Milhaly Biro

Here is an awesome ad for the Abadia Rolled Paper Company that is currently on display at MoMa in New York. It was made in 1923-1924 by artist/graphic designer Milhaly Biro. The fact that he apparently worked on this over the course of two years explains in part why it is so much better looking than modern ads.

If I remember I'm going to try and post more old school illustrated advertising here in the coming weeks, such as Norman Rockwell's ads for Typewriters and Plymouth automobiles.

I feel like having to take the time to hand paint an ad inherently caused it to be better because if someone is going to spend that many hours creating an image they have a greater incentive to make something that doesn't suck. If you are photo-shopping a movie poster, and you spend ten seconds on it (for example see every movie poster that I've ever reviewed on this site), and it sucks, you don't really care. You got paid to do it, and you will spend far less time looking at it than I will have to when it gets put up on every subway platform in New York. But if you're going to spend weeks creating a piece of art you have a lot more invested in it and want to make both the concept and execution of it worthwhile.