Just recently I read a book about one of my favorite things: space and geometric art. The book is "Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race" by Megan Prelinger. This heavy slab of a book details the use of geometric and abstract art in ad campaigns advertising the work of various tech companies in the 1950s and 60s. These ads also invited engineers to submit their resume's to these companies as there were jobs aplenty in the space and rocket field. The book is packed with art which I would have liked to paint. And it was painted and drawn, sometime on the forgotten medium of scratchboard. I looked closely at the reproduced ads. Many of them were printed complete with the ad copy. If you read the text it's clear that this rather difficult prose was aimed at engineers and administrators. The reproduced text is so tiny that you can barely read it, one of the only faults of this book. There's very little ad photography in that advertising era, and Prelinger carefully explains how the images in tech advertising progressed from hand-done art to photographs which were easier to manage.
I did quite a lot of work like this for various tech publications during the early Internet era. Looking at the ads in the book I can see just how the artists used ink and watercolor as their main medium. I don't think anyone will use traditional media for advertising any more, it's just too time-consuming and expensive. But any artist, including me, can easily crank out a geometric image with an hour or two of Photoshop time.
Photoshop, 8" x 3", July 28, 2020.
OK folks, sorry for the missed day. I am having all sorts of trouble with updating my Macintosh operating systems. I'm not done yet so please be patient.
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