The Branding of Polaroid, 1957 - 1977

Typography: 1722, Caslon and 1975, Gerald Giampa

Caslon was the typeface we used for banks and institutional advertising literature pieces when we wanted a distinctive classy look that didn't interfere with the reader's comprehension of the piece.

It's difficult to imagine a more appropriate typeface. What makes it all the more remarkable is that Caslon was designed and cut in the early eighteenth century. Wikipedia will fill you in on the details.

Click on images to enlarge them.

Caslon specimen page courtesy of the Gutenberg Museum, named after Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of printing from moveable metal type. It is located opposite the cathedral in the old part of Mainz, Germany.

 

Caslon 540

 

Antique Caslon

 

Antique Caslon Italic

 

How to identify Caslon by its distinctive features, source unknown

 

Digital Caslon by Adobe

 

Caslon 540 Italic with Initial swash A

 

Caslon Italic Swash initial caps, which should only be used as initial letters and never an entire word

 

Gerald Giampa at a Heidelberg press, courtesy Typophiles

I've included this extraordinary talent for all the amazing things he has done, which you can read about in more detail at the link above and by clicking here.

 

Gerald Giampa, Ezra Pound

The following examples illustrate Giampa's distinctive and contemporary use of Caslon

Typography: 1531, Garamond

Typography, like music, is art. It is also a discipline. Music has notes, typography has an alphabet. In these briefest of brief posts, let me show you some simple melodies from the best of the best. Designers like me who courted this attractive but fickle muse in the last century learned from trial and error which type faces to use for specific projects on our drawing tables. There was never any one face or one size that fit all and mistakes proved to be both costly and embarrassing. Type setting was done by specialists who followed the layouts and type specs they were given. Woe unto those who asked for the impossible. It's why we were dependent upon the specimen books that showed which faces were available in specific sizes.

Garamond by Claude Garamond, French, circa 1531

For this helpful graphic we are indebted to Barney Carroll for his Garamond v Garamond Physiology of a Typeface that illustrates how each type foundry cut its own version of Garamond. 

 Claude Garamond (1490-1561) was a contemporary of Martin Luther. (1483-1596)

 

 

The Calendar, by T.M. Cleland dated 1927 in The Decorative Work of T.M. Cleland by Alfred E. Hamill, 1929.

Thomas Maitland Cleland (1880-1964) was commissioned by the American Type Foundry to create decorative pieces in the style of the Garamond type face he designed for them in collaboration with Morris Fuller Benton (1872-1948), head of ATF's design department. Benton was most prolific as a type designer and created the News Gothic type face for ATF, which I used for my Polaroid product imagery in 1958.

A typical specimen sheet from ATF. Note the ligatures available at the end of the alphabet

  An italic face of great beauty. In additon to many ligatures, there is an alphabet of initial letters. They were never intended to be used sparingly and to see them used for every character in a sentence is an affront.

 

Adobe Garamond is available among other type faces bundled on some of today's computers

Thanks to my very good friend of many decades and noted book designer Dick Bartlett for his kindness in providing some of these images.

Typography

Roman Letter Forms

and how we got Polaroid set into News Gothic type

Appropriate typography is necessary to create decent branding. It has to be compatible with the product and product line, for commerce and/or publishing, and with the graphics to which it is an integral part. I hope to show those who are interested how the following typefaces came to life in the languages and the time in which they were created.

Roman emperor Julius Caesar, 100BC- 44BC
from a bust in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy

 

These are characters of the Roman, or Latin, alphabet, which date back from the days of the Caesars and from which most of our typography has been based. From a promotional book by James Hayes for R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company on the occasion of the exhibition The Roman Letter, Chicago, Illinois, 1951-52

 

The Pantheon, Rome, Italy circa 200 AD.  Photo by Andrew Giambarba, 2006

 

Roman letters photographed with a Polaroid Colorpack II in the Roman Forum, Paul Giambarba, 1959

Roman capitals drawn by Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg, Germany, 1535

 

Next: 1531, Garamond

Edwin Land and Polaroid, 1970. His Impossible Dream

These are freeze frames from a 1970 film directed by Bill Warriner discovered and displayed as a video transfer by Christopher Bonanos on his blog Polaroidland. Chris is the author of the recently published Instant, The Story of Polaroid. The film may be seen as well on Harry McCracken's Technologizer/Time magazine blog.

I've enhanced the images from their faded state. You may click on this link to view the film, which is approximately 16.5 minutes in length. Its title is The Long Walk and it was presented at Polaroid Corporation's annual meeting in 1970 at the Norwood plant.

Edwin Land is seen walking down the steps of 549 Technology Square, Cambridge. His formal office was on the third and top floor, though he spent most of his time in his lab on Osborne Street

 

Boarding the helicopter to overfly new plants and the site for a huge color negative film factory in New Bedford 

 

Land supplies the voice-over narrative in the film

 

Overview of the entire Technology Square complex, Cambridge

 

Polaroid's Norwood facility, designed by architect I.M. Pei

 

Print coating materials manufactured here

 

Polaroid's first factory for film, Route 128, Waltham

 

 

Needham distribution plant. One of ten such facilities in the USA

 

Another view of Technology Square, Cambridge. Land's office was in the small building just above, right

 

Pilot plant in Waltham for producing color negative film planned for New Bedford

 

 

125 acres in New Bedford, site of future color negative factory

 

Norwood complex of factories

 

Camera assembly plant, Norwood, is the first ever integrated camera plant

 

Dr. Land ends the film with his explanation of what the new SX-70 camera will do for photography and for all of us in the bargain. The SX-70 will be like the telephone you use all day long, a camera you would use as you would a pencil or your eyeglasses. A camera that will fit in your pocket.

Considering the 1970 date, this is prophetic and describes today's proliferation of camera-phones. That the SX-70 would fit in a pocket was a stretch of both pocket and imagination. Not mentioned was the staggering cost to do it all: a billion dollars plus another billion for the SX-70, according to author Christopher Bonanos.  While SX-70 was an impressive technological achievement, the price to develop it and get it in production, along with Polavision, Land's insistence on instant-movie film and camera, brought this once proud and debt-free corporation to its eventual ruin [a PDF file].

The future was digital photography, the future distress sales of Polaroid's industrial real estate, bankruptcy, fraud and jail time for a latter day CEO, golden parachutes for the last gang of honchos, and a dishonorable loss of pensions and health care for those who made Polaroid what it was in its golden years.

An American tragedy. Land's Impossible Dream.

Polaroid Land Film Type 47, 1960

Techland at Time nagazine, Polaroidland, and Vintage Obsession, all on the Web, recently posted about the original Polaroid Model 95A Land Camera and Type 47 film. It was a vast improvement over the old original film which faded, but it required the use of a minature squeegee to save the print. Its speed of 3000 ASA was a remarkable accomplishment allowing its use in low light levels.

My late wife, Ruth, and our newborn daughter, Lily, November 1960

Ruth serving a striped bass I had recently caught, summer 1961

 

Lily as a toddler, with her grandfather, summer 1962

I took these photos with a Model 95A. All of them are over 50 years old, and except for some very minor scratches along the left edge of the top print, they are in perfect archival condition. This has been accomplished with a minimum of care and storing in the pockets of an off-the-shelf photo album of clear vinyl pages. Polaroid always made it clear to its customers to avoid gluing picture corners to the black pages of what are now considered old-fashioned photo albums.

Please click on the links above to view and read more about this film from Harry McCracken and Chrisopher Bonanaos, two published authors and student Derek Butler.

And, many thanks once again to Jim Coudal.

Introducing arthurpolaroid

Forgive me for taking the lazy way out and simply adding these screen grabs from Arthur Smith's blog but doing so captures his direct easy to comprehend and follow posts. His current post tells and shows how to use an Impossible Project Cold clip in freezing temperatures.

Meanwhile, I shamefully add his much appreciated acknowledgment of my past work for Polaroid from a prior post.

Influences: Design Origins

Hanging around my neck was an old pre-World War II Contax. "Hitler's old camera," I called it. It had a great lens so I used it for most of my Kodachromes. My other ancient camera was an old Rolleiflex, with which I took the photo of my dear young wife shown below on Kodak Plus-X film.

By the time I showed up in 1955 at Polaroid's door, so to speak, I had had a few years of photographic experience. Nowhere was this more helpful than in shooting examples of what I thought to be great design for my own edification and collection, beginning with nearby subjects.

 

Congregational church, Centerville village, Cape Cod, where we lived.

 

Hanging sign, entrance to Camden, Maine

 

My late wife, Ruth, and figurehead, Nantucket, 1953

 

Hanging sign, barbershop, Aarhus, Denmark

This intrigued me. The notched-out plate used for shaving customers was all the signage  necessary to identify a place of business.

 

The Pantheon, Rome

The ancient Roman letterforms were exquisite to behold and lent themselves perfectly to the magnificent architecture.

[This photo was taken by my son with a digital camera at a much later time.]

 

Prototypes – Model 420/490, Type 108 film, and my How-to book

The film box, above, 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 off-the-shelf Polaroid cameras and film. 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.

The World in 1957

The world looked much different in 1957 from the way it does now. The National Geographic Magazine had the same cover design that it had used for decades. Pan American Airways was the major U.S. international air carrier, its fleet painted with a primitive logo, simply letterspacing its initials. Eastman Kodak's product design bore traces of industrial styling called streamlining, and had begun to identify its national advertising with a turned-up page bottom revealing the well-known Kodak logo in its trademark red against a similarly trademarked yellow background.

Evolution of Branding, Polaroid Color Stripes

 Design by Paul Giambarba, Design Director Bill Field, 1962

 Design by Paul Giambarba, Design Director Bill Field, 1962

 Design by Paul Giambarba, Design Director Bill Field, 1968

 

 Designs by Paul Giambarba, Design Directors Bill Field, John Milligan, 1962 - 1976