Themed Book Lists

10 Books on Advertising Design

December 27, 2013

Inspired by this week's Book of the Week, The Medium is the Massage, by mass communications analyst Marshall McLuhan, here are 10 books from our contributors on advertising and design.

1
Advertising by Design: Generating and Designing Creative Ideas Across Media, 2nd Edition Robin Landa

From the Publisher. Don't miss the new updated edition of the complete guide to the creative processes behind successful advertising design.

The second edition of Advertising by Design has been developed and greatly expanded. Sill the most comprehensive text on creative concept generation and designing for advertising, the book includes a number of features that make it an effective tool for instructors, students, or anyone interested in this field. This includes a practical approach to generating and designing creative integrated-media advertising for brands, organizations, and causes that encompasses brand-building through engagement, community building, added value, and entertainment.

Fully supplemented with interviews from esteemed creative directors, along with real-world examples, Advertising by Design is both a perfect text for courses that incorporate advertising concepts and design, and a valuable reference for anyone interested in the creative side of advertising.

2
Covering the ’60s George Lois

Collection of George Lois’s covers for Esquire magazine from 1962 through 1971 along with commentary from the artist.

3
The Creative Austerity in Today’s Advertising Art Directors Club Italy

From the Publisher. A collection of ads selected by the Art Directors Club Italia. Advertising provides clues on the mood of the time and place it appears. Creative Austerity investigates the relationships between economic austerity and the media, arts, fashion, technology, environment, social responsibility, and the future.

4
Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!) George Lois

— Graphic designer Louise Fili comments on Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!):

“When legendary adman George Lois speaks, we all listen.”

7
Max Bill: Typography, Advertising, Book Design Gerd Fleischmann
Hans Bosshard
Christoph Bignens

From the Publisher. Max Bill considered himself primarily an architect, yet he was also an inventive and tireless creator of type fonts and commercial logos, as well as being a designer with wonderful sense of visual humor - not exactly a common feature of Swiss graphic art, as the publisher (also Swiss) points out. This rich monograph gives Max Bill fans an extensive an inspring look at works for which he has received little attention, in the fields of typography, advertising and book design.

8
Mid-Century Ads: Advertising from the Mad Men Era Steven Heller
Jim Heimann

From the Publisher. Gleaned from thousands of images, this companion set of books offers the best of American print advertising in the age of the “Big Idea.” At the height of American consumerism magazines were flooded with clever campaigns selling everything from girdles to guns. These optimistic indicators paint a fascinating picture of the colorful capitalism that dominated the spirit of the 1950s and 60s, as concerns about the Cold War gave way to the carefree booze-and-cigarettes Mad Men era. Also included is a wide range of significant advertising campaigns from both eras, giving insight into the zeitgeist of the period. Bursting with fresh, crisp colors, these ads have been digitally mastered to look as bright and new as the day they first hit newsstands.

9
Modern Art In Advertising Egbert Jacobson

A reproduction of advertisements that appeared from 1937 to 1946 in issues of Time, Fortune and Business Week, a portion of which were included in a catalogue of an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago produced in 1945 with the title Modern Art in Advertising: An Exhibit of Designs for Container Corporation of America.

10
Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media Beatriz Colomina

From the Publisher. Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define 20th-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced.

With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

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