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- Dec 12, 2017
- 1 min
Commercial Art, War Dept. Style
During World War II, the Armed Forces required many specialists and laborers. If you went to art school before entering the service, there was a good chance you might be placed in a graphics unit producing anything from posters to manuals to camo and more. Commercial art was one of many jobs available to draftees and enlistees. The manuals used for training were similar to the correspondence school genre that civilians used to learn basic skills. Not every soldier fought with
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- May 12, 2017
- 7 min
Can Commercial Art Ever Be “Art”?
John Roman explores what prerequisites need to be present for commercial art to be respected as fine art. “All advertising art is pornographic,” claimed the well-known philosopher, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987). And many of today’s art critics, holding little regard for “commercial” art, might support such a view. Those of us in the graphic arts, however, disagree and refuse to draw a line between “fine art” and some of the magnificent images created in the numerous markets of
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- May 27, 2015
- 1 min
Commercial Artistry
If you were studying graphic design in the U.S. Armed Forces in 1939—design being one of many trades taught to recruits and draftees—this is what War Department Education Manual EM 959 would suggest that you include in your portfolio. The work reflects a handmade aesthetic, from the stylized “streamline” decorative illustration to the show card lettering. The War Department understood the need for graphic design and the necessity of sending soldiers and sailors home with a pr
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- Nov 26, 2014
- 4 min
Andy Warhol’s Magazine Career, from Raggedy to Riches
Alexey Brodovitch had the eye. Beginning in the 1930s Harper’s Bazaar’s art director became famous for his ability to look through contact sheets and know precisely what images to choose, where to crop, and arrange to produce highly elegant and refined pages and spreads. And he’s since come to be considered American publication design’s most innovative and skilled practitioner. One of his freelancers in the 1950s was a struggling, unkempt graphic artist nicknamed Raggedy Andy
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- Apr 18, 2014
- 1 min
Pharma Mexico is Surreal
Some of the most startling surrealist commercial art was (and is) produced for drug companies. Drugs are hard to sell on their prescriptive merits alone and governments restrict the look of much drug packaging to bland. So promotions, like these late 1940s postcards, contained surreal illustration to give the mood rather than the substance of the medications being promoted. Quite effective too. These were done for the Mexican pharmaceutical industry, which is no different fro
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- Jan 16, 2014
- 3 min
Must Designers Go to School?
Can you guess what this cover (below) is “selling”? If you were starting a career in the late 1920s or early ’30s (the period of Great Depression) or you wanted to make a little extra or any money, for that matter, and you had artistic aspirations, this cover and the booklet it graced would have been for you. This is the Your Future catalog of the Federal Schools, Inc. of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the largest commercial art correspondence school in America and a division of The
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