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To show you what advertising couldn't do here again is an example of an ad.
This is from a company that sold lawnmowers and
it shows you pictures of lawnmowers and exactly how they worked.
And the copy just describes what the lawnmowers,
how they were made and what they did.
You could say that this ad has no consumer appeal.
This ad is an early ad and it's from before the period where advertising
agencies realized that they could start to sell creative services.
That they could start to bring ideas
to the self selling of commercial objects that were more than just
coordinating an illustration with a descriptive piece of text.
Sometimes those early ads, it's not that they're not interesting,
like this is an ad for a sewing machine company.
It just tells you that it's where
the sewing machines that they're selling are made.
I think it's very humorous that
it tells you that the front of the factory is 560 feet long.
You're supposed to be impressed and look again at the sewing machine because of
the grandeur of the place where it was made.
But again as advertisers start to be creative,
one of the things you see is the integration of an ordinary illustration
like this typewriter ad has an engraving,
an engraved picture of the typewriter that just shows what the thing looks like.
But above it in quote marks it says âBristling with Noveltiesâ.
And that's text that obviously has been treated by the designer as a slogan.
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And it's meant to get your attention in a way, still making up for
the fact that the picture is actually kind of ordinary.
Again, if you look at that ad there's a lot of information on it,
it's organized typographically. The different kinds of fonts
are organized in a hierarchy for the reader to understand the message.
But here you could really say that it is the words that are doing the work.
Another good example, this is a really early ad for the Kodak camera.
The Kodak camera was one of the first American cameras made so
that anybody could afford it and
it was made to be incredibly simple, it took no professional skill to run it.
So here you have a description, âThe Kodak Cameraâ,
it describes in the text what it can do and it just shows you this
engraving of two hands holding the object, what it looks like.
So that's the earliest version.
But here in a slightly later version,
there you see another version of the same image but
suddenly you have under âThe Kodak Cameraâ in quote marks a slogan.
âYou press the button, we do the restâ.
And you see the words attempting to aid your appreciation
of that product that they're trying to sell you and then typographically,
it's integrated into the text of the ad.
This is an ad from a famous series of soap ads for
a product called Sapolio from the 1890s where there's a description and
an argument about why the soap is good that runs in the middle of the ad.
But both on the top and the bottom are a kind of sequence of almost
kid's book illustrations of fanciful figures holding the product and
a poem, or song lyrics, about something called âSpotless Townâ.
The Sapolio ads were famous for the series of jingles that were integrated into
the printed ads so that if you didn't want to read the dry description
of what the product did you still had this kind of entertainment attached.
And it also this ad, again has a more sophisticated imagery because
it appears at a point in newspapers where illustrations can be engraved and
where the possibilities of integrating text and image have increased.
When chromolithography comes along, you do have the power, where the imagery or
the illustration is being put to work to do things beyond the power of words.
So this ad for
something called the Domestic Sewing Machine has this elaborate illustration of
a groom showing his bride her lovely new wedding gift of the sewing machine.
Of course, it's also putting her to work,
and maybe if you were looking at the set at the time, you might not have noticed
that the sewing machine actually was about domestic work and
not about the glamour of a party at a wedding.
This is a earlier promotional photograph for
the famous Singer Sewing Machine showing the woman using it,
which also shows an interesting thing about the Singer Sewing Machine, which was
that it came in a crate that could also double as the sewing machine table.
But this kind of imagery is much more photographic, much more documentary.
It's really a photograph set up to inform the possible owner of a sewing machine,
what to expect rather than to seduce the possible owner of a sewing machine,
like that wedding advertisement into the idea of buying the product.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
