While posters can be seen everywhere in the city, a new art exhibit is attempting to become tradition using the outdoors and bright colors to capture spectators’ attention.

After a year-and-a-half of planning, the first ever Chicago Poster Biennial opened on Sept. 26, exhibiting 167 posters in Millennium Park created by international artists.

The jury exhibit was moderated by Joseph M. Essex. Other international recognized jury judges were from France, Japan, Canada, Israel and Mexico.

“By having a larger jury and a particular voting process that we used, it made it so that only the best work could get identified, and the politics were reduced if not completely eliminated,” Joseph Essex said.

Essex said the process-selecting who to invite for the opening night of the exhibit, narrowing down the winners and sending out press releases-took more time than expected since it was the first time planning the event.

“The basic criterion of a poster is to attract a person’s attention from 25 feet away,” Essex said. “To be able to hold the audience and give them information they need in order to make a particular point so that you have typography and imagery that comes together giving the viewer information.”

There were no specific guidelines for the entries. All the posters had different themes ranging from music, to restaurants, to politics.

“We wanted it to be outside for the public because we need to change the cultural attitude about posters here,” Rutter said. “We want people to be more aware of what is possible with the ways we communicate and that design is not simply [a] means of advancing commerce through business process.”

From the 167 posters at the exhibit, there were five awards given on opening night. The gold medal winner was from Switzerland, the two silver medals winners were from China and United States and the last two winners were from Iran and France.

“The judging of each poster was based on its artistic merits and communication merits relative to its own subject,” Essex said.

A silver recognition was given to Dan Ibarra, owner of Aesthetics Apparatus, a design company in Minneapolis. His promotional poster took him a week-and-a-half to create and was for a concert of Daniel Johnson, a musician from Texas who has been struggling with bipolar disorder for 20 years.

“The poster shows concepts of mental illness and reclusion,” Ibarra said. “Recurring themes all inspired the collage-based image that was then digitally dismantled and reconstructed as a three-color screen printed poster.”

The idea for the poster biennial came from Lance Rutter, president of Chicago Poster Biennial Association. The exhibit is being hosted not only in Chicago for the first time but in the United States, as well. To get the event off the ground, 43 local designers donated money for the exhibit.

“Usually in a public space, design in Chicago is reflected in architecture, parks and museums but not in graphic design,” he said. “We saw this as an opportunity to tell people what’s possible in our visual landscape after embracing design.”

The exhibit runs through Oct. 29 at the Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Millennium Park.