Posts in Advertising

Flickr user “Advertising Hitchcock” has a large collection of beautiful high-res scans of — as the name implies — original advertising from Hitchcock films. Of particular interest is the Psycho (1960) set, which includes international versions of the release poster. The Italian version is definitely my favorite; considering that the file is generously offered at such a high resolution (1352×2674 @ 300dpi), I’m going to have to fire up the Epson. For some reason made me think of the classic sci-fi covers stuff from Eric Carl. Also be sure to check out the type on the lobby cards; great layout.

Sorry, no information on the designers. Please let me know if you have any names.

 

Scans via Advertising Hitchcock

Alan Fletcher (later of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill) created these adverts for Pirelli while living in Milan in 1959. Just another one to add to the pile of things I wish were posters.

Via Display

We’ve covered some of Franco Grignani’s (Italian, 1908-1999) work here on the blog before, but I recently ran across some very nice new scans over at Display. Some of these I hadn’t seen yet or was unable to locate high enough resolution images to post. Inspiring stuff; and a quick Google image search reveals the debt modern graphic design owes this man.

Images source Display via Junkyard.dogs

Retro Synth Ads has some great scans of various electronic music equipment from the 70’s and 80’s. It’s interesting to observe how the sophistication of advertising design in niche industries — like music technology — predictably lags behind that of the mainstream. These are pretty far along and represent output from some of the biggest names of the day, but examples like this and this are fascinating in their simplicity. I’m guessing the engineers who built the machines were moonlighting as their own designers in these cases. Loving the TL-12, makes me wish I had a MSQ-700.

Source Retro Synth Ads

Dwell has an excellent piece on Swiss design shop Geigy. The in house agency has such a rich portfolio of beautiful work, most for the medical industry. I particularly enjoy the packaging work.

Grain Edit also has some more info and pics from a book about Geigy design here

Source Dwell

Just hearing the name Volkswagen makes me think deep history. Especially now after stumbling upon a Volkswagen archive that has scans from Everett Barnes’ collection. It’s well worth checking out if you have the time. The collection starts from the early 1930s’ and goes all the way until 2005. It has nearly more images and spreads of brochures and random Volkswagen nostalgia than you can shake a stick at.

View the full archive

(more…)

It’s funny how a lot of those things that you thought were boring when growing up, are now actually really fun things to do. I never would have thought I’d spend a sunny Seattle Saturday sifting through tubs and tubs of posters and ads. But its a damn good thing I did because I found these vintage Porsche ads. I was tempted to purchase all of them but instead I wrote down some info and looked them up online. All of these ads I found on eBay and were from the 1980’s. A few of them might be late 70’s, but it’s tough to tell.

The thing I really like about these ads is that they feel authentic. That’s not to say that ads nowadays aren’t authentic but there is certainly more than enough CGI being done to them. It also seems like it’s rare to see such nice large type of this treatment in ads anymore.

Sander from the comments informed us that Helmet Krone was the designer behind these ads—more info here.

(more…)

Eric Carl (who also brought us these vintage sci-fi book covers and these classic logos) has a beautifully scanned set of vintage ads from magazines up. They’re all high res so it’s a goldmine for textures and overlays. I love how magazine print breaks up at high resolution. The moire patterns are very useful when blown up in compositions; I use them a lot for posters.

Vintage Ads on Flickr by Eric Carl

Found a few nice examples of gas company brochures/maps on Kaizen Verdant’s Flickr. Reminds me of one of my favorite’s, the Shell Nature Lovers’ Atlas (second one down).

See Related: Oil Company Ephemera

A few selections from the artwork portion of these Science and Technology adverts. I often like the text layouts on these old advertisements, but in these cases it was the artwork that caught my attention. I see a little Matthew Lyons in that first one. Be sure to check out the rest of the set.

via Ministry of Type