I'm glad this post is now a proper thread. Excellent vintage nostalgia, makes me feel rather bummed that I missed out on all that cool stuff when it was in the present! ?
Package Design Starting in the Fifties
- Thread starter jpmcwjr
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You know you are old when all your contemporary images, from growing up, are considered vintage nostalgia?
Look around. There are tons of stuff way better than they had back in the 50's. People don't appreciate things till they are gone.
Yeah, I know it's a selective viewpoint, I get it. There are a myriad of things that sucked back then that are much better nowadays. Still, there's just a certain feeling I get when, for example, I watch a blaxploitation flick from the 70s, and everyone in it is chain smoking and wearing as pants what could easily be mistaken for Holiday Inn curtains circa 1976. And in bellbottoms, no less!
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Awesome post sir! Some very impressive design work on your father’s part! Great memories for you to cherish and thank you for sharing!Title changed. This thread was started in response to a request by the OP, so I did it to make sure copy and paste would work on a large file.
TheIronMonkey
Part of the Furniture Now
Saturday at 11:28 PM
My father was a package designer. In the 1950s, he handled a lot of overflow work and did designs for a big advertising executive named Frank Gianninoto. He worked on the package for Marlboro cigarettes when Gianninoto was rebranding it from a women's brand into the manly brand we know today with the red chevron. My father worked on holiday packages for KOOL and Viceroy in the '60s (and designed annual reports for Philip Morris through the early '70s). He worked in an office, but, he also had a studio set up in the basement at home.
He worked on the candy wrappers in the '60s for Three Musketeers and Milky Way (see the hand painted dummy for that below and the hand painted pasta box) and a whole bunch of other fairly iconic designs.
In the '70s he worked on Swanson TV dinners. He swore we'd never eat such terrible food and was horrified when he found out years later that my mother fed us nothing but Swanson TV dinners for a year and a half when he was away spending time with one of my brothers in another state.
Around 1967, he worked on Four Roses packaging (when I believe Seagram's might've owned it). Those of you into higher end bourbon will remember when Four Roses did the Al Young 50th Anniversary Small Batch release, they inverted the bottom heavy bottle design to look like this 1967 one my dad worked on:
My dad chain smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, but, he also smoked a pipe. I remember him smoking Cherry Borkum Riff, but, when I picture the big round tin he had, it was black and white—so, I'm thinking he must've been smoking the Bourbon Whiskey version. I loved the smell of his pipe. In the early '70s he smoked a Barling Challenger. I can still picture the deep, dark, blue box with condensed, white, sans serif lettering it came in. My dad's pipes are in storage. I'm hoping to retrieve them sooner than later and smoke them. Or at least display them. I recently picked up a pouch of the Borkum Riff Bourbon Whiskey tobacco and will smoke it to rekindle the memories of my father smoking it.
In the mid-to-late-Eighties, when I was playing competitive darts in leagues and tournaments, there was a guy at my local team bar in Manhattan, the Kettle of Fish, named Bob Teague. Bob was always doing work around the bar and smoked a pipe. He made a dart cabinet for me, which I still have. I loved the smell of his pipe, too. Unfortunately, Bob died from throat cancer.
In the early '90s I got into cigars big time. I was subscribing to Cigar Aficionado, Marvin Shanken's Cigar Insider Newsletter, buying any cigar magazine I could find. I was buying cigars by the box and smoking at least one a day. I picked up a Dr. Grabow pipe to add a little variety to the mix and smoke a pipe instead of a cigar on occasion. When my father died from lung cancer in 2002, I cut back on smoking quite a bit.
In 2018 and 2019 I attended CIGARfest with Susan and had a great time and got back into cigars. I received some freebie Missouri Meerschaum pipes in the bundles each year. I work on a magazine with a friend and he got into cigars and that reinvigorated my interest as well. Sharing a hobby with a friend can be great fun. My interest in pipes got rekindled in 2020, especially when it got too cold to smoke outside. Susan can tolerate my pipes indoors, but, the cigars, not so much.
I guess because my dad was a package designer, it's why I enjoy collecting some pipes in their original packaging. My appreciation for the design as a whole comes from seeing my father work on so many cool things growing up. And the smell of his pipe probably has much to do with it, too. I miss him very much.
I love this antique thread. Thanks Jpmcwjr................
You are most welcome! But all I did was copy and paste and start a new thread that Ironmonkey wrote.
Very Kool that you shared this. Nothing like Christmas cartons of smokes!
I figured since this forum is into tobacco, drinks, music, and food, I'd include some more stuff my dad designed related to those themes. Some of the designs below are probably from the early '70s. Below are a couple more Viceroy packages he worked on. The first is a photostat, probably used to make the mechanical to create the films for the printing plates. That photostat would've been affixed to an illustration board with rubber cement. A tissue overlay indicating the colours would've been taped onto the artboard, possibly including the colour swatches to indicate the inks to be used on the job. My dad's friend worked for Sun Chemical and created what would become the Pantone Matching System (PMS), an industry colour standard in printing today. My father worked on the production for the original books. @sablebrush52 and @JimInks have been in the commercial arts long enough to appreciate/remember photostat machines. They were huge clunky behemoths and stunk of chemicals. I don't miss them.
The next is an annual report my father did for Phillip Morris incorporating a die cut window on the cover showing the ends of cigarettes and the tobacco revealed on the first facing page inside. He was very proud of this one.
The next two groups are folders for Four Roses and Remy Martin with promotional info sheets inside.
These are salad dressing labels he did for Wish Bone and some record labels:
Below are packages he designed for Whitman's Milk Chocolates, Pepperidge Farm, and Avon:
Thanks for looking! I'll see if I can find the cover slicks for the album covers from the '50s/'60s my father did.
*Correction: I spelled Frank Gianninoto incorrectly 2x in the opening post. Back in the '50s, the executives got all the credit—people like my dad did the work and were invisible, unlike today's design annuals that list every person under the sun—which is a good thing. Remember how short movie credits used to be? The people behind the scenes didn't get their due. It's about time they did—it's just sad that most people walk out during the credits and never read the names.
The next is an annual report my father did for Phillip Morris incorporating a die cut window on the cover showing the ends of cigarettes and the tobacco revealed on the first facing page inside. He was very proud of this one.
The next two groups are folders for Four Roses and Remy Martin with promotional info sheets inside.
These are salad dressing labels he did for Wish Bone and some record labels:
Below are packages he designed for Whitman's Milk Chocolates, Pepperidge Farm, and Avon:
Thanks for looking! I'll see if I can find the cover slicks for the album covers from the '50s/'60s my father did.
*Correction: I spelled Frank Gianninoto incorrectly 2x in the opening post. Back in the '50s, the executives got all the credit—people like my dad did the work and were invisible, unlike today's design annuals that list every person under the sun—which is a good thing. Remember how short movie credits used to be? The people behind the scenes didn't get their due. It's about time they did—it's just sad that most people walk out during the credits and never read the names.
The Milky Way snap is interesting. 2 and an eight ounces for a dime. They're now 1.84 ounces and almost 2 bucks.
Your father had a remarkable eye and worked with a lot of iconic American brands. He helped define the looks of culturally influential products for a particular period of time. Sounds a bit grand, but that's the truth of it. What he provided helped sell products, and that's at the center of American life.
Very cool display!
Very cool display!
Thank you for those generous words. It's incredibly nice to have my own thoughts confirmed by someone as accomplished as yourself. Many years ago, a friend of mine met my father, and after seeing my Dad's portfolio, wanted to write an article for the AIGA. My father refused. He said, "What's the point? People claimed credit for this stuff years ago. I don't want to make waves. I know I did them." My friend was very disappointed, as there's so little known about who did this kind of stuff during this period. But, he respected my father's wishes.
As someone who enjoys graphic design, logos, commercial art & branding more than most conventional fine art I thank you for this thread. I especially like the KOOL, Wishbone dressing, Nikolai Vodka (stuff was like $5 per handle back in college). I also like seeing some of the common Pennsylvania brands like Borden and the Amish noodles. I wonder who the target Viceroy consumer was. I’ve never known anyone to smoke them and when I worked at 7-11 nobody really bought them. Anyway I hope you find more stuff to share. Old product packaging takes me down memory lane.
Filter, flavor, flip top box! - I found an old ad for Marlboro cigs, and found an odd video. It starts with an ad, but then flips to scenes (from Reefer Madness?) about how marijuana will turn you nuts, or even a murderer.
My work has had other people’s names attached to it, especially at awards time. My work might have won Clios, Emmys, and an Oscar, but others, higher on the food chain, took credit for it because they could.
There is a saying: take 100% credit and 50% blame.
I don't necessarily agree with the saying, but have seen others abide by it whether it was their personal constitution or not.
I don't necessarily agree with the saying, but have seen others abide by it whether it was their personal constitution or not.
Thank you very much for sharing your fathers’ story and beautiful artwork. I really like the looks of that Remy Martin ad. Clearly he was an immensely talented man and I also thank him for his service in the army.