A Fistful of Wicked 80’s Print Ads

The 1980’s were wicked-awesome and the print ads of that decade were par for the course. They were playful and sophisticated, the focus trending toward less copy and more imagery. Ads often consisted of a bold, catchy headlines with a single large product shot bathed in a spectrum of color. Doesn’t get much better than that.

After sifting through thousands of these 80’s ads, the layouts and type choices can admittedly become quite predictable; but they never become tiresome to me. It’s true that we often romanticize the past, and that’s very possible what I’m doing here, but I can’t help but feel coming up with these ads thirty-some years ago was a lot of fun. I can’t say I look forward to doing any ads in this day and age.

You have to admire the strong grid foundations these ads are constructed on; so solid. Desktop publishing really didn’t make a strong push until the end of the decade, so I’m assuming these ads were created using physical layouts. Rubylith anyone?

I’ve got folders teeming with this stuff, more to come…