The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

Polaroid film boxes, 1957

Here are three film boxes that illustrate once more how vulnerable Polaroid products were at point of purchase that was dominated by Eastman's yellow boxes.

Things were about to change early in 1958.

Kodak's Aggressive Yellow and Polaroid's Passive Gray

In 1957, and for prior decades, the photographic marketplace was saturated in Eastman Kodak yellow. Polaroid's pre-1958 packaging featured red and gray, MIT school colors, and little crossed circular filters -- a hold-over from Polaroid's polarization products -- along with the imponderable name in an illegible typeface. As might be expected, Kodak yellow sat on the few Polaroid packages at point of purchase.

Branding Polaroid without a thought given to clarity and comprehension

Polaroid package design looked like this when I got the go-ahead to redesign the line. White crossed filters denoting polarizing filters looked like soap bubbles against the drab gray background. Polaroid is reversed, or dropped-out, from a red patch in a mangled version of a typeface called Memphis. The true Memphis lower case "a" has an upper serif to distinguish it from an "o," but close inspection will reveal that the upper serif has been removed from the Polaroid "a." Thus the brand name could be easily misread at quick glance as Poloroid. Of all the counterproductive things one can do in commerce, this was outrageously stupid, especially when spending considerably to launch a new line of products.

Polaroid – Before and After – 1957 and 1958

Americans learned how to pronounce this tricky name, though it may have taken some half a century to do so. Like nuclear, a word that some of our presidents have never learned to say, Polaroid often came out poyle-a-rode. It had its origins in the polarization process for which Edwin Land and his associates produced material used in World War II. There's much more to it than that, but that's the short answer.
It's the brand name we were forced to work with. If you think this is bad, wait until you see the packaging on the pages that follow.

The logo above, in use until 1958, has been set in a typeface in which the lower case a is barely distinguishable from a lower case o. My simple solution was to set it in the only decent sans serif face that was available to us at the time, News Gothic. Restrained and classy, News Gothic is also distinctly American, one of several faces designed by the great type designer, Morris Fuller Benton (1872 - 1948) and cut by American Type Founders Co. There were other versions of this face, most common substitute being Trade Gothic, Mergenthaler's linotype product identifed as "after M.F. Benton." I specified the ATF version from Boston's best typesetter, H.G. McMennamin.

Imagery, 1957

It's important to remember what advertising looked like in 1957. Kodak's product design bore traces of industrial styling called streamlining. Pan American Airlines was still calling itself PAA, and the National Geographic Magazine's cover design was in a static format that hadn't changed in decades.