Wear it With Pride has just opened up a new exhibit that I swear is custom-made for me. Showing earlier this year in London and just opened in Barcelona, Now Showing displays the work of several designers comissioned to create new posters for old films. The tagline for the show is “Exploring the ‘Lost Art’ of the Film Poster.” While I don’t think the film poster as ‘art’ was never really lost in the first place (commercially there’s been a decline, but there were plenty of bad film posters way back when, too), the title is really a play on words, as though these new works are somehow lost posters only just rediscovered.

It turns out having fun with the previously known images that surround old films really inspired these designers, as some of the work is really damn good–either paying homage to various design periods in time, or using completely contemporary methods to re-present the film in an entirely new mode. These aren’t your traditional film posters, full of little credits, following a reasonably consistent set of guidelines set-up to market a film. This is work done by contemporary artists who know their films–a company like Criterion couldn’t go wrong in licensing some of this stuff if they’re releasing any of the featured films in the future.

Check out this Five Easy Pieces poster as an example. The title of the film is a reference to Jack Nicholson’s unchosen career as a pianist, and his giving up of an upper crust, artistic direction in life in exchange for a conscious embrace of the working class American world of menial jobs, cheap diners and bowling alleys. The brilliant thing is that the poster evokes the very records Nicholson’s character would have been listening to as a child, back when he prepared his “five easy pieces” for a (unseen in the film) recital. Take a look at the recently released and quite excellent Classique for an idea of a few quality classical music LP covers, and then look at the poster again. It’s clearly done by someone who knows and loves the film enough to put that level of work into it.

My other favourite is this poster of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Not only is it one of the best films ever made, but the Italian film posters of the 1950s and 60s are some of the best examples of the form, anywhere. Redoing any of them is a tall order, and artist Fons Schiedon does a killer job here. Conceptually smart and beautiful to look at, it’s one of the best on display.

Metropolis, Rear Window, The Birds, and Planet of the Apes also get amazing treatments. Prints are for sale here, and the show is playing at Vallery, in Barcelona, through November 1.

My vintage product design obsession shows no signs of lessening, and as though it knows what I want, flickr continues to scheme away, providing me with a horribly infinite well of images. While the “pools” or “groups” are so big as to be daunting, with categories like “vintage illustration” having something like 10,000 potentially day-destroying items in them, people’s individual sets are far more digestible and can–at times–be favourable to your fledgling attempts at time management.

There are hundreds of these things floating around flickr, but these are the five (plus one extra) I’ve found most enjoyable; I find myself returning to a few of them several times over and saving various jpegs into my “put these on a t-shirt one day” folder, an 8-year project that has produced exactly zero shirts. One day, I swear to you…

5. Vintage Transistor Radios

This guy has about a billion different transistor radios, radio boxes, radio rooms, and other radio things on here, sorted by brand, country, type, etc. My favorite are all these ones with the round, oversized speaker grills, which look incredible.

4. Polish Matchbooks

At a market in Brussels I once tried to buy an entire box of old Belgian and French matchbooks, but the guy was asking something like 20 euros for about 200 of them. There were so many, I couldn’t make the necessary evaluation as to whether or not it was worth the price–I just kept looking at various packages and trying to decide if, alltogether, they added up to something worth 20 euros. Probably.

3. Old I.D. Badges

Thanks to bad banana blog for this one. I found an old Belgian ID card at that same Brussels antique market, and it’s still kicking around. I’d love a few of these, though–badges are just way better. Can we get back to these, and away from ID cards? I know it’s completely cost-prohibitive, but come on. Imagine if we all carried individual little badges for every organization we belonged to, all wonderfully designed with our austere, serious-looking photos inside. I suppose our pockets would be prohibitively heavy, though. There goes that idea. Wallets and ID cards it is, then.

2. Typewriter Ribbon Collection

Thanks to Rosencrans Baldwin for pointing this one out. As he said, if only today’s inkjet-cartridge package designers would think of posterity.

There is plenty of great packaging being made today (check out www.thedieline.com if you don’t believe me), but the ridiculous cavalcade of solid, craftsmanship packaging that once existed is a lost art. Shelf packaging was one of the primary concerns for a product’s viability, back when 70% of the marketing outlets of today didn’t exist, and it was just plain necessary to put some work and thought into it. There are also industrial reasons for the posterity: plastic packaging wasn’t prevalent in the slightest, so the nature of the materials used lent itself to being designed upon. It’s not easy to spend money on a beautifully done piece of clear plastic today, when your customers are just going to cut into the thing with a pair of scissors anyway.

1. Society in Decline; Intrastate Commerce

Not products, but street signs, this set recently got some notice on various blogs. I’m assuming the guy’s username (also called society in decline) is expressing his need to document these pieces of signage that are disappearing from the American landscape. I’m inclined to agree with him: as much as 1950s motel signs are trashy, overly kitsch, or just plain bad, anything beats a boring franchise sign you’ve seen 4,000 times before.

(and an extra): Bottle Caps

It’s not just because I enjoy various bottled beverages that these are awesome, although that does affect my judgement a little bit.

It was only yesterday when Olympus went ahead and released a new concept camera, capturing some semi-classic styling in a new format called micro four thirds. This new format is a conscious attempt to return to the old SLR types popularized by cameras like the Canon AE-1–it’s an entirely different approach for digital SLRs that shies away from the big bodies popularized by most cameras, but still allows for interchangeable lenses.

With that in mind, I decided to round up some examples of modern digital cameras that are beautifully designed, but keep to the best traditions of classic camera bodies. This has been a definite trend of late, with manufacturers realizing that the same old grey-rectangle isn’t how it always has to be when it comes to a digital camera.

Why get stuck in the exact same manufacturing ghetto when there’s a huge tradition to draw upon? With big thanks to the invaluable Retro to Go website for their tireless mentions of many amazing products, let’s run down the list:

5. Olympus Micro Four Thirds (Concept)

This is only a mockup of the aforementioned Olympus, but I hope it comes to market in something like this form. It’s a different direction for the digital SLR, and stands out from the rest of the classic bodies we’ve seen on the other cameras today. Obviously it needs some polishing, but here’s hoping the general idea gets retained.

4. Leica C-LUX 3

And the parade of Leicas beings. Here’s their attempt to inject clean lines and classic design into what is otherwise a basic, contemporary digital camera design. It doesn’t look so far off from some of the cameras you might find in a big-box superstore, but the subtle detailing makes all the difference.

3. Leica D-LUX 4

A wonderful metal body and a ridiculous level of simplicity make this look miles away from most digital cameras you’ve seen before. Wonderfully done.

2. Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF 5.0

Yes! A redesign of the famous Rolleiflex top-down camera design that started all the way back in 1929. You use a crank (purely aesthetic, this part) and look down at this camera from above. This remake is actually done by a Japanese manufacturer who has reproduced the original Rolleiflex design in miniature (the originals are insanely popular in Japan).

1. Leica M8 and M8.2

Yeah, these are new digital cameras. Leica has a massive, half-insane following around the world, and online you can find no shortage of endless diatribes that debate the exact differences between two limited-run lenses from the 1960s that only seventeen people have tried. Every artistic realm has its hardcore subculture full of passionate devotees, and what Steinway is to pianists and B&W is to audiophiles, Leica is to photographers. These two cameras (above is the M8.2, at the top of the page is the M) pull the famous Leica M-series, first introduced in the 1950s, into the digital realm–and the incredible bodies are easily the best I’ve seen in digital cameras of this type.

If you’ve got any more examples of some fine-looking digital cameras, let us know in the comments!

A few months ago I stopped into the kind of store you can find easier in Paris than anywhere else–full of old advertising art, vintage posters, and ancient maps. Next to nothing cost under 100 euros, and if I were rich, I would decorate 20 houses with the posters I found in there. I’m not rich.

I did still manage to find some beautiful prints around Paris, though. The great thing about all the green-stalled vendors that line the Seine is the variety of their stuff; they don’t have the exact same posters and cards that their neighbour has, and a lot of it is a step above the mass-produced vintage reprints more widely available. I bought a ton of it and it’s still all over my walls.

For those of us, however, who no longer have a fast train connection to Paris, there are other ways of decorating with some of the best old illustration and cartography available. Sure, you can order about 17 billion different prints online, but the minimum cost for a poster is often above $20–a quick glance at the “Italian Maps” section of barewalls.com shows an amazing 3/4 map of Rome, and it costs $31.50. Not the end of the world, but not ridiculously cheap either.

I recently spent some time back in my native Canada, and figured that on my return to Europe I’d hit whatever old, dustry print shops I could find (there are really 17,0000 of them in every big European city) and get to decorating my new walls. I didn’t expect to find much in Ottawa, but as I was wandering around a paper shop I suddenly saw a beautiful, faux-aged vintage map of Rome. Then I saw another hundred copies of the same map below it. They were hanging over a little bar, nestled in among other big pieces of paper featuring small dogs and various forgettable patterns. The price? $3.95. I’d just found my new, cheap-as-hell decorating source: wrapping paper.

The company that makes these maps is Cavallini & Co., they have a sizeable line of them, and they’re all worth a look. Sure, it’s just gift paper and obviously not as strong as a real poster, but that’s the whole point–you can buy 4 or 5 of these for the price of a single poster. And there’s actually something about the texture and consistency of the wrapping paper that serves the vintage theme rather well.

Most of these are 20″ x 28″ sizes, which you know is just fine for your wall. There are also several selections of vintage advertising illustration, some of which I received half-wrapped around some recent books I got–my friend didn’t even tape the wrapping paper, she just hastily placed the books inside and treated the gift-wrapping as a gift in itself. It’s on my wall as a result.

You can find the Cavallini & Co. wrapping paper online here, here, or here.

And here are a few other examples of gift wrap that can easily double as posters, and cost nothing:

The French Paper Company also has a ton of quality wrapping paper that can be used for other stuff too, and Whimsy’s Dude Wrap “Paper Invaders” edition is awesome as well.

The Olympic Games are a consistent magnet for design criticism–professional and amateur alike–as seen most clearly in last summer’s messy reaction to the London 2012 logo. Personally, when speaking of an event as universal as the Olympics, I tend towards the “better a weird logo” camp than the “obviously designed by committee” one, so I found the harshness directed towards the London logo (it does have its defenders, too) far preferable to the usual collective shrug/ignorance meted out to high-profile logos like this.

Last year in Brussels I saw a great shirt with the Moscow 1980 logo on it, and I realized there’s a dearth of products out there that take advantage of the wonderful design history of the Olympic Games. Whether it’s the concentric lines of the Mexico 68 logo (the closest thing I own that’s similar is this killer shirt from iso50) or the beautiful simplicity of the Tokyo 64 logo, this is a heritage of design ripe for a wide-scale reintroduction–something likely blocked because, for legal reasons, any old designer can’t slap a classic Olympic logo on a t-shirt and start selling it.

Whether or not Colloco’s new PVC-leather Olympic Logo Bags are legal is beside the point–they’re fantastic. The aforementioned 64 and 68 designs are beautifully represented, and the Munich 72 games are rendered with the iconic sport-specific pictograms created by Otl Aicher specifically for those games (good thing, as those symbols are more enduring than the actual Olympic logo of that year, although it’s good too). There’s also a re-imagining of the Los Angeles 84 logo, and the great Moscow 80 one as well.

It’s an Olympic Year, which means it’s time to either protest, embrace, observe, or simply ignore the Beijing Games; I’m not sure which one I’ll choose for August (probably the complicated ignorance through vacation route), but should I decide, on a whim, to express my Olympic Spirit through a woman’s handbag, I’ll stick with the classics.

There are an absolute ton of online archives and digitized university collections online, from the NY Public Library to just about every university you can name. One of my favorites has been the Duke collection, which houses a manageable amount of stuff while spreading its holdings across an interesting range of categories. Sure, historical insight is always interesting, but what I’m really after are some nice, big JPEGs that really let you explore old design up-close. Part of it could be some kind of image-hoarding complex, with the idea that one day I’ll start making one-off t-shirts for myself, with all the best images I’ve found online (unlikely), but probalby it’s just because this stuff is plain rich, and speaks volumes if you give it some time and thought.

Finding a smaller university collection like Duke’s can be a goldmine for inspiration or just good old interesting stuff to see, so let’s take a look at some favorite selections.

Songbook: I’m Going Back to California

Here’s one of my favorites: American Sheet Music from the 1850s right up to the 1920s. If you want to see a concise history of American illustration (or a little history of illustrated racism), look here. Not only do you get overwhelmed with lots of old-time song titles and obscure music hall singers long since forgotten, but the art continuously attempted to match the subject matter in a myraid of interesting ways. Endlessly worthwhile.

KLM Airlines Ad, 1953

There are over 800 transportation related ads in the Duke holdings, and there’s something about seeing how the American public viewed (or was sold) the experience of travelling to Europe in the 1940s that’s endlessly evocative to me. This idea of getting on a bouncy plane and heading across the ocean to find a Spain or Italy where English was surely non-existent and American money was still worth a lot more than the local currency is fascinating, especially when beheld through the lens of advertising.

Now You’ll Like Yeast!

Another fantastic thing about old collections is the text used in promoting the products, especially medical ones. Here’s one from Duke’s “Medicine and Madison Avenue” series. Remember that Simpsons episode where Grandpa tried to figure out what was wrong with Maggie and pulled out “Dr. Washburn’s” medical book, naming off such old-timey ailments as scofula, the ‘vapors’, jugnle rot, dandy fever, poor man’s gout, the staggers, and dum-dum feveer? If you enjoyed that in any way, old medical ads can hold your interest for about 6 straight hours.

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Ad, 1915

This classic Kellogg’s advertising card is taken from Duke’s wonderful collection of advertising “ephemera“, made up of cards and inserts and hundreds of other little unmissable things that came along with standard advertising, from 1850-1920. An fount of styles and inspiration.

Photo from “The Urban Landscape”

Here’s an unidentified photo from an otherwise so/so “Urban Landscape” series I couldn’t help but include. I love it because of the overblown vignetting that obscures everything but the monument, the flag (see the full view), and whatever the protagonists of the photo are looking at off to the left. I’d surely buy this if it was artfully converted to a vector graphic and screen printed on a shirt.

Within these categories you can find some of the best old advertising, design, and illustration around. Whether you’re writing copy for an “old-fashioned” ad campaign, trying to get a retro look for a client, or simply interested in some vintage American advertising and photography, you’ll stumble upon something useful in the collection.