progresswear/marketing

Designers: a Users Guide
If only the pinheads one is forced to deal with in a career in advertising or design would actually read this and take it to heart. Good luck Seth, these people are far smarter than us, or so they like to make us feel. We're just the art people, the colorers. We didn't get a robotic by the numbers MBA in marketing. We're the creatives, but we'll never see their money or have lunch with the CEO.

Once, in a brief stint in-house at a pharmaceutical agency I had dinner with the president. She was talking about a new AIDS drug and what we might do to ensure compliance among young men, how that was her job and that of her strategists. I suggested she simply lock a very talented copywriter and art director in a room until they came up with a brilliant solution. She looked at me is if I were crazy.

Aah, for the days when writers and art directors sat in the CEO's chair.

Once again I can't resist plugging the work of a friend. My old pal Frank Baseman of Philadelphia University along with Chaz Maviyane-Davies and Elizabeth Reznick of Massachusetts College of Art labored for two years to chose the 121 best posters of the past 40 years relating to Peace, Social Justice and the Environment.

While the selection is impressive online, go catch the show before August 18th in NYC at the AIGA Gallery at the National Design Center; 164 Fifth Ave. at 21st. Confront yourself with the power of the real posters instead of jpegs. In the flesh, these posters are power rendered visual. Designers will marvel at printing and production techniques employed long before Photoshop arrived. Spend an hour surrounded by ideas that designers around the world, free of their usual commercial constraints, were compelled to try and wedge into people's minds while they drove down the street or waited for the subway.

Sometimes StumbleUpon is just a bit too cerebrally Alice through the looking glass. Click an image from Darfour or Iraq here, escape via the next Stumbler's predilection for waif/heroin addict chic fashion photography or pretty puddy-cats. Knowing that these posters reached millions and made many think gives me hope that yes, the profession whose feeding hand I so love to bite, can bring some good.