Crane's Papers - Would that I needed paper.

This 1935 ad from Crane's Papers is an object lesson in why Art Deco was pretty much the best design style humanity ever came up with. This ad is so beautiful, it's like they don't even need my business!

 In case you don't see what all the fuss is about, here are the highlights.

-The wide margins and generous use of "negative space" imply a relaxed luxury. It's like the art doesn't feel the need to fill up every available corner of the page.

-The thin lines aren't shouty. This makes the art feel dignified. It's not trying to leap off the page at you. Notice it or don't. It doesn't care one way or the other.

-The picture doesn't seem to have any direct relation to the product. You have to read the copy to get it. "Our paper goes all over the world, constantly." But with a picture that pretty, we hardly care if it relates to the product or not.

Mostly, the text in the ad brags about Cranes' achievements at market domination. I guess they really don't need our business. The bottom line is, the ad mirrors their attitude, and that's this: "Wouldn't you feel better using Crane's than the loser paper you have now?" I'm inclined to agree.

Believe it or not, Crane's is still around (http://www.crane.com/), but it seems that the look of their site, which in the modern world is the front door of your company, has lost a lot of the grandeur and class they had in 1935. Better get on that shit, Crane's.

1935 Buick - Star style.

It's been a while since we've featured a decogasm here, what with all the goofy inventions and spurious ad copy to be ridiculed. Let's point our eye-holes at some bonkers luxury, shall we? It's time for a decogasm. get ready for your brain to make a gooey mess all over the inside of your skull. Behold this frikkin swanky ad for the 1935 Buick. Phwoooaaaah!

This ad comes to us from the March, 1935 issue of Fortune magazine, which, considering the year and target demo, was basically the daily read of Mister Monopoly, formerly "Rich Uncle Pennybags", renamed by Hasbro some time in the 2000s. I like the old name better.

Man, like that's a lot of pinanos. What do fifty-whatever pinanos even sound like? Why do you need fifty-whatever pinanos in a print ad anyway? Well, this ad was run in cross-promotion with a film, Gold Diggers of 1935, which was directed by Busby Berkeley. Aaaaaaaahh, that explains the kooky overproduction. If his name is unfamiliar, just understand that every "homage" or "retro" musical number you see in a music video or movie is more or less a sendup of the style of musical production made famous by Busby Berkeley. Madonna's Material Girl video and the goofy opening sequences to the Austin Powers movies? Those are tributes to the Busby Berkeley style. Rows and rows of kicking dancers. Curving staircases. Fountains. Maybe a couple of kitchen sinks.

Here's something you see a LOT of in old photograhps. They didn't have Photoshop, right? So, they'd de-ambiguize objects in dark shadows. The edge of the car's tire wasn't really clear in the original photo, so a photo retoucher went in with an airbrush (an actual airbrush, children!) and sprayed some medium gray over a round frisket, to define the edge of the tire. My brain doesn't care. I don't need to see the edge of the tire. I know tires are round, and the airbrushing leaps out at me as being distracting. But, it's an interesting part of techno-history.

I don't care about musicals, and cars this old don't really warm my blood, but the visual composition of each scene in this movie are beautiful. If I may go way out on a limb, it occurs to me that there's a modern movie with similar attention to the beauty of each scene as an artistic layout: The Matrix. That movie is a study in visual composition in the same way as Gold Diggers of 1935, at least to my eye. I kind of want to watch both movies in one weekend, just to find the edges of this theory of mine.You can watch the whole Gold Diggers movie on FaceTube - it's just chopped up into ten minute segments is all. Or you can stream it from Asthmazon, Google Play or Vudu, it seems. Here's the trailer. Now that I watch that, another though occurs. Women in these movies plucked the shit out of their eyebrows! It's a bad look. Ladies, men aren't into Sharpie eyebrows. Stop it.

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Cadillac LaSalle - Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.

In the opening credits for All in the Family, Edith sings "Gee, our old LaSalle ran great", right before she shrieks the final line "Thoose were the daaaaayyyyys!" with Archie. So this is the car she was singing about. The ad is from 1931, and it's a minimalist eyefull of Deco class. Swing, baby.

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Art Deco generally means pulling your punches and taking the high road. Any time I've been required by a job to do the Deco thing, it has meant leaving a lot of negative space, repeated geomoetric shapes and visual restraint. Notice the large areas of empty space around the ad copy, and the surprisingly small size of the illustration at the top, with lots of breathing room around it. All of these art decisions communicate dignity and grace, as if the ad doesn't need to shout at you to communicate. It's an ad that doesn't care if you read it or not. Cadillac doesn't even need your business. They want you to feel like you can buy some of that dignity if you buy their car. They're THAT classy.

All of that is B.S., of course. You can still be a vulgar prick and have a nice car, as we all know. Somehow, as advertising ruins every tool with overuse and cheapness, Art Deco hasn't been destroyed by the ad biz. It still works as a communicator of calm aristocracy.

Sure, The Eighties did it's best to drag Deco into the toilet of Miami Vice cocaine culture, but somehow it's been able to recover from abominations like this dining room, and the juvenile "more is more" mentality that swept the nation in that decade.

There's a reason mirrored surfaces were so popular in The Eighties. You never know when you'll need another taste of booger sugar. Those weren't the daaaayyyys.

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Miraculously, I can look at the people in this 1931 clip art without imaging them doing rails of blow off the hood of the LaSalle in the ad. Deco still works.

Cadillac 1931 - So deco samba.

Here's an eye-wateringly beautiful Cadillac ad from a 1931. Back then, the back of National Geographic was filled with stuff for rich people and world travelers. Yachts, exotic travel locations, stuff like that. This superdeco Cadillac ad refreshes your brain with its minimalism and brushes your eyes with its reserved presentation and light, airy layout. This is a recipe for all-day freshness you can count on. We present this ad in original smudges-and-paper-grain version and in pristine cleaned-up version (scroll down), cause you got an honest face. You're welcome!

In trying to come up with a clever headline for today's post, I made an unclever reference to "So Danco Samba", a bossa nova written by Tom Jobim and covered by lots of people. I have in several incarnations in my collection. The song has nothing to do with this ad, other than the pun in the headline, and being really great. Play any version. You can't go far wrong.

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Pabst TAPaCan - Technology at work.

This ad for Babst beer makes a big deal of the packaging. Why's that? Turns out, in 1936, getting beer into a can without turning into skunkwater was a big deal.

For the full story, you can read this website, whose credentials we can't be bothered to verify. The simple enthusiasm of beer fans is enough for me to buy into the timeline presented at keglined.com.

The long at the short of it is that beer goes bad in a hurry when in contact with metal, and it wasn't until 1935 or so that the American Can Company worked out the vinyl-based coating (with the help of Union Carbide) on the inside of beer cans that keeps the beer from turning into whiz. "Keglined" became a trademark of ACCO in 1934, during the development process. As of '35, you could buy decent beer in cans, which was exciting more for the retailer than the customer. Bottles seal just as well as cans (for good flavor), but as the ad states, cans allow greater density on shelves, due to their stackability. Fair enough, but that's big news for the guy selling the beer, rather than the guy buying it, as the illustration suggests.

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There's some nice 1935 deco in this ad. There's something interesting going on here. Rule #1 of advertising art is "don't bury the product shot". You'd think that airbrushing the characters and the skyline would make them the focal point of the composition. leaving the comparatively flat beer can in the man's arms to take a back seat. However, by leaving the can free of shading, the artist has retained maximum contrast and clarity so that it pops out at you, despite being so small. Clever.

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The Austin Company - ACTION!

Today, Phil Are GO! is proud to bring you yet another decogasm from the 1930s in the form of this ad for The Austin Company, builders of commercial properties in the golden era of  Rich Uncle Pennybags, the Monopoly guy. We found the picture in Fortune Magazine. Pity that Austin was a little premature with their optimism about the economy at the time. The Great Depression would still be depressing us till nineteen forty-something.

Pow. Get an eyefull of that uber-deco building. My dear picture, art thou deco? Let me count the ways. Airbrush? Check. Melodramatic, harsh light source? Check. Clean, geometric lines? Check. Radiused corners? Check. Giant, bold text? Oh, you better believe that's a big check! If you want to duplicate the text in header of this ad, just grab yourself some Stymie Black and start typing.

Well doesn't that beat all? The Austin Company are still around, although I have to say their design team is a little mediocre these days. Their site looks about as ordinary as you can get. Come on guys. You're supposed to be a design company for buildings. You might consider letting your web site reflect a tiny shred of the panache you had back in '36. Just a thought.

In the rendering in today's ad, you can tell that it started with a photograph of a sky, which was then sprayed over with a darker gray to make the white building pop. It's the decoist's love of stark contrast that often leads to the use of dark skies with bright foreground elements. Stormy weatherrrr...

Anyway, your rude finger thinks you should right click this little beauty into your hard drive's private real estate holdings. It's right. Get ready to right click in three, two, one.... You're welcome.

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The Commercial National Bank and Trust Company of New York - Say it, then have a nap.

Today's 1936 ad features a fantastic piece of art by an uncredited artist. But to get there, we'll have to let the Research and Googling team do their little dance for you. Sigh. Fine, guys. If you must. get it over with.

The Commercial National Bank and trust Company of New York has a frikkin' long name. The cumbersome proportions of the name is probably a badge of honor for a bank. Think of it this way: you need them so bad, they can make you stumble through their name every time you need to talk about your money. Banks aren't like mayonnaise or a car. They don't give a crap how snappy their name sounds. If you want their money, you'll play ball. Also, this bank's name is the result of a long series of mergers with other banks, dating back to 1903. Each time the bank merged with   something, they just tacked the name on the end of their own. Bankers aren't concerned with a slick-sounding name. They want their name to be something you have to carefully step around, like a building.

So what's at 56 Wall Street now? Well, Deutsche Bank and our old pals AIG are in the neighborhood. Whoever's living at number Fifty-Six, looks like they're having some work done on the place. Business must be good.


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Charlie Chaplin once hung from the teeth of this logo.

Anyhoo, it turns out The Commercial of New York can claim the famous J. P. Morgan as one of it's founding fathers. Ain't that something? Fast forward about thirty years and we find The Commercial in the role of helping to rebuild the nation in the ashes of the Great Depression. Hence, this ad. Hence even more, this piece of art.

This illustration could have been anything. Instead, the bank wisely went with the "hard-working, roll up your sleeves and rebuild our nation" angle. Well done. The pencil sketch nature of the piece contributes to the honest,  rough-edged look of the ad. The Commercial wants to help you help the nation start over. It's interesting that the figures are almost totally obscured in heavy cross hatching and shading. Fine detail has been exchanged in favor of heavy, sooty texture. It makes you think of hard labor. All of this helps the piece get businessmen cranked about building stuff... or, more to the point, borrowing the money to pay others to build stuff for you.

This drawing is so nice, Phil Are GO! is proud to present it to you in crazy high resolution, just in case you wanted to download it and have it printed in a frameable size or something. Graphic gift coming your way. This file is 4000 x 3343, so you may need to right click with BOTH your rude fingers to get all 5Mb of it onto your hard drive. Don't say I didn't warn you. You're welcome.

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FAQ: "Why didn't you save the file as grayscale? It could be smaller." Yes, we could have. But the yellowness of the paper, we feel, is part of the history and charm of the artwork. It looks better. Shut up.

The French Line - A cartoon of Frenchness, by Pierre.

I need to go to Paris some time. Friends that have been there tell me that the whole thing about the French being pricks just isn't true. Apparently, they're pricks to you only if you condict yourself like an Ugly American - you know, being belligerent, and getting irritated when France isn't exactly like the U.S.A. Also, I'm told that the people are even nicer if you go outside the city, where they're not bombarded with blowhardy tourists all the time. Makes sense.

This 1936 ad for  French Line cruise ships seems to portray a cartoonish parody of Paris. Really? Kids playing with circle-and-stick in 1936? This painting looks more like 1836 to me. At least the dogs aren't poodles. Maybe those wiener dogs are the first German invaders? They do seem to have that boy on a leash.

Here's a travelogue of Paris from 1936. It seems more modern than life in the painting.



Surely this painting must have been done by an American. nobody else would..... huh?

Seriously? "Pierre Brissaud?" That name can't be real. It's got to be a jo... Hey, wow! apparently old Pierre was big in the deco movement, born and trained in France. Nice work, Pierre. Actually, I like his other work even better than the watercolor in this ad. He seems to have to have dialed back his personal style for this french Line ad. These other examples of his stuff seem to have more personality. Check it out:

I like Brissaud so much, I have half a mind to put this book on the old Amazon wish list for later purchase. Oh hell. That's the Kindle version. I want paper, baby! Oh well.

Lastly, here's Jonathan and Darlene Edwards molesting Paris in the Spring from their fantastic masterwork Jonathan and Darlene Edwards' greatest Hits:

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Climax Moly - Decogasm.

In the altogether more innocent year of 1936, you could name a company "Climax Molybdenum" Company" without attracting too many muffled snorts of mirth (I love that band, BTW), even if your board of directors were all fourteen year old boys. Today, putting the words "Climax Moly" in your ad sounds like you're soliciting prostitution. It is possible there may come a day when we people living in 2012 seem quaint and innocent. It's hard to think how, but it has to be possible.

This ad comes from a 1936 issue of Fortune magazine, the publication read by the Monopoly guy (Whose name was once "Rich Uncle Pennybags, but has since been changed to "Mr. Monopoly". Sad.). Fortune is now somehow siamese twinned with CNN and Money magazine, but back in Yore, it was just a super thick monthly simply dripping with mouth-watering deco eye-candy. Art Deco was inspired by industry, and captains of industry read Fortune.

The picture in this ad was airbrushed. For those who don't know but are interested, here's a quick explanation. Those who care but already know or don't know and don't care can skip the next paragraph. The ones who don't care are probably reading OMG and, if they ever wound up at PAG!, it was only by accident, and only hung around long enough to go "what-EVERRRR".

Fishes with her bare hands, and votes.

An airbrush is a cool-looking little spray gun you hold like a pen. It's connected to a compressed air supply (usually a motorized compressor), and it atomizes paint into a spray and allows the artist to control the air-to-paint mix with a fancy trigger. Regrettably, some artists see the airbrush as The Only Tool They Need, and embark on a career painting T shirts at the mall for people who don't know any better and don't deserve any better. As I have ranted before, airbrush art generally looks like airbrush art, and while it does take a lot of skill to control the thing well enough to use, the barrier of entry with regard to taste is the lowest of the low.

According to Wikipedia, The first real commercial atomizing airbrush was presented at the World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair)  in Chicago in 1893. Hey, cool! Also, the same World's Fair was the scene of the world's first serial murderer, as described in Devil in the White City, (which is an okay book - equal parts interesting history lesson, tedious history lesson, and tedious procedural crime drama.)

Lots of Art Deco flat art utilized the airbrush. Deco is typified by dramatic color, minimalist design, stark silhouettes and clean lines, which lend themselves very well to the cut-stencil technique involved in airbrushing.

In this factory scene, we see a load of scrap metal being loaded into a rail car on a magnetic crane. Clouds of backlit smoke supply your standard deco drama. Silhouettes of smokestacks and factory windows were obviously sprayed over an adhesive stencil, or "frisket", cut with an X-Acto knife. Climax is trumpeting the benefits of molybdenum steel, as opposed to ordinary mild steel, for structural engineering. Moly steel is stronger, is less effected by heat, and less prone to failure. Climax's angle is that it's more expensive to replace a part than to make it stronger the first time. Fair enough.

I learned to say "molybdenum" around the age of ten when my dad bought me a second hand Team Mongoose BMX frame, and built me my first good bike. The frame was "chromoly", which is an alloy of chromium, molybdenum, and good old steel. It made for a lighter, stronger frame. Chromoly is still used for things like roll cages in racing cars and, believe it or not, bike frames. Large bike manufacturers have moved on to aluminum and carbon fiber, but there are still small boutique bike manufacturers that do incredible things with steel (chromoly is still a type of steel) like Surly and Salsa. In the hands of a really good fabricator, chromoly steel can be as light and agile as aluminum without the harshness that comes with a typical ALU frame. When aluminum flexes, it suffers, and eventually will break. It's best to keep aluminum from flexing. But steel can be made into a spring, with clever tempering. A steel frame can be designed to absorb rough vibration without transmitting it to the rider, but an aluminum bike frame built strong enough to last will have to be thick enough to be harsh.

Anyway, please enjoy our special crop of this deco factory scene for your next CD cover, if you still use those things. We present it in slightly-higher-than-normal 2400px size, unpolluted by our watermark, for your delight. You're welcome.

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Edw. G. Budd Manufacturing Co. - Stain-less design.

This ad was found in a copy of Fortune magazine from 1936, the publication for industrialists and the horsey set. Basically, this is the magazine that the guy in the Monopoly game would have read. And since it's 1936, every page is covered with proof that Art Deco was just about the most beautiful thing that humanity has ever created. Don't take my word for it. Just look at the proof, then admit I'm right. Ho-lee crapola.

Better people than me have tried to explain what art deco was, and if you're foggy on the concept, there's gobs of places you can read all about it. The Wikipedia article kind of hits the nail of greatness on the head with this: "At its best, art deco represented elegance, glamour, functionality and modernity." Testify. This is why art deco was influential all the way from earrings to trains. The whole "beauty of function" thing makes it obvious why engineery types can easily get all misty when confronted with an especially deft piece of deco, like this Budd ad.

Before I forget to mention, check out the way they laid out the body text in the Budd ad. The weird paragraphs of alternating italicized type for no reason? This looks like the wanted posters from the 1800s, with ONE HUGE LINE OF TEXT and then a few lines of tiny text in a different font CLOSELY FOLLOWED BY MORE IRRATIONALLY HUGE LETTERS FOR no reason. It's like a ten year old who just found out how to change fonts in Microsoft Word. I could be wrong about this, but it's kind of odd how this Budd ad straddles the fence between modernism an antiquity.

Deco was typified by simple geometric shapes and stark colors, which can be useful if you're printing in black and white. Keeping the colors limited to very dark darks and very light lights makes for an eye-catching ad. Often, you'd also find a lot of energetic diagonal lines, like the lines of text in the Budd ad. Note that the text goes up as you read from left to right. Also, the train is heading towards the top of the page. It's no accident, as this subliminally communicates optimism to your brain, whether you notice it or not. This kind of belies the overall dark and non-cheerful colors in this ad. To my mind, this is decidedly characteristic of art deco. Intense, semi-scary tonality, combined with super strong and optimistic shapes. The contrast is beautiful and sometimes unsettling.

Unfortunately, this also was the visual language of WWII propaganda posters, some of which got downright freaky with their blow-the-shit-out-of-em messages. War. Uh! Good god y'awll!

Deco was just the prevailing style of the time, and actually predates dubyah dubhay eye-eye by a good ten or twenty years. Still, it could have easily been smirched with the stink of war forever, due to guilt-by-association. But you can't keep a good design down, and it has remained a favorite. Hell, it's even survived a kind of retarded revival in The Eighties, what with the repeated shapes and cheap-to-produce geometry that polluted every common room in college dorms throughout The Nineties. The Eighties is the mouth-breathing cousin of our favorite idiot decade The Seventies and there's almost nothing it can't ruin, except for art deco.

Hey! Check it out. Budd manufacturing is still around, and they're mostly doing the same kind of stuff, although they're now ThyssenKrupp Budd. The Wikipedia entry sort of reads like it was written by the ThyssenKrupp marketing department, so, grain of salt time. Still, it's good to see them still rocking the steel biz over in Michigan.

Where has deco gone? Nowhere. Something this good doesn't just vanish. It finds it's way into everything. so you don't notice it. Most smartyphones have the perfectly radiused (perfectly rounded) corners and minimalist design of deco, as well as pretty much everything that Apple and Ikea sell.

If you like the fonts in this ad, go to your favorite free font site of choice and look up Two Cent for the "profitable performance" text at the top, and City medium or Rockwell for the stuff at the bottom. Just don't forget to make your text change font for no reason and become RANDOMLY GIGANTIC and bafflingly small. Otherwise, you'll never catch those gall dern Dalton boys.

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Around the House - Handyman tips from 1941

The American Magazine had a DIY column in which readers shared their tips for home improvement. Reading this column, it's amusing to note that, apparently, there was a housing shortage back in '41. That's adorable.

One other interesting note is the bit about waterproofing your awnings with a mixture of gasoline and paraffin. I imagine it worked, but I'd be surprised if your Helpful Hardware Man or Home Depot Drone would ever advise a customer to do this. In the process, you've got a pretty decent accelerant all over your garage, and even after the project is complete, a canvas (I think) awning soaked in wax would pretty much amount to a huge candle. At least they advise you to keep smokers away while you're working.

The illustrations in this article make for nice clip art. I've scanned them and contrasted them into clean black-and-whiteness for you, our beloved readers. The ultra-deco handyman guy at the head of the page deserved even more than mere jpegging, so he's also available as a vector file, for those of you who can make use of those. Blogger doesn't allow posting of direct file downloads in any vector formats, so email if you want it sent to you as an attchment. The EPS version is 318K and the AI  is 91k.

Rude Finger Graphic Gifts coming up in three, two, one...

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Zenith Table Radio - Look at the sounds.

"Oh boo hoo. Waah waah. Everything was better then. Everything is terrible now". Well, as with basically everything, it's a non-simple mix of "yes" and "no". This ad for a gorgeous Zenith table radio makes you want to go all "waah waah".

It sure is pretty. Look how deco and geometric it is. Much of the consumer products landscape here in the future has been designed to look all swoopy and blobby, as if one left one's consumer product out on the driveway on that one day in July when the sun chose to go triple nova. Your poor radio/vacuum/microwave, all bendy with the blown-off quanta.

This Zenith cost thirty bucks in 1954. That sounds a little steep. The old inflation calculator says that's... OOF! $240! For that, you got a radio that looks great, stores no presets, connects to probably nothing via an "aux in" jack, and has an analog tuner of the "nylon string wrapped around a pulley" type that dissolves into sibilant noise as soon as you take your hand off the knob. Two weeks after buying the radio, the volume pot would get that corrosion on the copper contacts that makes adjusting the volume sound like "KSSHT! kh-kh-kh KUUH! KKKSSHHHHT!" Aah, the golden age of wireless.

For my money, the digital tuner is the single greatest development that radio has enjoyed since it's invention. Second greatest: digital volume control.

Let's say you walked into your local Best Buy's Noyze Zone and plunked down your $240 and said "give me your best". First off, the best thing you can do after walking into Best Buy's audio department is to walk right back out before the Corporately Mandated Hipness Demonstration Subwoofers loosen your bowel.  But, maybe your car broke down and you're stuck there.

Well, it won't be easy to spend $240 on a table radio. The first thing that your Eminem-looking associate will show you is probbaly something like this Sony XPLOD plastic aorta  for $129. It's been overdesigned with the exact same degree of effort as the Zenith in the old ad, but with rather a different sensibility. The chosen name of the XPLOD brand tells you everything you need to know about their idea of audio fidelity, regardless of your chosen price point. For $240, you can get two XPLODs and make them into a pair of headphones with some of those really long zip ties.




If you simply must spend $240 on a table radio, you'd do better to get this Boston Acoustics iObject dock in Stormtrooper White from Amazon for $249. Radio with more presets than there are decent stations in any one language. Solid build quality. Various in and out connectors. No CD mechanism. Sound quality that will make you take a few days off just to finish being impressed with it. The menu system is cryptic and frustrating, though, until you get it figured out. It could use Bluetooth audio streaming. Also, pity it looks like you paid $100. The Boston radio isn't especially clever or pretty (apart from the auto-dimming backlight on the display), but the ghetto dynamic of XPLOD's mouth-breathing troglodytic product developers makes the Boston look positively inspired. Too bad all the really good industrial designers work for Swedish companies whose point of entry is, shall we say, "prohibitive".

So, like it or not, you do get a lot for your money, thanks to science. If only the ghost of Zenith past would have come and worked some magic on the Boston Acoustics design department.

[I know this looks like a review or a promotion for Boaston Acoustics, but it's not. It's just a decent radio that costs about the same as the old Zenith.  -Mgmt.]