By then, Beall had thoroughly assimilated these ideas so that they provided only the remote background to his own personal American idiom. Public and professional reaction to his work was immediate and completely enthusiastic. The spectator was instantly gripped by his excitingly different graphic composition. It was an unconventional design rhetoric employing contrast and incongruity, scale, bold abstract shapes, thrusting perspective, a shocking introduction of punctuation marks and typographic devices. If the cast was diverse, the plot was sure and the direction disciplined. Each poster delivered an arresting message.