Other people manage to parley their

reputations that were gained through advertising even into other directions.

This is a picture of a large industrialized shoe factory in

Massachusetts at the turn of the century, called the WL Douglas Shoe Company.

On all of his ads for W.L.

Douglas, the man who owned the company, was always depicted.

And in this ad with a picture of a happy family going shoe shopping.

There's even his signature turned into the logo for the company,

as you see right under the illustration.

And he eventually ran for Governor of Massachusetts and was elected,

surely in part because he was already a celebrity from the appearance of his

face over and over again in popular product advertising of the time.

This is an ad for a brand of house paint called Iron-Clad.

Iron-Clad was a nick name of a famous ship in the Civil War battle.

And even though this is 30 years later, the idea of tough paint that will

withstand moisture could be conveyed referring to a kind of celebrity boat.

These connections were made in early advertising and if we think about the way

that we're constantly seeing celebrities in our visual environment today.

You see that our inheritance is directly connected to this period.

The thing that advertisers learned to, and that designers and

illustrators serviced was the idea of the repetition of advertising,

that you could get the audience's attention through clever repetition.

This is maybe a little too repetitive and wonderfully surreal.

An add for a brand of baking powder where the package with a picture of

the package of baking powder which has a picture of the package of baking powder

moving back into infinity on the product.

You see humor, like these rat traps which actually have a label that says out

of sight rat trap, where the advertising is applied directly to the product.

And then it's also the period where the idea of an imaginary person

who can brand a product comes into play.

Now this is a little later, this is 1898,

as you can tell from this beautifully colored illustration.

This is probably what was called a chromolithograph where color is used to sell

products and the Uneeda Biscuit Boy was a famous logo for

the National Biscuit Company which we now know as Nabisco.

And the idea again of connecting a person, even if they're a fake person

to a product to give it some kind of humanity and personality to make up for

the fact that everybody knew it was made in a giant factory somewhere and

then shipped across the country, is kind of connected.

So the idea of appealing to the consumer even with

clever messaging around emotional or

charming subjects gets attached to the selling of commercial products.

Some things are allegedly derived from the owner of the product,

like the Ford logo which is still used in one form or another,

is a stylized calligraphic rendering of Ford's handwriting.

Other things like the Coca-Cola logo, which were trademarked really early,

is this kind of beautiful calligraphic

rendering of the idea of something that's smooth and pleasurable.

And you see it coming out of the period where images were maybe not as useful

as strong lettering was, but they kept using because of its visual power.

A Household Name

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

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