When I get tired of leafing through current award books, it’s often more productive to reach deeper into the past for ideas to steal inspiration. That said, here are some classic advertising and design archives.

Key things to think about as you browse the archives are:
• the graphic history of iconic brands
• the evolution of the relationship between advertising and its audience
• the ebb and flow of design trends, including typography, illustrative styles and proportions, and color.

The first three are from Duke University; tomorrow I’ll show some more from all over the web.

The Emergence of Advertising in America. About 9,000 categorized, searchable ads from 1850-1920. It’s also worth looking at the timeline, to see how far back the roots of viral and buzz-marketing concepts go.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa/

Ad*Access. This picks up roughly where the previous collection leaves off. There are about 7,000 categorized, searchable print ads from 1911 to 1957.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/

Medicine and Madison Avenue. This specialized collection has about 600 categorized, searchable drug and health-related ads from the 1910s through the 1950s, and a timeline that runs from the 1840s to the 1990s.
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/mma/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Advertising, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.