100 Years of Illustration

Enjoy Your Summer (while you can). Labor Day 2008

Click on image to enlarge it.

Sorry about the paucity of new material

First there were the two carpal tunnel syndrome surgeries

And just recently the first cataract surgery.

I hope to get back with more material next week. Thanks for your patience.

More of my stuff, 1962-1972

I wasn't prepared for the positive feedback I got about my Polaroid designs. I'm particularly grateful to the kind words of Alissa of Mediabistro, Khoi Vinh of Subtraction and Stephanie Piro. I urge you visit them on this incredible medium that connects us all in a wonderful way we could never have dreamed of when this work was done.

Cape Cod Winter is an original silk-screen print I produced myself in 1962 working with a resist of torn paper and LePage's glue. I added Peace in Bodoni in Adobe Photoshop® a couple of years ago. Click on image to enlarge.

This was Cape Cod Summer, produced in the same manner and same sheet size, 20 x 26 inches. 1963. Click on image to enlarge.

Working the one-man squeegee at one end of the studio-workshop, Centerville, Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The designing end of the studio-workshop I built (in 1962) on the footprint of a two-car garage, about 20 x 24 feet in size.

Magpies, another silk screen print on 20 x 26 Strathmore Fairfield paper in 1973. The resist was glue over touche. Click on image to enlarge.

Purple Grackle, same technique, 1973. Click on image to enlarge.

Nude in black, glue resist over touche on 20 x 26 Strathmore, 1970.

The original sketch for the print, above, done with felt-nib markers on a sheet of layout pad paper.

A commercially printed poster designed for the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in 1972. I worked a 6-month gig in Sardinia at the time and designed this with markers on a layout pad for a printer in Milano. I hope to replace this fuzzy scan with something better when I can find the original.

OK, enough about me, let's get back to the amazing talent of Al Parker who was an extraordinary designer as well as illustrator.

My designs, 1962-1978

This is probably shameless of me, but I can't resist adding my own work to this web log. I've rationalized it this way: as so many have remarked in so many words, "You probably haven't heard about this guy . . . ." and a few articles have favorably mentioned my work, which you can find at my other blog: The Branding of Polaroid 1957-1977. I feel I really should enlighten my viewers to what it was like working in the great post World War II environment before the accursed bean-counters took over and polluted the world visually as well as physically by their insane preoccupation with the "bottom-line." You can view it all and read about it in detail by clicking the hot link above.

The first collection of Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera family of a high-quality camera and accessories as introduced in 1972. Below is an enlarged version of the "god's eye" which I used to identify the product line of cameras.

The Polaroid Pronto! Land Camera line of products introduced in 1976.

The Polaroid Square Shooter Land Camera, introduced in the early 1970s to capture the market for instant photography at lower price points in department and discount retail outlets. Square format film sold for less than the traditional rectangular format film.

The Polaroid Square Shooter Land Camera line used both square- and rectangular-format film. This was also a down-market one-piece camera made of plastic to sell for low prices in discount stores. Click on image to enlarge.

 

My original design for Polaroid sunglasses sold only internationally and not in the USA. The date was 1962 and it was one of my favorite designs. The image eventually became generic for sunglasses throughout the world and was discontinued by Polaroid for that reason in the late 1970s. Click on image to enlarge.

My favorite design for the Boston-Kyoto Sister City Committee done pro bono in 1972. More, later.