holding a bottle of Sic soda. The yellow form is a simplified human shape, upright and smiling. The orange form coils like a ribbon of peel, topped with a fish-like head. Above them, the SIC brand name fills the upper third of the composition in large, hand-lettered crimson. Across the base, condensed blue serif type declares "ENFIN UNE BOISSON RAFRAICHISSANTE", Finally, a Refreshing Drink, with the Champigneulles name below in italic script.
Paul Colin (1892–1985) produced this lithograph for Brasserie Champigneulles, the Nancy-region brewery founded in 1897 in Lorraine, around 1950 to 1954. Printed by Imprimerie Bedos & Cie in Paris, it represents Colin's post-war commercial graphic style: biomorphic, flat, chromatic, built from a handful of decisive shapes rather than illustration. Over his career Colin produced more than 1,400 posters, many for French theatre and entertainment, but his advertising work for food and drink clients applied the same bold economy to consumer products.
The composition distils the Sic brand into two invented creatures, part human, part citrus fruit, whose meeting reads simultaneously as a handshake and a toast. The sky-blue field amplifies the warmth of the yellow and orange, giving the whole poster an optimism consistent with the post-war consumer moment it was made for.
Reproduced from a high-resolution scan of the original lithograph on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper with archival pigment inks. The natural white, no-OBA matte surface holds the saturated flat colour and hand-lettered energy of Colin's original design.
