The economy is falling apart. Old adages like, “What's good for General Motors is good for the country,” are out the window. So are lots of other ideas and frameworks we used to think would always be there. How liberating! It’s a great time to be alive, to be engaged with any segment of the communications design business, and to influence the future.

THE LAST 50 YEARS
This article is about the major changes I have observed in the communications design business and (I’ll give away the ending) how the advertising design and graphic design sides of the business have come together once again in a strategic effort to shape peoples' complex experience with clients’ brands across mediums and touch points (many of them digital). A print and TV campaign for Coke, an annual report for Xerox, how do these efforts of the past compare with today’s advertising and design to transform a brand into an authentic experience that resonates with people empowered by the proliferation of choices available in the marketplace?

Much of today’s advertising and design tries to make meaning for people, sometimes helping them feel as though they belong to a tribe; finding out what would make them become devoted disciples like Harley Davidson riders, Saturn owners and Mac users.¹ In the age of commodities, all detergents can get your clothes clean. How can the product be turned into an object of devotion? Tide is not a detergent; it is an enabler, a liberator.²

COMMUNICATION ARTS
Needing a place to start (for I was not around for the entire fifty years), I looked through early issues of the Journal of Commercial Art and CA: Magazine of the Communication Arts, the former names of Communication Arts magazine. The ads, and there weren’t many, were small ones for the tools and services commonly used by art directors, designers and illustrators to execute the craft part of their work. They were dry transfer lettering, Speed Ball pens, Fixative spray fix, Lucygraf (for scaling) and Photostat machines, precut mats and veloxes. The first full-page ad I found was for Champion Papers, in the September 1962 issue.

The word “artist” was often used to describe illustrators, designers and art directors. (There was an Art Directors and Artists Club of San Francisco.) Steven Heller, author, historian and educator, thinks the reason advertising designers were called artists is because at one time they were. Futurists, Surrealists and Russian Constructivists as well as designers Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky created powerful advertising in the 1920s.³ Until the early ’90s, ads were placed for designers in newspapers' classified sections under “art.”

WOMEN         
One of the most significant changes in the last 50 years in design and advertising has been the influx of women. There is a conspicuous absence of women's names in the credits of the first ten years of advertising and design competitions.⁴ In an interview in the 1969 issue, Jean Coyne asked James Cross, owner of a Los Angeles graphic design firm opened in 1963, “What staff do you have now?” He responded, “Five of us, three designers, a girl and myself.”⁵ In a 2008 Advertising Age article, Laurel Cutler, who started at JWT as a clerk-typist and rose to creative director at McCann-Erickson in 1960, said, “The woman's ladder was one-person wide.”⁶ By the mid-1970s, more women had become involved and visible in advertising and design, but it was not an avalanche.    

THE ENGINE FOR ADVERTISING
During World War II, almost all of America’s resources and manufacturing capabilities were focused on designing and providing goods and services for the military. Designers and artists in and out of the armed forces were involved in some of these activities. For example, a group of 1,105 soldiers were chosen for an elite, secret group, to develop and deploy expertise in the arts of deception, or camouflage.⁷ The talent of the Walt Disney Company was conscripted to make training and propaganda films.

After the war, these same resources, including of course America's most talented designers working with its updated manufacturing capabilities and new found distribution skills, began to design and deliver goods and services to a public starved for them by years of scarcity and rationing. In the late ’50s, early ’60s, advertising agencies were booming, because of the growth of the consumer economy. Many of the art directors and designers in them had earned their degrees courtesy of the generous benefits of the GI Bill, created after World War II and available to Korean War vets as well. Print, radio, direct mail and network TV advertising were the media advertising agencies used to communicate the availability of goods and services for personal use: cars, appliances, food, nylon stockings, cosmetics, shoes and clothing, toys and games, entertainment and sporting goods, air travel, hotels and restaurants. The suburbs were expanding and there were thousands of new houses to be filled with stuff.

Ads directed people to where they could buy what they wanted, and growing chains of supermarkets, department and specialty stores followed them to the suburbs. The retail design business grew out of the demand for more and better stores.

CREATIVE REVOLUTION IN ADVERTISING DESIGN
In the late ’50s and early ’60s, there was a creative revolution in the field of advertising that mirrored cultural changes; people wanted to break the mold of the past, they dreamed of a better life, society was becoming more permissive, people were fighting for civil rights-a bit like today. Advertising began to put aside the way things had been done in the past and began to experiment with words, imagery and often humor. This period of time coincided with Volkswagen's decision to come to the U.S. to sell cars; while not the only great ads of the time, the iconic “Think Small” and “Lemon” created by Doyle Dane Bernbach changed the image and practice of the advertising business forever.