by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)
THESE little spot ads for movies (generally referred to as ‘admats’) are possibly the most overlooked and ignored chapter in american graphic design. but, they’re probably maybe the single most important arena of american design thinking of the last century. they employed thousands of unknown artists, supported their larger work load, were also the primary entry point for thousands more amateur artists and non-artists into the field. most importantly, they were likely the single most influential and inspiring visible venue of design thinking and training maybe ever. how many people started out ‘designing’ things based on their familiarity with this most commonplace sort of pictoral design?
AC:an old friend of mine used to be the 'marketing director' for one of the seattle area theater chains. his job was to lay out the admats for every day's newspaper adverts. so, he was in admat hell. everybody was on his ass all the time to do it THEIR way of all sorts of dumb reasons. for instance, when he was working on layouts for "the shining" ads to go inot the seattle times and seattle PI, stanley kubrick would call him up PERSONALLY every single day to tell him how to lay out the little admat - EVERY DAY FOR WEEKS. it was insane. some of these guys were complete control freaks.
admats were created originally to simply advertise movies in the newspapers. ideally, the studio would send out to theaters formatted flyers with many of these little cuts already laid out and designed into a formatted image (with blank space to drop in date/time/place). these stock adverts were created by professional staff designers culled form the signpainting world. that’s why they have such great lettering. i’ve seen photos of sign shops where there were maybe 100 artists working diligently on posters and showcards and admats to send out to theaters. it was a literal machine of handwork all done by seasoned professional signmakers that originally produced this stuff.
as time went on and movie making exploded, there emerged a much less organized version of the admat. they were executed by freelancers and ‘artists’ who had little or no training in the field and simply aped what the standard ‘look’ that they grew up seeing in the adverts in the paper. horror movies looked a certain way, so did historical epics and so did romances. western movie ads all looked like westerns, too. it was the first rumblings of branding and targeted marketing. graphic standards were unconsciously established and then met.
of course, when the theater owners got the admats, they often had their own ‘artists’ (often just a secretary of even the theater owner himself). the owner would buy an ad space in the local paper and quickly cut and paste up the supplied elements into the odd spaces they purchased (often they simply just let the newspaper staff do it for them.) in essence, they became designers themselves – often horrific designers. a whole new standard of lowball branding emerged – the crude huckstering promotional hack who simply filled space with as much crap as he could (to ‘get his money’s worth’). this, in turn became a style unto itself. think: drive-in movies. these crummy DIY adverts were every bit as influential to the newly forming graphic design world as the professionally rendered work. maybe even more influential, actually. it denoted an ‘anyone can do it’ approach to visual language of advertising unlike anybody had encountered before. and it was EXTREMELY effective.
these crappy little admats and ad cuts became the clip art influence of excellence for several generations of graphic design. we all unconsciously attended the ‘movie admat school of hard knocks’ in our infancy. for instance, we all now know what a horror movie looks like at a glance. we learned to speak the language of sensation and shock and attention-grabbing by looking at these crappy (but effective) admats from the movie biz. nothing is so american as this sort of thinking. the rest of the world simply followed our lead by example as well.
in the the history of graphic design and advertising, the importance of this movie admat aesthetic and dialog has been shunned as lowbrow crap. however, i want to point out that nobody ignored it. EVERYBODY learned this language. you can’t look at any sort of advertising in any medium and not distinctly spot it’s impact. and the best part is that we all learned it so well that we can all do it, too.
perhaps that’s why graphic design academic history embraces european graphic design thinking so exclusively (and so equally as profoundly ignore our own home grown influences). we emulate the “good taste” of european design as a the ONLY worthy solution to this language. but, the rabble (aka – the rest of us) know this language so well that we instinctively reach for it every time we tackle a piece of visual art.
all of this work is anonymous and essentially authorless. but the actual artists who created this work may be the most profoundly powerful and influential practitioners of graphic design in history.
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