Sunday, March 16, 2008

'58 Chevrolet Outdoor Poster In Layout Form

A BEAUTIFULLY MOVING THING !  '58 CHEVROLET
Finding examples of old Chevy outdoor posters is very very difficult but finding the rough layout for one is----well I don't know quite what the odds might be. I don't know if this idea sold and became a published board or not. It doesn't matter because with this you get an idea of the kind of thing that was shown to our clients. Some art directors could render layouts better than others but strong ideas always were the most important consideration. Quite often the quality of a layout depended upon the amount of time the art director had to put it together. This example along with most of the 1958 ads shown here came from a box of old slides Jim Hastings gave me a very long time ago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn! I really miss the years when an art director, sitting in front of the ever-present pad and armed with a bunch of felt pens, could sketch out an ad layout in a few minutes. They didn't look as carefully "comp'ed" as the work that today's "graphic designers" produce....but you could fill a wall with ideas in the time it takes today's artists to create one layout.

Jim Bernardin said...

I couldn't agree more. We worked on what we called yellows. Yellows were nothing more than a pad of yellow paper about nine by eleven or something like that. The idea could be put down in very crude form by a copy guy or an art director and you could tell if it had a chance to become an ad. It was all about ideas--original ideas. Not everything worked like this but we tried to make it important for everyone. Sometimes a writer would come in and make a mini presentation done on a small layout pad. He would have a page by page rational leading up to his ad campaign. Didn't take long to make and if it was good you could tell right away. Ad making has always been about ideas and always will be.