A new restaurant, La Familia, just opened in our community. It’s not upscale, by any means, so although they’ve put some effort in making it look nice, they’ve not been able to go all-out with decor, design, promotion, and so on. I was especially struck by the menu, featuring a decorative font that was popular maybe 10 years ago. At first I rolled my eyes (to myself, of course) at this cliched and ineffective use of typography. But then I recognized it for what it was, a fashion decision, not a design decision. There’s the half-life of fashion in action; the font is increasingly unappealing as time marches on, but for the fringes it still symbolizes what it once may have meant to designers - fun, fresh, optimistic. Good design may be timeless, but practical applications show us that fashion, even out-of-fashion, may be the economically viable alternative.

See the full version of the menu

As promised yesterday, here are a few more places I often visit for inspiration.

Simon’s Skip: Advert and Brochure Archive. Simon Moses graduated from the University of Brighton (UK)
with a degree in Design History. His personal website houses a small collection of British ads and
brochures for household appliances, mostly from the 1960s but extending into the 1970s.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/adverts.html

Design students might also explore the sections on vintage electrical appliances, Art Deco buildings, and this page housing a small collection of 1970s car brochures.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/carbrochures.html

Finally, Simon has posted an academic paper looking at retro industrial design trends as sanitized social nostalgia. Worth a read.
http://www.74simon.co.uk/nostalgiaessay.pdf

American Package Museum. This online museum shows about 140 examples of 20th century package design.
http://www.packagemuseum.com/

Dan Goodsell’s Tick Tock Toys Archive and Gallery. Food packaging, store displays, fast food merchandising, ad mascots, newspaper ads and early television commercials, gum card art, and irresistible snapshots from times gone by.
http://theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html

Advertising Character Collection of MLT Creative. This creative services agency in Atlanta, GA has a private collection of about 45 advertising mascots to view online, each with a brief history or commentary.
http://www.mltcreative.com/collection.html

TV Party! Saturday Morning Commercials. See what creative teams did with 60 seconds of broadcast time, an almost unimaginable luxury today.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomsat.html

Also, on the same website, see how cigarettes were marketed on TV.
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcomcig.html

Prelinger Archives of Moving Images. Look for the short films and collections of classic television commercials.
To Browse, click here

When I get tired of leafing through current award books, it’s often more productive to reach deeper into the past for ideas to steal inspiration. That said, here are some classic advertising and design archives.

Key things to think about as you browse the archives are:
• the graphic history of iconic brands
• the evolution of the relationship between advertising and its audience
• the ebb and flow of design trends, including typography, illustrative styles and proportions, and color.

The first three are from Duke University; tomorrow I’ll show some more from all over the web.

The Emergence of Advertising in America. About 9,000 categorized, searchable ads from 1850-1920. It’s also worth looking at the timeline, to see how far back the roots of viral and buzz-marketing concepts go.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

Ad*Access. This picks up roughly where the previous collection leaves off. There are about 7,000 categorized, searchable print ads from 1911 to 1957.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

Medicine and Madison Avenue. This specialized collection has about 600 categorized, searchable drug and health-related ads from the 1910s through the 1950s, and a timeline that runs from the 1840s to the 1990s.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/

Kermit told us that it wasn’t easy bein’ green, where green obviously stood in for many aspects of identity, including race/color. Green was the new black, at the time.

So what to make of this ad for Mucinex?

“Mucus is beautiful” echoes the famous Black Is Beautiful slogan, but while Kermit was our hero in his fight for equality, Mr. Mucus as he is known is effectively a villain. Maybe this is too much subtext, or maybe this could be the booger that sets race relationships back a generation.

AdAge named the VW “Think Small” advertising campaign (1959) as the #1 campaign of last century. It’s interesting to see how they’ve continued to reference the original work in their advertising for the new Beetle and even other lines.

It’s almost revisionist, though, with today’s car image being prominent, and the messages directly opposite the original, which saluted economizing. Now the trend to obesity is being sold back to us as an advertising message. It’s okay to be fat, everyone, our cars are fat and you are too! Is this a betrayal of the legacy, or a frank acknowledgement that times have really really changed?

For a record ninth-consecutive year, Anheuser-Busch has just won USA Today’s exclusive Super Bowl advertising poll. And with it, Budweiser has flipped the switch on Bud.tv. With Anheuser-Busch looking to spend over $30 million this year alone on this online video network. The site looks to be easy to navigate, featuring short films like “Finish Our Film”. This mash-up of reality show and making-of-a-film documentary was produced by LivePlanet, (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company). Not surprisingly most of the videos lean towards 25-year guy humor with high art concepts like “Replaced by a Chimp” in which a chimp tries to do a real job.

Sure there have been many attempts by marketers to create content online that provides a contextual envelope to advertise their brands, yet, Bud.tv is definitely the most ambitious venture of its kind to date.

Missed out on all the “commercial” fun? Well here’s your chance to catch up and see what all the fuss is about. Watch the Superbowl 2007 ads.

via threeminds.organic

Microsoft has come up with some creative advertising for their new Microsoft Office 2007 launch. This web advert takes the shape of a ten page illustrated fairy tale comic book that features a fairy tale princess CEO who saves her woodland empire through the wonders of Office’s newly redesigned interface. Kudos to Microsoft for breaking out of the usual boundries of creativity in promoting software products.

via digitalthread

When Mercedes asked Toronto photographer Don Dixon to shoot an introduction ad for the New Turbo 320, he said, “Why not?” To get things in order for the shoot, he called the Toronto Zoo to make a date with a camel, next was an Extensis scan through his massive stock library to find a parched desert road, followed by a trip to the airport in search of the perfect jet engine. A couple of days of retouching and here we have it: A new Mercedes Ad.

via Applied Arts Magazine

The new iPod ads take place at a new club. I think I like the hip hop club better. The new club is a prog rock punky kind of stylized place with a Warhol-like 60’s feel. All the ads are addictive but getting tired. The most obvious shift is not the design but the change in target audience. Apple has moved from hip hop to progressive rock / punk audience. Do you remember the rap ads? (The everyman Caucasian rapping a cappella with headphones on.) “Baby got back and I can not lie, you other suckers can’t deny….” Nobody is offended by a white guy rapping poorly, and everyone is happy when they see it! ;-)

Anyway, all in all these new ads are the same ads all over again with a clear target demographic shift and it looks like that is what the designers were assigned in the new creative brief. They are still fun…but I’m looking forward to something new!

With the Internet amassing marketing money once reserved for the newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today think making a stink will improve the bottom line. The two publications plan to test scented ads to bolster print ad revenue. The two papers are working with a company called Scentisphere, which sells a product called Rub’nSmell.
Unlike the scratch-and-sniff technology that has been around for some 30 years, (remember the stickers we collected as kids), Rub’nSmell represents a significant advance because it can be applied directly to printed ads as an ink, says Bob Bernstein, president of Scentisphere. No separate print run to create scented inserts is required.

via informationweek.com