The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

The new Polaroid film family of 1970

Actually there was another film package of square format black-and-white film, Type 87, I believe, but I haven't been able to find one. When I do, I'll be sure to add it here.

Polaroid Type 88 square format film

This is what I came up with. It seemed the logical way to go and when we had the larger product folding box to work with, I could create a lot more tension with large black panels and much less type to position.

The guys in sales were almost apoplectic about the final box design. They wanted to write all over the box but Stan Calderwood went with my suggestion that in this case less is more, and we could stack product at point of purchase to make a dramatic presence among competitive product packages on which sales departments had plastered with photos, copy and bullets.

What do we do now?

It's now 1970 and the color stripes are a big hit. They were introduced into supermarkets, then big discount outlets and camera stores, and sales are going through the roof until a recession sets in and someone at the lab decides that Polaroid would sell even more film if it didn't cost so much. The money is in selling film and every square centimeter determines its cost to the consumer.

Bill Field gave me a blank box dummy in the new square format and said, "Maybe we ought to square off the color stripes. See what you can do."

Prototypes – Model 420/490; Type 108 film

The film box, right, and the folding camera model box, below, that was the high end of the product price line. The sleeve held both camera and flash attachment. In my opinion, these cameras – all clones of the original Model 100 – took the very best Polaroid instant color photos.

This is the book, below, that I did using only an off-the-shelf Polaroid camera, so to speak. The cover photo is of my son, who was five years old at the time the photo was taken. Peter Wensberg had said one day at lunch that he would spend a million dollars to get customers to take the camera off the shelf in their hall closets and shoot a couple of rolls of film. Remembering those wonderful books in the Kodak libraries available at most camera stores, I proposed doing a similar program for Polaroid. The concept was that they be sold as products, similar to what Eastman Kodak did, and the cost be self-liquidated, if I can remember the buzz word. Wensberg was elated at the results when I brought in the photos, dummy and script. Calderwood was equally enthusiastic.

Sounds good, but the euphoria didn't last. Wensberg's assistant, Ted Voss, insisted that the customers would be best served if the book was given away as a premium. I argued against that concept but to no avail. At that point, Stan Calderwood had already decided to leave Polaroid, Wensberg was busy preparing to take over Stan's job, and the entire book project just died on the vine. More's the pity because I sold a trade book edition to Doubleday anticipating some promotional effort by Polaroid which never materialized.

Yahoo! picks us today!

You can imagine my surprise when I came in from a sweaty hour of cutting the grass (I can't call it a lawn) on a muggy Cape Cod morning and found that Yahoo! had selected this site as a pick of the day. Thank you, folks at Yahoo! for the kind words. With your permission I'll link to your site and copy the text below since the link will obviously pull up something else later in the day or tomorrow.
http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/

Yahoo! Picks

July 24, 2004

Branding of Polaroid, 1957-1977

Creating a global brand out of thin air is like trying to harness the power of the tides. The marketplace can come crashing down on you, leaving you high and dry. This fascinating look back at how Polaroid forged its brand from 1957 to 1977 demonstrates the power of design, function, and intelligence. Illustrious designer Paul Giambarba, the man who began Polaroid's corporate image development in 1958, uses a weblog format to post his thoughts on different subjects of Polaroid brand history every day. Start at the beginning to see how a change in typeface made a huge difference, and then trace the history of Giambarba's colorful designs for the camera company. Or you can browse through the categories for a linear jaunt through Giambarba's time at Polaroid. Whatever path you choose, you'll be exposed to an utterly fascinating story. (in Marketing & Advertising)

A larger family of Polaroid cameras, accessories, and film product image by PG from the 1960s

I'm sorry but this is another small scan from a 35mm Kodachrome. It shows the aforementioned Colorpack camera boxes along with their more expensive folding camera brethren and related accessories.

Polaroid Colorpack Family – Product Image by PG

I wish I had something better than a 35mm slide of this, but that's the way we showed our work in the 1960s and 1970s, with Kodak Carousel Projectors. Below the film boxes is the family of one-piece molded plastic cameras that saturated the market for inexpensive photo equipment. The package design was deliberate. We wanted our retailers to stack pyramids of product and create a Polaroid island to attract instore traffic. The designs were also very visible in store windows throughout Western Europe. The silhouette drawing of the camera identified each model instantly, since the camera model names were not descriptive.

Ad for Polaroid sunglasses, international

Calderwood came by one day and asked if I could come up with an idea or two for magazine ads that show how polarizing works in sunglasses. This is a page from Elle, the French magazine for women, that probably goes back to 1958 or 1959. I think the ad was produced by DD&B because that is one good looking young woman. But I digress . . . .

Polaroid’s famous color stripes and how they came to be, 1968

The first color striped package design was created specifically when Polaroid color film was introduced into supermarkets in 1968. Peter Wensberg, ad vice president at the time, insisted on a strong colorful box that would appeal to shoppers as well as look good in television advertising, now being transimitted in color.

[This is also the introduction of the Polaroid Colorpack, a one-piece plastic camera at low end pricing that offered instant color photos. The Colorpack was the brain child of Stan Calderwood, who was now Executive Vice President of Polaroid Corporation. He shared this exalted role with William McCune, whose background was in engineering, and who beat out Stan for the role of President when Edwin H. Land stepped down as CEO. This event will take place in the not too distant future.]

I remember that there was a good deal of pressure for a film package with a four-color process photo of something on it. Wensberg, his assistant Ted Voss, Design Director Bill Field and I discussed it and I can remember being relieved to find that both Bill and I were of a mind to avoid the pretty picture. It was hardly a unique solution and could be done better by others (read Kodak here inasmuch as they were committed to producing instant film) and since Polaroid would not add to the shop cost of the products by upgrading the quality of packaging board and print production. I also created a way of illustrating the product on end panels that would not suffer from the limitations imposed by the printing process of flexography. I'll show examples of these illustrations in subsequent postings.

It’s not possible to describe a step-by-step scenario that led to the final design. Bill and I just kept trying to find something that would please us enough for him to bring into a meeting with Wensberg and Calderwood. I had already been thinking of color and design as a corporate and/or product flag, as I did for Polaroid Sunglasses, for instant recognition by consumers at point-of-purchase where they might have only a fraction of a second to fall in love at first sight -- in a manner of speaking, to be sure.

I began with blank folding box dummies supplied by Champion Paper Box, who was Polaroid’s longtime supplier. When I had something I thought still looked good the next morning, I brought it up to Cambridge for an informal evaluation. With Bill that took all of a couple of minutes because he was a quick study and decisive. Eventually we settled on six color stripes for Polacolor film and Colorpack camera boxes, and seven gradations of black ink for black-and-white film. These packages will be shown in the next post.

We added another color stripe or band for the cover design of the 1969 annual report which is shown here. .

Is Graphic Design Art or Industrial Waste?

I don’t know if graphic design is art, but I do know that it can be simply one more form of industrial waste. And, like any reasonable person, I’m against further pollution of our environment.

With all the lip service that is paid to originality and “doing one’s own thing,” it is hard to explain the periodic avalanches of manneristic and “trendy” material that may initially have had some charm but which is soon lost in indistinguishable and pervasive sameness.

The worst pollutants are the mindless displays of material that do not even approach this “me, too” level. They bring visual discomfort to our everyday lives and one endures them like the noise and foul air. One has only to try to fill a shopping list in a supermarket or attempt to get from one part of a major U.S. city to another to experience the chaos that is contemporary packaging, promotional material, and signage.

My own personal philosophy is that I should like to make every day as good as it can be, because each opportunity passed by is lost forever. Accordingly, I try to make each design assignment something more than just another job. I get deeply involved in the problem and I utilize all the time that I can to arrive at the best possible solution because I know I will ultimately reject much of what I do.

I believe in working intuitively. This requires many thumbnail sketches and rough layouts but the extra work has a great reward: the problem takes on another dimension, has a life of its own, so to speak, and good things happen that never would have without the effort to bring them forth out of the subconscious.

From an essay in IDEA magazine #120 (Tokyo) for September 1973