Tom McMahon

 
Ted Key, Creator of Peabody and Sherman   

From the NY Times obituary:

• Ted Key also created Hazel
• Jay Ward, the creator of Bullwinkle, was a friend of Mr. Key’s brother, Leonard.
• Key's father was an immigrant from Latvia

 
Cereal Mascot Reunion 

(via Advertising Is Good For You)

F Minus

Short on life lessons, precious moments, and pearls of wisdom, Tony Carrillo's “F Minus” takes on life's serious issues by pinning them to the ground and stealing their lunch money. (H/T: Stephen and my cubicle neighbor Ernie at UltraGlobalMegaCorp)

The Lottery: Fulfilling What Advertising Has Always Promised

An ad for the Chilean Lottery.

Lego: Milwaukee's Miller Park, Complete With A Working Retractable Roof

Built by Tim Kaebisch, a student at Milwaukee School of Engineering, where it is on display thru the end of August 2008. An excerpt from an interview with the web site Home Run Derby:

HRD:  Did you have blueprints or schemes to work from?
TK:  There was nothing like that out there.  So it was mostly trial and error.  I started with the roof before anything else.

HRD: Is it all made entirely of Lego?
TK:  It’s 99% Lego materials.  There’s some light string and twist ties in there.  The electronics are all from Lego Mindstorm. ...

HRD: What’s your major at MSOE?
TK:  I’m a Junior majoring in Architectural Engineering, specializing in Environmental Engineering, which includes HVAC, plumbing and fire protection.  I’ll graduate in May 2009.

Do you think he'll have any trouble finding a job? Me neither. By the way, Home Run Derby has a great page of other Lego ballparks as well. (via Cold Spring Shops)

Jeff Fisher LogoMotives: A Logo Design Studio

His website. His gallery. His book.

The 1955 Record Album Lonesome Echo: The Songs Are Sung By Jackie Gleason. The Album Cover Is Painted By Salvador Dali. And The Mind Boggles.

From Varifrank:

Think about it for a second.

Gleason - Dali.

Unfortunately, this is not where the weirdness ends. Heres just a partial list of things I that I find weird about this rather odd artifact from the past.

1. Jackie Gleason, made record albums where he showcased his singing. Apparently this went on for years with no intervention from the authorities.

2. Capitol Records, who would one day have the Beatles under contract, gave Jackie Gleason a contract to make these albums, which were not for comedy skits, but singing. I assume this was done for money and profit and not for laughs or as a result of the loss of a bet on the part of a record company executive.

3. People bought the albums. I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Perhaps there was a shortage of rodent repellant in the 1950's.

And that's just a partial list of Varifrank's partial list. I guess that the Gleason style just isn't his cup of tea. But maybe it's not about the songs anyway:

Although Gleason's 1955 album is not nearly as well known as most others in this list, it can be seen as one of the most important. Throughout the 50s, more and more experimentation with album art was taking place, particularly in the jazz scene. While the crooners of the day still tended to favour a simple photo of themselves as their album cover, others such as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie were employing artists to come up with more interesting concepts. When TV personality Gleason used a piece by legendary surrealist Salvador Dali for his album cover, it was official; the album cover was a legitimate art form. It hasn't looked back.

The Art Of Siggi Eggertsson

(via Notcot)

Retro Pulp: The Nazi Madhouse Zoo Of Ravaged Women

As always, the knife-wielding monkey is indeed a nice touch. (via Andrea Harris)

Is This Any Way To Sell Beer? (Click to Biggify)

From here (PDF)

Cartoonist Mike Lynch

I've used enough other artists work off of Mike's terrific blog that I thought I should show you some of his own work. I think we've all worked at one time or another for the boss shown above, eh?

Buffalo Wild Wings Margarita Mayhem

The Creative Director on this ad is another fellow named Tom McMahon  --- if I didn't Google myself I'd miss out on all kinds of great stuff like this. Be sure to click thru to the larger image, lots of terrific detail.

The World Of Cartoonist Eric Decitis

(via Mike Lynch)

The Quimby Award For Excellence In Outdoor Christmas Displays

Anne Quimby Mathias explains:

Each December, my family would pile in the car, pop in the cassette of John Denver and the Muppets, and go looking for houses to nominate for “The Quimby Award.” My dad started this tradition and it’s one of my fondest Christmas memories. The criteria for the Quimby Award are really pretty straightforward:

• There must be flashing or “chasing” lights somewhere on the scene.
• The tableau must blend the sacred and profane. A light-up Frosty or Santa hovering over the baby Jesus? Excellent.
• Some type of Licensed Character should be present.
• Bonus points if there is evidence of decorations from another holiday anywhere in the yard – a rotting pumpkin on the porch, or one of those jack-o-lantern lawn and leaf bags next to the garage? Perfect.

Just follow the links to see this year's finalists. 

Ad man Steve Simpson comes to the defense of a universally-hated medium. An excerpt:

Of all forms of advertising -- all of which is an imposition and ought to have the decency to be entertaining or at least interesting -- outdoor advertising has the most to apologize for and the fewest ways to do it. It has to make an impression with an absolute minimum of elements. A few words, a simple message, a tastelessly large logo or product shot.

The bad is as bad as it gets. But the good is consistently, surprisingly good.

For years, it’s been the democratic medium in which a quirky museum or a budget-busted zoo could stand right up next to, and outwit, a multinational marketer. And it’s where big marketers can boil down a message that even muddle-brained middle brand managers can’t bloat.

Outdoor advertising also gives a kind of street credence and instant relevance to brands that maybe no other medium can.

Where's Willy?: The Redesigned Logo of the Nordic Battlegroup

Redesigned because a group of female Swedish soldiers filed a sex discrimination complaint with the European Court of Justice.

The Basic Elements

Meowza explains:

I don't need to tell you who any these characters are for you to recognize them. Our eyes strip down everything we see into its most basic elements on a daily basis without even thinking about it. Mickey Mouse isn't a mouse who wears red shorts. Our mind remembers him as a circle with two smaller circles on top. Just to visualize, we can dress him up in any colors or attire we desire and nobody would ever mistake him for anyone else.

Human beings are extremely lazy creatures when it comes to visual association. We have difficulty consciously remembering details and ultimately recollect most of our visuals through basic shapes. ... Although a solid foundation can be enhanced with flashy details, flashy details cannot save a poorly designed foundation. Spending that extra time in the initial compositional stages of a design is of utmost importance. It's the "Mickey Mouse ears" from which all other elements of a design will work off of.

The LaFollette National Progressive Party Swastika Lite

From Wisconsinology:

A photo of Phil La Follette's well intentioned National Progressive Party launch in 1938...It doesn't show the giant banners that were arranged behind him, but you can tell by the Nazi Party meets Jefferson Davis official Progressive Party logo hanging from the podium that it wasn't a good idea....and yes,copying the iconic success of German Nazi design was their naive intention. The three time governor and champion of his father's great legacy was viewed by many as weak. This disorganized attempt to create a national party that would unite Progressives everywhere and challenge President Roosevelt soon fizzled.

And from the University of Wisconsin LaFollette page:

Called a "circumcised swastika," the symbol invented to promote the National Progressive Party was one of the factors that contributed to its failure.

See also Jonah Goldberg's new Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

My 2008 Wish To You: Happy Everything!

(from my high school ultra-liberal friend Jeff Brown)

Abe Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, so 2009 will be the 200th anniversary of his birth. In honor of this event, the Lincoln penny will get a makeover in 2009. The heads side will stay the same, but the Lincoln Memorial will go bye-bye after 50 years. By law, there will be four different scenes on the back of the 2009 Lincoln penny:

• His birth & childhood in Kentucky
• His formative years in Indiana
• His Professional life in Illinois
• His Presidency in Washington, DC

Ya just gotta love American politics, eh? It gets better: There are two separate groups evaluating designs for the new pennies. The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) was created to advise the Secretary of the Treasury on the selection of themes and design proposals for circulating coinage, commemorative coins, bullion coinage, Congressional Gold Medals and other medals. Then there's the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), which I suppose is the more artsy group. So 4 designs x 2 groups = 8 recommendations. Here's where they stand so far:

Lincoln's Childhood in Kentucky

Both the CCAC and the CFA liked this design. Log cabin, hey, what's not to like?

Lincoln's Formative Years in Indiana
CCAC Design (left), CFA Design (right)

Either one of these would be fine, eh? I have a slight preference for the CCAC design, as I think it would look better on a small penny.

Lincoln's Professional Life in Illinois
CCAC Design (left), CFA Design (right)

Again, either is OK. And again, I think the CCAC design would look a little better on a small penny.

Lincoln's Presidency in Washington, DC
No CCAC Design Recommendation
CFA Design Recommendation Shown

That's the CFA design, as there was no CCAC recommendation:

CCAC members felt that none of these concepts evoked correct remembrance of President Lincoln during the Civil War years. A key concern was that the public would not generally understand what was meant by an image of the unfinished Capitol. Lincoln had ordered work on the dome continue during the war as a symbol that the Union would be preserved. Historian and committee member John Alexander said it would be a mistake not to associate Lincoln with the Civil War. One concept mentioned was Lincoln visiting the troops, perhaps showing tents or war-related items.

A different view, voiced by member Rita Laws, was that the focus should be on the Emancipation Proclamation, depicting Lincoln as the Great Emancipator rather than a military commander. A vote taken on the issue showed an 8-2 preference for a concept evoking Lincoln's role in the Civil War more overtly.

You can see all the designs here. The CCAC will meet January 15, 2008 to review more designs. By the way, I think the CCAC got this one right, too. None of the designs really capture Lincoln as President during the Civil War, in my opinion.

These four designs are just for 2009. A new design for the reverse of the Lincoln cent in 2010 and beyond will be based on his preservation of the United States as a single and united country.

Gluyas Williams

Excerpts from American Heritage:

IF YOU WANT a quick fix on what upper-middle-class Americans were doing between the two World Wars, look at the cartoons of Gluyas Williams. It will take less time than reading Dodsworth or the works of J. P. Marquand, and will be just as accurate. Accurate observation was the essence of Williams’s art, and he was, in the words of one magazine editor, a “superb noticer.”

As a rule, Williams drew only those things that he had observed personally. Years after he retired, he described his working methods this way: “I’d watch for things to happen at the West Newton Station in the morning or evening—things like somebody trying to get through the station door to buy a paper, just as everyone else surges out to board the train; or trying to get a taxi at the station on a rainy night; or the way everyone in the station starts for the platform when a train rumbles by, and it’s usually a freight train; all those little everyday occurrences can be built into cartoons.” ...

That year Robert Benchley, a lower classmate who wished to contribute to the humor magazine, showed his cartoons to the art editor. Williams (according to Benchley) suggested he go into writing. Years later, when Benchley’s first book of essays was published, Williams illustrated it. When Williams’s first collection of cartoons was published in 1929, Benchley wrote the introduction.

In time Williams would illustrate all of Benchley’s books, which meant doing hundreds of caricatures of the pudgy author. Sometimes it seemed as though he could not stop. At least it seemed that way to Benchley: “There is only one drawback in having been Mr. Williams’s model for so many pictures. After years of capturing those particular facial characteristics of which my mother is so fond, he has quite unconsciously taken to putting me into all his drawings, commercial and otherwise, as the typical American Sap. I glance at an advertisement for McCreery’s and see myself, laden with bundles, illustrating the sales point that even the dullest of customers receives consideration in that store. My friends point out to me that I have been caught to the life in a Williams drawing showing the delight with which dear old Uncle Tasker will receive a dressing gown for Christmas. When people come to me and say: ‘I saw your picture in Vanity Fair to-day,’ I know instinctively that it was not among those nominated for the Hall of Fame but in the back of the book among the advertisements typifying the sort of men to whom a Bates umbrella or a pair of Goodyear rubbers will be an ornament. Not only in his advertising drawings but in those amazing full pages in the New Yorker and the Cosmopolitan where the face of Mr. Mencken’s Boobus Americanus is called for, mine is the face.”

Yep, that's Robert Benchley all right, no doubt about it. You can browse more of Gluyas Williams' drawings on Google.

2008 Will Be The Last Year Of The State Quarters

UPDATE: United States Mint to Produce New Quarters in 2009 to Honor District of Columbia and U.S. Territories

Washington - The District of Columbia and the five U.S. territories will get their own commemorative quarter-dollars in 2009, under new legislation signed by President Bush. ... Congress has now added a provision to the 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act that calls on the United States Mint to produce six newly designed quarters in 2009 honoring the District of Columbia and the five U.S. territories: the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the United States Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The new quarter program will continue to feature images of President George Washington on the obverse (heads side) of each quarter.  The image on the reverse (tails side) will commemorate the history, geography or traditions of the District of Columbia and each territory. The first quarter to be issued in the 2009 program will be the one honoring the District of Columbia.  The five United States territories will follow throughout 2009.

Arthur Mole's Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, Made With 21,000 Troops In 1918

An excerpt from Louis Kaplan:

Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-generating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community. In these mass ornaments, thousands of military troops and other groups were arranged artfully to form American patriotic symbols, emblems, and military insignia visible from a bird’s eye perspective. During World War I, these military formations came to serve as rallying points to support American involvement in the war and to ward off isolationist tendencies.

Close-Up Of Arthur Mole's Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson

More of Mole's amazing work here and here.

Fordite

The Story of Fordite:

Fordite is a unique automotive enamel material, with an interesting history. The original layered automotive paint slag "rough" was made incidentally, years ago, by the now extinct practice of hand spray-painting multiples of production cars in big automotive factories.The oversprayed paint in the painting bays gradually built up on the tracks and skids that the car frames were painted on. Over time, many colorful layers built up there. These layers were hardened repeatedly in the ovens that the car bodies went into to cure the paint. Some of these deeper layers were even baked 100 times. Eventually, the paint build-up would become obstructing, or too thick and heavy, and had to be removed. As the story goes, some crafty workers with an eye for beauty realized that this unique byproduct was worth salvaging. It was super-cured, patterned like psychedelic agate, and could be cut and polished with relative ease. ...

Sadly, the techniques that produced this great rough years ago, are no longer in practice. Cars are now painted by way of an electrostatic process that essentially magnetizes the enamels to the car bodies. This leaves little, or no overspray. The old factory methods that created this incredible material are long gone.

(via J-Walk)

Google's First Veterans Day Logo

Nice design. Kudos to Google for this.

Pushing Daisies: The Only TV Series That Offers A Comic Book Recap Of Previous Episodes

They use Skitch and Comic Life from plasq. Based on still images from the show, the comics help viewers catch up on missed episodes and relive the live show. Skitch is used to capture images from a DVD stream. The resulting images are placed into a Comic Life template, filtered, mixed with speech balloons containing key plot points, then shared on abc.go.com

The Mona Lisa Playing Poker With Dogs

Exactly what the Internet was made for. Just needs Vince Van Patten with a microphone over in the corner. Now this I would watch on cable TV!

Mondrian Farm Subsidy Maps

This one shows all the city slickers in the Twin Cities who are receiving big farm subsidies.

I Dig Chicks!

Doesn't everybody?

Visit The Zoo!

Circa 1930. It seems so odd to see a Soviet poster for a normal everyday activity like visiting the zoo instead of fighting the Nazis or meeting the production goals of the latest 5-year plan.

Mavis Beacon Teaches Painting

The equivalent phrase above in a few other languages:

• Bulgarian: А little fluffy young rabbit ran under a southern tree blooming in blue
• Danish: The quiz contestants ate strawberries with cream while Walther the clown was playing the xylophone.
• French: Bring this old whisky to the blond smoking judge
• Hungarian: An angry Mexican man, who caught his faithless son-in-law, is painting Wesselényi's house in Quito.

A Rare Portrait Of An Indian Chief On An 1899 United States Silver Certificate

The silver certificate itself was worth $5, but the blurb is priceless:

The portrait shows the likeness of one of only two Native Americans on United States currency. Chief Running Antelope, from the Sioux tribe, was depicted wearing a headdress from the Pawnee tribe. This created ill will among the Sioux and Pawnee nations.

The 10 Worst-Designed Cars Ever

Yeah, they're all there: the Chevette, the Vega, the AMC Matador, the AMC Pacer, the Ford Edsel, the Corvair, the AMC Gremlin, the Pontiac Aztec, the Ford Pinto, and the car shown above, the Yugo:

"You couldn't get scrap-metal money even if it was running."

"The Yugo was a car that fell apart while you drove."

"I used to work for a dealer and the last one on the lot was an '88 model that never got sold. It was there until 1991, when it was given away as a promotional gift on a radio show."

Everyone Smokes!

The story from Alexander Zakharov at his fine new blog A Soviet Poster A Day:

In Russia tobacco and alcohol has always been quite popular, being one of the main sources for state treasury income. Tobacco was brought to Russia in the 16th century during the reign of Russian tsar Ivan the Terrible. Later smoking was strictly prohibited, as it supposedly caused a vicious fire which burned down Moscow in 1634. Infringers were subject to chopping of their noses. During the next 50 years Russian rulers were prohibiting and legalizing tobacco, until realizing that monopolization of the tobacco market could result in fantastical profits.

After the WW1 the Bolshevics were in financial trouble, as the country economy struggled to survive the nationalizing and planned economy measures. Tobacco and alcohol were the most significant financial drivers for the young soviet government, so massive advertising campaigns started – promoting tobacco and smoking. Although nationalized some factories were still operating under old brands.

This poster says: “Everyone smokes! Donskaya State Tobacco Factory (fomer Asmolov and Co)”. And this was sad but true – more than 90% of the adult population were smoking tobacco in the twenties. Later, this figure went down, albeit slowly, resulting in 70% of smokers among the adult male population nowadays.

(via PCL Linkdump )

Russell W. Porter (1871-1949) is one of those really interesting guys that few people have ever heard of. He first got interested in the Artic in 1892:

Porter caught what he would call Arctic fever when, in 1892, he attended a lecture by Robert Peary, who described his latest explorations in northern Greenland, which he had proved to be an island. The next year, the scientist Frederick Cook came to Boston to advertise a summer cruise up the coast of Greenland. Porter negotiated passage on Cook's voyage by offering to serve as surveyor and artist.

This would be the first of Porter's eight northern adventures over the next 15 years. The first ended above the Arctic Circle, when the small steamship was first damaged on a reef and then collided with an iceberg. The crew was rescued by Eskimos and returned to Boston by fishing boat.