Lost Art of Advertising

Yesterday sitting in the Top Secret Lab and talking of print and promotion with Catch Wreck, discussing the downsides of homogenized Pen and Pixel style pop advertising, I felt compelled to show some of the pieces we looked at in the History of Graphic Design class I took last semester. Some of the artists, like Alphonse Mucha, I was already familiar with, and their iconic style of work – but there are countless examples of advertising from eras where form was as at least as important a consideration as function. And design was an artistic discipline, not a formulaic series of steps in Photoshop. When type was physical and set and images were illustrated, not live traced. These are some of the ones we gravitated towards:

Beggarstaffs

Alphonse Mucha