Simple Ad Layouts That Feature The Product

I'm nostalgic for old time simple generic product ad layout. I love these ads because the layout is completely functional. It's designed to show off the product. The products themselves are so much fun to look at that they don't need fancy layouts to distract from them.

http://neatocoolville.blogspot.com/2008/07/1960s-hanna-barbera-tv-guide-ads.html

I love the generic typefaces in the instructional text. The headings are much bolder and tell you the main point - they draw you in to read the smaller text. Hierarchy of importance and control of function and purpose. Alien concepts today.

Man, wouldn't you kill for this Howdy Doody skullless floating facial parts mobile??! What a great idea. I'd love to do this with some of my characters. Or my friends.

All this stuff is handsomely and carefully arranged with logic.

I sent away for this very ad and ordered all these breakfast eating accessories. You can't imagine the thrill I got when the package actually arrived in the mail. From then on I refused to eat breakfast in anything but my Huckleberry Hound Bowl and Yogi Bear mug.

Package Art Layout

The covers of old cereal boxes had more design in the layouts. The whole image was designed to be bold and have a non-ambiguous shape that you could see all the way across the store.

Bold graphically expert fun images tell you that the product is very tasty.

Compare to today's layouts:

Chaos Theory Layout

a lot of modern layout has no layout at all. Look how much harder it is to tell what you are looking at in this cluttered thoughtless box art. This sends a message that the food will taste like landfill.

Who is it that forces every box artist to put that crappy airbrush dirt all over the characters on every product? Is there some sort of Airbrush God that won't allow any variety in rendering cartoon characters? This style has to be the absolute worst way to render cartoons - ever. And it's all there is anymore! It takes all the cartooniness out of the image and makes the characters hard to make out. Somebody pleeeease explain this to me.

There's another theory of modern layout that drives me crazy - "book design". Ever buy a book about some vintage art, cartoons or toys because you actually like those cartoons and toys only to find out that the book has been designed so you never get a full image of any of the things you bought the book for? Or the images of the most intricately detailed toys are really small, and a tiny simple image is blown up far beyond what you need? Or there are acres of blank white space around tiny images and then 4 tons of text explaining to you why you should love these images that you can barely see?

That's layout that purposely competes for attention with the subject of the book or product , which is considered very stylish these days. I don't have any examples handy, but I'm sure if you are a collector, you've had this same frustrating experience.

Tony the Tiger Was Cool

Hey check out this fun commercial that I got from Leo Burnett. My friend Ryan Karell is an ad exec there and he likes the same kinds of stuff we all do, so he hunted down this for me (and some other classic spots too).

http://cartoonthrills.org/blog/commercialsClassic/TonyTigerBand.mov

Why did they ever change this design? It's so kid-friendly!
Boy, he could really chew up a lot of kids with those teeth.




This is what my pet turtle's eyes looked like when he died.

Compare this box to the modern style cereal packaging! So bold! You could see this across the supermarket.
Mmmm, sparkling sugar goodness.

I like when kids acted like Mr. Horse. This one is really thinking about the pleasurable taste sensation happening in his head.
Here's my favorite theory about sugar...that it's good for you and makes you athletic!
Just like cigarettes!





This must be one of the commercial characters Greg Duffel said Phil Monroe developed for Kellogg's.

I don't know who animated it though.
Here's the modern airbrushed, human-proportioned Tony. Fairly well drawn, but I think the old cartoony one is more fun for kids...plus he has sugar in the title and you can't say sugar anymore, because it's pleasurable and pleasure is bad for you.

They should give away free morals in cereal today too.

What people did who grew up in the Golden Age Of Kid's Life:

Here's an observation I've had for awhile, and I should know, because I watched it all happen.

The best time and place in all of history for kids to grow up was the 50s and 60s in North America.

Science and technology created a whole generation of pretty easy lives. A huge secure and healthy middle class. Major diseases gone. Lots of food for everyone. Kids didn't have to help their parents work the farm. We had no wars on our shores.

Whole industries filled with hugely talented and creative professionals whose mission in life was to bring fun to kids, more fun than they ever had growing up.

http://theimaginaryworld.com/kellogg.html

We had great inventive and beautifully designed toys-tons of them!
All packaging was done by extremely talented and creative designers.
We had beautifully designed cereal boxes that came with well animated fun cartoon character commercials. The cereals had killer prizes inside them and activities on the backs of the boxes.
We had tons of classic cartoons on TV. Short cartoons in the movie theatres-really well done and funny ones.

The Three Stooges reruns on TV. Get Smart. The Beverly Hillbillies. Local puppet shows on every TV station.

Weird-0h models, Mad Magazine, bubble gum cards, Rat Fink, Barbie, millions of comic books in tons of styles, CHEAP comic books that you could buy in any corner store! Sugar on everything.

It truly was a Golden Age for kids.

So what did the kids who grew up in this blissful atmosphere do when they grew up? How did they repay their good fortune?

They became hippies and ruined everything for the following generations of kids.
The hippies took the prizes out of cereal, hired amateurs to design bland mushy toys, put morals in cartoons-made them realistic, bland and ugly, painted eyes flesh color, got rid of kids' music.

The hippies got older and became corporate executives who used their hippie mysticism to create crazy corporate religious practices-focus testing, market research and on and on. They no longer trusted in natural talent and people who were born to create fun for others. They hired psychologists to help them ruin cartoons.

They came up with the theory of creative democracy, that everyone is equally talented, thus shoving actually talented people to the back of the bus. Skill and professionalism died as amateurs and charlatans invaded fields that just a few short years earlier were peopled by gifted talents and experts in fun.

The people who had the most childhood fun in history saw to it that their descendants would never have that much fun again.

Here's proof that the 70s ruined fun forever.





Vintage Cocoa KrispiesGreat professional design. Fun character. Easy to read across the room. Clarity and confidence. Fun

Modern Cocoa Krispies

Sloppy Cluttered design. Hard to read. Confusing. Amateurish. No fun.