Book of the Month – November

Rewind: Forty Years of Design and Advertising by Jeremy Myerson and Graham Vickers
Chosen by Jeff Edis

This book of the month is so much more than a book. It’s an amazing 511-page retrospective of ‘Forty Years of Advertising and Design’. The brainchild of Michael Johnson, founder of Johnson Banks branding and design consultancy, it contains all that is awesome and inspiring in advertising and design from the ‘Swinging Sixties’ to the early 2000s. All of the true game changers and creative landmarks are in this wonderful compendium.

Although we see the embryonic beginnings of new ways of communicating and persuading in the 1960s, it’s in the 1970s that we truly discover the coming together of strong ideas and images that demand attention. There is no better example than the ‘pregnant man’ ad produced for the Health Education Council. It offered definitive proof, that as long as the central idea is truly unique, with the ability to stop the reader in their tracks, there is no need for shocking realism or quirky photographic trickery. All that was needed was a cushion stuffed up a man’s jumper and a headline that was as convincing as it was preposterous. The ad was produced by the unknown start up Cramer Saatchi, soon to become Saatchi and Saatchi, an agency that changed the face of advertising and swept all before it. For any practitioner or student of advertising and design, this publication is an absolute must.