Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Billboards of the 1930s Since their inception, critics have assailed billboards as a blight on the American landscape. Although ...

today. Initially, billboards were sold by solicitors or agents often connected to a printing firm. In the 1920 s advertising age ...

Comic Strip Ads In 1933 Charles Chaplin wrote about the comic strip in society: “In a troubled world such as is the one in which ...

acolytes working in advertising bullpens and art-service studios. The quality ranged from primitive comics to highly polished re ...

by conventional rule. With the aplomb of Ignatz Mouse tossing a brick at Krazy Kat, continuity and comic strips have impudently ...

The First Record Album^409 Alex Steinweiss Alex Steinweiss created the first record albums with original cover art in the late 1 ...

were often sections near the record players in appliance stores, comprised shelf upon shelf of dreary album spines facing outwar ...

Cheap Thrills^411 R. Crumb and Bob Cato A standing ovation at the Fillmore East, New York’s premier music hall during the late 1 ...

made public. There is no telling how many records were sold from that night’s debut, but, musically, it was Big Brother’s best a ...

albums came a need for eye-catching cover art that telegraphed the eccentricity of the new rock. In competition with the visiona ...

Cato, who was no novice when it came to taming celebrity egos, calmly suggested to Joplin that the words “sex” and “dope” on the ...

Dust Jackets of the 1920s and 1930s^415 In 1833 the first book jacket was used by Longmans & Co., a British publisher, to pr ...

and sales device meant to be torn from the book the moment it is sold or it is an indispensable cover. If the latter were true, ...

Advertising Stamps^417 Common wisdom holds that a poster must lure the eye from a distance of five city blocks (or a quarter of ...

interesting quality: at this scale even the most clichéd image was curiously transformed into a striking miniature. Even trite i ...

Atoms for Peace^419 Erik Nitsche General Dynamics was one of the wellsprings of design innovation. Formed in 1953 as the parent ...

Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, Switzerland, in August of that year. Hopkins wanted a display that w ...

paintings appear timeless. His typography was clean and crisp, a marriage of classical and modern approaches. A progenitor of in ...

Wolfschmidt George Lois George Lois (b. 1931 ), the agent provocateur of advertising’s Creative Revolution of the 1960 s, didn’t ...

The goal of all liquor advertising was to get the consumer to identify with the label and, therefore, order the brand by name. A ...