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The other day, in a search for illustrated film posters for John Carpenter films, I stumbled upon a site named Cover Browser. Maintained by Phillip Lenssen, the site features nearly half a million images from the covers of comics, pulp magazines, books, as well as movie posters, and unusually for an archive of this size, the quality remains pretty high throughout. The site also contains this helpful piechart, which explains how the contents shape-up.
There are plenty of similar archives out there, such as B-Movie poster site Wrong Side of The Art, or the 100 posters featured on Andrew Lindstrom's Well Medicated blog (Andrew's site also features some great collections of vintage tobacco ads, gig posters, and vintage space-age scenes), and I'll try to get round to featuring something on them soon. For now though, these examples come from Cover Browser's horror movie posters archive. Some, like this Saul Bass poster for Otto Preminger's 1965 thriller, Bunny Lake Is Missing, are refreshingly understated. Even this poster for George Romero's Day Of The Dead (not a film known for holding back on the red stuff) is well considered and very unlike most horror movie posters.
...then again some others are, y'know, not quite so understated... but then what would you expect from film with titles such as Silent Madness (In 3D!) and, er... The Cauldron of Death? Hard-hitting stuff indeed.
I won't attempt to add to the reams and reams already been written about the design of Penguin Books, from the systematic approach defined by Jan Tischold during his brief stint in charge of typography and production, to the distinctive design of books in a particular series, such as these examples of popular fiction, science, crime, and science-fiction from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Its the consistency of the design within each series that appeals to me as much as the styles involved. For example the restricted green and black colour palet and simple-but-striking, Saul Bass-like illustration of the crime series. There are numerous archives of Penguin covers online, but particularly worth a look are the Pelican Project by Things Magazine, which organises the covers by decade, and Joe Kral's personal collection.
Volkswagen's advertising of the 1950s and 60s was ahead of its time in promoting affordability, practical solutions for large families, and low fuel consumption. Minimal, and characteristically deadpan, the ads still look fresh today. Roy's VW Ad Archive compiles printed adverts, postcards, billboards, calendars, and even stamps, from 1952 up to the present day (or thereabouts), and features examples from the US, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. The site may look a bit unsophisticated, but the content is well organised and extensive. Nice one, Roy!
Now, I'm certainly no Beetle-geek, but there seems to be no shortage of VW-related online resources provided by people who are. VW Postcards and Found VW Postcards are, perhaps unsuprisingly, collections of postcards of the 1950s and 60s which feature the eponymous vehicles. Although some were obviously produced by VW for promotional reasons, many are simply scenes in which the photographer just happened to capture the image of VW in the landscape. This indicates the VW's popularity at that time, as well as the broader importance played by the automobile in leasure and hoiliday activities of the time - postcard of a carpark, anyone? I find the images fascinating not for the vehicles featured within them, but for the colour, tone, and architecture of the landscapes, which provoke such a distinctive nostalgia for post-war America.
Finally, for the kids, there's a Spot the VW game. Happy hunting.
The other day, in a search for illustrated film posters for John Carpenter films, I stumbled upon a site named Cover Browser. Maintained by Phillip Lenssen, the site features nearly half a million images from the covers of comics, pulp magazines, books, as well as movie posters, and unusually for an archive of this size, the quality remains pretty high throughout. The site also contains this helpful piechart, which explains how the contents shape-up.
There are plenty of similar archives out there, such as B-Movie poster site Wrong Side of The Art, or the 100 posters featured on Andrew Lindstrom's Well Medicated blog (Andrew's site also features some great collections of vintage tobacco ads, gig posters, and vintage space-age scenes), and I'll try to get round to featuring something on them soon. For now though, these examples come from Cover Browser's horror movie posters archive. Some, like this Saul Bass poster for Otto Preminger's 1965 thriller, Bunny Lake Is Missing, are refreshingly understated. Even this poster for George Romero's Day Of The Dead (not a film known for holding back on the red stuff) is well considered and very unlike most horror movie posters.
...then again some others are, y'know, not quite so understated... but then what would you expect from film with titles such as Silent Madness (In 3D!) and, er... The Cauldron of Death? Hard-hitting stuff indeed.
