Among Emanuel Cahana’s works, the movie posters he designed in the early 1960s are the best known. Cahana was the Israel movie industry’s leading designer. Together with Haim Peled, at the Peled Advertising Agency, he contributed greatly to this particular specialty in the field of advertising. At the Peled Agency, Cahana designed more than 150 movie posters. Peled states that Cahana was “crazy about movies, and knew everything about film culture. During that period, it was necessary to shatter conventions and prove that professional advertising could significantly increase box-office sales.”

Cahana also collaborated with numerous Israeli companies, accompanying the birth of Israel’s industrial sector. He was responsible for designing advertisements for numerous consumer products and food products, including Tadiran air-conditioners, Paz products, Amcor, Coor, The Pancake House, Amca, Oman Knits, Caesarea Mattresses, Ma-Kor Ice Cream, Mekorot, Avik Medicine, Air France, Lodzia,  Rotext, Vitalgo, Zemer Hahasida, Sanfrost, Globus Group, Etz HaDaat, El Al, and ATTA. He also worked with public institutions, including the Government Advertising Agency, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Housing, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Communications. 

Cahana designed dozens of local and international exhibitions, including: The Levant Fair (1962), as a representative of the insurance company Hasenh; the International Stamp Exhibition in Jerusalem (1978); exhibitions for various companies at the Man and His World fair; the Agritech agriculture exhibition; numerous exhibitions at the Ganei Hataarucha fairgrounds in  Tel Aviv (food, agriculture, electricity, toys and more); and displays for the world’s most prominent design exhibitions. Cahana also created hundreds of well-known logos, which remain identified with the companies they were designed to represent.

In the field of typography, Cahana designed different types of letters for each advertisement and movie poster, adapting the form, style, color and volume of the hand-drawn letters to the content and message. His expertise in creating origami served him consistently in designing volumes, and he would sometimes construct cardboard models of the letters for exhibitions, in order to examine them in three dimensions. Rather than revisiting earlier creations, he remained consistently committed to innovation and originality.