Advertising Layout Handbook of Don May
In the age of comp drawing Don May was the rough trader. He was an art and layout consultant with Hoskinson, Rohloff and Associates, and worked for dozens of national clients, including Abbot Laboratories, Hart Schaffner and Marks, Sears Roebook, and the Chicago Daily News. He was a layout machine and layout man’s layout man. These roughs come from his 1942 book 101 Roughs: A Handbook of Advertising Layout, featuring (you guessed it) 101 of the best rough layouts ever laid out. Oswald Cooper wrote that this book “is a honey…to one like myself who is unable to make a ‘rough.’ but must work everything out in detail.” The Inland Printer, the most renown trade journal for decades praised “It is a practical book.”
The roughs come in every shape and form, from “Full Illustration” to “Vertical Axis” to “Lettering illustrative” to “Overprint”, “Illustration Left,” “Illustration Right,” and all the permutations in between. This was an art that will never see its like again. Damn online banner ads!
