Sunday, November 25, 2012

Bank Julius Baer / Art Deco brochure / 1980s


Bank Julius Baer, a private Swiss bank founded in 1890 that provides a discrete financial service to a world-wide clientele, published this interesting brochure to attract ne customers. They chose to feature some magnificent Art Deco objects that get a brief mention on the first page and captions after that.
    The twenty-four page brochure is 11.75 by 8.25 inches and printed on a good matt art paper. The reason I kept it was because of the printing. A three hundred screen was used which perfectly captures the quality of the art. The first page after the cover was printed on a very light bond to give the brochure a feel of class.

 

 
 













Saturday, November 17, 2012

House of cards / 1952



Six decades old and still available.  I recently bought a MoMA picture deck from a shopping channel at a remarkably low price.  Charles and Ray Eames designed two decks in 1952: a pattern and picture deck, both had fifty-four cards.  The pattern version seems to have fallen out of favor in recent times, though I bought a mixed deck in the early sixties (twenty-five pattern and twenty-eight pictures plus one title card). 
    The book Eames design (the best title I've read about the design duo and still available, check out Amazon) had some pages devoted to the cards and two fold-out pages that displayed them all (below).  The picture deck featured “familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms”. 
    Tigrett Enterprises, in Chicago, originally handled the distribution and marketing, the MoMA set I bought was made by the German company Ravensburger.   In 1960 Swissair issued some cards for children to play with on their flights, you can see them in the September 2011 archive. 
 
 












The leaflet that came with the pack I bought in the early sixties.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Experiments in print / Daniels Printing Company

The Daniels Printing Company of Boston wanted to show how good they were and came up with these six large folders called Experiments in print, each with a sheet inside showing different printing and binding techniques.  A nice set because of the size: fourteen inches square and apart from four and six they are all worth framing.  The front of each folder describes printing or binding technique.