Swiss pharma company Geigy (now Novartis) cranked out tons of drugs and tons of great designs to sell them during their time. The images above are from the book “Corporate Diversity : Swiss Graphic Design and Advertising by Geigy 1940 – 1970″ (amazon) which chronicles their best work during that period. There are more images and info over at Things To Look At and Grain Edit.
Images via Things To Look At
When I was down in LA for the Ghostly show, Jakub, Sam and I were talking and this Schaefer’s Beer ad came up. It’s one of those things that’s so great you want to wait to post it for as long as possible. Well, it’s been years since I first saw it and I guess now is as good a time as any.
This is Ed Kalehoff performing a jingle he wrote on the Moog Modular System for Schaefer’s beer. Even if you don’t know of him, you know his work; he did most of the music and cues for The Price is Right. Nothing tops this though, nothing. How great it would have been to live in a time when a beer slogan like that could fly. Also, was he scratching on that 2″ reel? Awesome.
Tim Heidecker & Eric Wareheim are comic geniuses and their show on Adult Swim is the best thing on Television or the Innernette. It’s basically a free-form public-access-VHS style collection of sketches with what seems to be a loose focus on late-eighties to mid-nineties culture. Beyond the immediate, viscerally comic aspects of their work there’s a deeper commentary going on and for me, that’s what makes the show so enjoyable time and time again.
Unfortunately, no one I know besides Jakub, Dusty, and Sam agree with me and over the past few years I’ve come to realize that Tim & Eric are rather polarizing figures; you either love them or you hate them. I’ve refrained from posting on them in the past just because it’s a little off topic for this blog and I doubt most of you come here looking for hilarious shows to watch. But today I came across Daniel Murphy’s Esquire article about the series of ads Tim & Eric and Zach Galifianakis created for Absolut Vodka and I thought it was an interesting look at how they approached the project from an advertising perspective. The three spots — which I consider to be some of Tim & Eric’s best work — came out last year as part of the Absolut World campaign. The vodka maker basically gave them an open ended commission; they could make whatever they wanted as long as they mentioned the product. I’ve never worked directly in advertising, but I’d have to imagine this would be a dream gig for anyone in the industry.
“It’s the incense, it’s the ferns.”
A Vodka Movie Pt. 1 – Watch
Esquire Article about Pt. 1 – Read
And the other two parts:
A Vodka Movie Pt. 2 – Watch
A Vodka Movie Pt. 3 – Watch
“The Olivetti Lettera 32 is a portable mechanical typewriter designed by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti in 1963 as the successor of the popular Olivetti Lettera 22. This typewriter was popular amongst journalists and students.
The typewriter is sized about 34x35x10 cm (with the carriage return lever adding about 1-2 more centimeters in height), making it portable at least for the time’s standards, even though its 5.9 kg weight may limit portability somewhat.”
- Wikipedia
Just found a nice size collection of 1960′s Advertising from around the world on Flickr, plenty more photos of exhibitions, typefaces, tv ad’s, and print.
The beautiful graphic design of Ken Garland and Associates, from storefront font layout to pamphlet covers these guys have been putting together solid work since 1962.
Alvin Lustig contributions to the design of books and book jackets, magazines, interiors, and textiles as well as his teachings would have made him a credible candidate for the AIGA Lifetime Achievement award when he was alive. By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, he had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today. If one were to reconstruct, based on photographs, Lustig’s 1949 exhibition at The Composing Room Gallery in New York, the exhibits on view and the installation would be remarkably fresh, particularly in terms of the current trends in art-based imagery.
Update: I really can’t find larger images of this work so I put 2 in each image which doesn’t give them justice, please visit here.
