The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

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The Branding of Polaroid blog has come to an end. You are invited to read it all just as you would a book by going to Archives and clicking on the links in sequence from 00 through 20. The material is my personal observation which has its source in my daybooks and job logs of the period. Thanks to TypePad and the digital revolution it represents one of the first and rare occasions when a freeance designer has been able to publish his work in full color free of the restrictions of four-color process printing and publishing budgets. All of the work identified as mine began from scratch on white paper in my shop. Obviously there were scores of Polaroid employees with whom I worked over the period of two decades. It was impossible to include all of them for fear of neglecting those who might not be remembered after all the years that have passed.

Additional Kudos

Yahoo! Picks
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. [July 24, 2004]

Coudal Partners
Great account by Paul Giambarba, head of Polaroid's identity and packaging at the time. These posts are full of smart thinking and interesting details, none of which seem out of date today.

Armchair Media
Paul Giambarba added some color to Polaroid's packaging, sent sales through the roof and secured his place in graphic design history. His tell-all blog goes behind the scenes and gives us a glimpse of a period in American graphic design where everything was in blooming color - even your TV.
-- posted by Stefan Kjartansson

Additional Kudos

As announced in the brilliant UK publication Grafik for August 2005, The Branding of Polaroid, 1957-1977 was published in book form.

For an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file of the article, click on this link: Download G131_Polaroid.pdf

Quotes from the article by John Weich, Grafik, August 2005 --

"Like Apple today, Polaroid supplemented its superior product with superior branding. . . ."

"In 1958 the company decided to hire freelance designer Paul Giambarba with a view to revitalizing the brand. This was the start of a relationship that was to last an amazing twenty-five years—Giambarba changed the face of Polaroid. He was responsible for creating packaging for Polaroid's Colorpacks, its SX-70, Square Shooter and Square Shooter 2 and the OneSteps. Giambarba's first initiative was to transform the logo into an uppercase News Gothic, and his second was to give the company's B&W film shelf distinction by way of black end panels, which were easily discernible in its TV spots (which, of course, were black and white).

"The first round of rebranding lent Polaroid some design credibility, but its second, more significant evolution elevated the brand to design icon. . . ."

Thank you, John and thank you, Grafik Editor Caroline Roberts. Grafik is the UK's only magazine dedicated entirely to showcasing the most exciting new graphic design work every month. It's also an essential tool for a designer in search of information and inspiration.

Stanford M. Calderwood, R.I.P.

An Unabashed Tribute to Stan Calderwood (1921-2003)

This is how I want to remember Stan. The year was 1973 and Stan had been three years away from Polaroid and his boss, Edwin H. Land. We were at my favorite Boston restaurant, Café Budapest. (Yes, I know the photo is out of focus but so probably was I.)

Upon leaving Polaroid Stan immediately took over as president of WGBH-TV in Boston. Within months he had consumated a fortuitous deal with the BBC to import Masterpiece Theatre; and then convinced Mobil Oil to fund the series. During the same brief period he arranged for Julia Child to introduce her series, The French Chef, to American television audiences. With this kind of phenomenal success, we were all sure that it wouldn’t be long before Stan Calderwood would be running the entire Public Broadcasting network.

Little did any of us know that before the summer’s end in 1970 that he would be embroiled in a no-win situation with activists in Boston’s black community. It was about the use of socially unacceptable profanity on prime time television.

The irony here is that PBS lost a good man who had done what he could to help recruit minorites, especially blacks, at Polaroid. Along with being insulted and jostled at confrontations, he began receiving death threats for cancelling the show. Responding to public pressure, WGBH reinstated Say Brother and called the prior cancellation a “mistake.” Stan quit in disgust.

In 1972 he joined a money management business controlled by Yale University and found his comfort level among kindred spirits in corporate management and the shepherding of institutional pension funds.

In 1981 he had accumulated enough personal wealth to buy control of Trinity Investment Management of Boston. By this time we rarely saw each other anymore, let alone socialize with our wives as we once did, so I have no first-hand knowledge of him or Norma Jean in the last two decades of his life.

I choose to remember Stan the cowboy from Chugwater, Wyoming, via Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and Boulder, Colorado. I’m sure he would prefer to be remembered as a Harvard Fellow and Brahmin benefactor who, with Norma Jean, has endowed more University chairs and museums than any of his philanthropic contemporaries.

Finally, it's my prejudiced opinion that if Edwin Land had not insisted that his successor be a fellow engineer and had encouraged and groomed Stan to run the company upon his retirement, Polaroid would never gone belly up into Chapter 11 as it did.

Stan departed this life on 10 May 2003 at Massachusetts General Hospital, where, typically, he was a significant benefactor.

Rest in Peace, Big Spender from Chugwater.

Peter C. Wensberg

Peter spent 24 years at Polaroid directing U.S. marketing and communications during which time he was appointed Executive Vice President. He left the company two months after Edwin Land retired in 1982. He then joined Warner Communications as president of Atari Tel, a division of Atari. Since 1987 he has been a consultant and writer, author of “Land’s Polaroid,” and a novel, “The Last Bastion.” He departed this life in November of 2007 after a brief illness.

Bill Field

Bill left Polaroid as Design Director in 1970 to return to his native Santa Fe, New Mexico to start his own shop, William Field Design. He was recently appointed Director of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Santa Fe’s newest museum, which opened on 21 July 2002, and is the first of its kind to celebrate the rich cultural life of Spanish New Mexico. Click on http://www.spanishcolonial.org

Paul Giambarba

And then there’s me. The photo was taken in 1970 by my wife in San Gimigniano, Italy, one of its picturesque towers reflected in the sunglass lenses. Yes, I liked to smoke those little Dutch Ritmeesters. Those were the days.

I chose not to be a Polaroid employee because I had already enjoyed the freedom of freelance life for ten years before I met up with Stan Calderwood. He delighted in chiding me with, “Gee-yam, you’re just not made for corporate life!” whenever I complained–and it was often. He was right. I did a lot of travelling that was not business travel, and it was an education I would recommend to any young designer.

In the years 1960 through 1963 I built myself a home and a studio on Cape Cod, fishing and swimming whenever my work load and weather permitted. I had the great experience of being with my wife and watching my children grow without the lost hours of commuting and working elsewhere but home. I attended meetings in Cambridge only when necessary. After expat adventures in Switzerland and Italy and nine years of publishing in Northern California I returned to Cape Cod where I court a similar muse of these Branding of Polaroid years.

Labor Day Time Out. What else was I doing?

Well, for one thing, I was making toys for my kids. You can see more at http://giambarba.com/toys.html

I did this logo for the Boston-Kyoto Sister City Committee. It uses a black or a white background. You can see more of this kind of thing at http://giambarba.com/bizimage.html

I also did a corporate identity program for Tonka Corporation and a product identity as well for Tonka Toys. There's more at http://giambarba.com/bizimage.html

Poster for a regatta commissioned by the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in 1972. I took a six-month contract to do print and production for H.H. Aga Khan's hotels and consortiums on Sardinia while Polaroid was developing SX-70. Click on image to enlarge.

A quick watercolor sketch of my wife, Ruth, for a personal greeting card, 1957.

A proposed book cover for a second edition of my book "Lighthouses," originally published in 1969.

A small watercolor of New York Harbor. Click on image to enlarge.

A portion of a watercolor of Newport, Rhode Island, 1958. Click on image to enlarge.

An original silk screen print made and printed in its entirety by the artist (me), 1971. You can see more silk screen prints that I did in these years at http://giambarba.com/prints.html

A portion of an original silk screen print that I first ran in 1962 but resurrected as a poster for peace in 2002. Click image to enlarge. I'm using at present for my splash page at http://giambarba.com

I'll get back to Polaroid stuff after Labor Day. Consider this a brief interlude or a way of understanding my thought processes as I tried to solve the design challenges I had to deal with every time Polaroid came up with a new product or family of products. This print is the result of the same thinking as the design solution for the first Polaroid sunglass product identity, also 1962.

New. The Last Hurrah – Polavision, 1977

If there's one thing I can remember about these days it's Stan Calderwood's opposition to this product that contributed, I feel certain, to his leaving the company. "Jee-zus, Gee-am," he would say in his Chugwater, Wyoming, twang," the goddam movie camera business accounts for only three per cent of the entire photographic market and Land insists on getting into it." More on why this crippled Polaroid in a subsequent post. Click on the image above for an enlargement.

I tried using the product but it was obviously a turkey compared to anything I was using that Kodak offered and a positive disaster when compared to my 8mm Bolex. I tried with the package design to make it look like a winner. The tinted plasic gave it an unwarranted classy look. Instant movie film was an engineering achievement but it's precisely what separated Polaroid techies from Polaroid pragmatists. There just weren't enough customers out there on whom to work the magic.

Stan Calderwood had confided to me that there would be a $15 million loss to account for. In 1974 Polaroid stock had plummeted to a fraction over 14 as stockolders lost considerably over $4 billion. This blow came even as SX-70 sales went through the roof and Polaroid's sales approached $1 billion in 1976. Land's personal losses were $660 million, according to Peter Wensberg in his book, "Land's Polaroid."

The camera box with its top lid removed, above, and the shelf panel, below.