100 Years of Illustration

The Golden Age of Design: an Introduction

It's about time we started some show-and-tell about design.

At the same time in mid-century that Al Parker and his talented colleagues were doing great illustrations for the popular press in the USA, some fabulous design work was taking place in Europe, particularly Switzerland.

To set the stage, so to speak, here's a great example of typography from the early 20th or late 19th century. It's a glass shop door in Lisbon, Portugal, and that's me shooting Kodachrome with a Nikon F.

I followed that in my slide show with this poster circa 1957 to show Cornell students what I thought were the limits of just how far restraint and abstraction could go and still have a good promotional piece.

This is a poster for a Swiss wine, which is not bad when drunk on site. The French, of course, scorn it and say it's only good for washing mirrors.

By the mid-1970s, beautiful faces predominated poster hoardings as much as they did magazine covers. Click on image to enlarge.

Nowhere was classy design more evident than in the collateral material produced by Swissair. This is a paper ticket wallet printed on silver and white duplex stock and embossed with the airline's logo.

These are beautiful little boxes of toasted almonds and hazelnuts as munchies served with a dramatic solid red paper napkin before meals. This was in economy, not business or first-class. Click on image to enlarge.

Today this is what an economy passenger get on a Southwest Airlines transcontinental flight. Click on image to enlarge.

You can read more at this hotlink.

Robert Louis Stevenson by John W. Alexander

We've just returned from Silverado Country in California and it will take me a few days to get organized. Meanwhile, here's a great portrait of this marvelous author that appeared in Century Magazine in its April 1888 issue.

Al Parker's ads for American Airlines

Here's the work of Al Parker, my idea of The Great One among illustrators.

Click on the images to enlarge them.

Illustrations don't get better than this. The complete double page spread is shown below. It's the usual copy to induce readers to think about making travel plans. The two people with their fishing gear is a predictable illustration; the fetching young woman in the mid-century bikini is where Parker makes his skill as an illustrator so obvious. I swear that you can smell her sun-tan lotion.

Another one of the great ads he did for American Airlines. It's obvious and it's been done a thousand times or more, but not as well as Al Parker could do it.

A more typical solution. You can see that Parker was doing his best with what he was asked to do. A dull and boring setup that he energized by rendering a personable ticket agent and a sophisticated traveller.

Same boring concept probably dictated by the client, except that Parker has saved it with a very restrained drawing technique.

What could be worse than this? Back view of travellers approaching the plane. Yes, that's the way we used to board planes in those days. Sometimes we had to run, with crew running along with us.

Once again, Al Parker saves the day with a very fine portrait of a flight attendant, known as stewardesses then and not averse to helping with the baby. Here he has taken a mundane situation and made a painting out of it. BTW, that link has about as lukewarm a description of Parker as an illustrator as one could imagine, but it contains a photo of him at his beat-up old drawing table.

Jon Whitcomb's pretty girls and boys

 

We macho young illustrators used to trash Jon Whitcomb's stuff calling it candy box illustration. For this reason I don't have much in my files. In fact, this is pretty much it. The pages are from magazines my late wife subscribed to: McCall's, Ladies Home Journal, and who knows what else. They all had one thing in common: impossible fiction story lines and articles about oafish husbands.

 

Even the signature was to gag on, with the two little red balls over the lower case j and i. But the guy could paint and I often tried and failed to get those slick flesh tones with Winsor Newton Designer Colors. He had a touch.

You have to understand that these illustrations appeared a decade or so after World War II when millions of returning veterans slept in their underwear all those years, if they were lucky. Maybe Eisenhower and field rank officers had jammies, but the most of the infantry slept in their uniforms. So this Tony Curtis-type must have been known only to Jon and his editors who had intimate knowledge of pajamas and dressing gowns.

This guy is supposed to be a maitre d'? Where on this planet would that occur?

FYI -- this is what maitre d's looked like in those days. A drawing from my sketchbook of one of the more pleasant ones.

Typical Hollywood direction that's obligatory to this day: nude guy, clothed chick. What is he supposed to be thinking?

This is great rendering and I saved it until last. You can read more about Jon Whitcomb here.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Stay tuned for The Great One among this genre of illustrators -- Al Parker.