Of the noted Soviet poster artists of the photomontage and Socialist Realism aesthetics, Viktor Borisovich Koretskii stands out as one of the most iconic. Koretskii attended the Secondary Professional Art School in Moscow from 1921 to 1929. He began working as a professional graphic designer in 1931 and he immediately gained recognition in the Soviet Union. His professional break-through occurred while working for the major state publishing houses Iskusstvo and Ogiz-Izogiz. During this that period of his work, he concentrated on (and perfected) his technique of photomontage. However, the period of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union meant that Koretskii had to move away from his own avant-garde style of discontinuous photomontage in order to be more consistent with the Socialist Realist dogma dictated by the government. During the 1930s, Koretskii also worked as an artistic director and decorator for Nikolai Okhlopkov 's Realistic Theatre and for Yurii Zavadsky's theatre-studio. From 1939 to 1987, he was a member of the editorial board of the film advertising publishing house Reklamfilm.

The 1st Exemplary Typography Workshop was named in honor of Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948), a Soviet military leader and a senior member of the Politburo who died in 1948. Reportedly, Andrei Zhdanov controlled the atomic espionage division of the USSR and he was Josef Stalin's closest confidant.

The history of IzoGiz begins with the formation of Ogiz, the Association of the State Book and Magazine Publishers. In 1930, the Sovnarkom of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic established Ogiz to centralize publishing under a monopoly in order to eliminate duplication of printed material, to streamline and control publishing production and its output, and to create a base for marketing books, training and technical manuals. In 1931, the Central Committee of the USSR ordered certain publications be separated from Ogiz. The separation principally affected technical manuals and propaganda material issued by the publisher. For example, posters, art magazines and artistic books were placed under Izogiz (Izobrazitel'noe iskusstvo), the fine arts section of Ogiz. In 1963, Izogiz was merged with the publishing house, "Soviet Artist" (Sovetskii khudozhnik).