Sixties - Advertising, Magazines and Design Trends

In the early 60s British magazines took on a new ‘black and white’ style. Magazines such as Queen, Vogue and Nova used new techniques of photolithography to bend, twist and stretch type around pictures on the page.

A new type of magazine was the Sunday Color Supplement launched in 1962 that was sold with The Sunday Times. Three years later The Observer launched their own supplemental magazine. These supplements were devoted to making the consumer familiar to new goods, through glossy advertisements or editorial features.

Psychedelic magazines like The International Times, first published in 1966 and Oz, launched the following year, catered to the idealistic, anti-establishment counter-culture.

In the 1960s companies started producing furniture that challenged the assumptions and used new and improved materials such as injection-moulded plastics. New concepts such as card board chairs that could be thrown away, inflatable living room chairs or bean bags whose shape was molded by the sitter were introduced.

The first inflatable chair to achieve international notoriety was designed by Paolo Lamazzi, Donato d’Urbino and Jonathan de Pas for Zanotta in 1967. However inflatable furniture was already available in Denmark as early as 1961. Zanotta also produced the ‘Sacco’ chair designed by Piero Gatti, Cesare Paolino and Franco Teodoro in 1969 (prototypes had been made several years earlier). The chair was filled with millions of tiny polystyrene balls which moulded to the body. This type of chair became known as the Bean Bag.

In 1969 Allen Jones produced a chair, table and coat-stand based on girlie magazine photo’s of women in fetishist clothing and poses.

Advertising was still a growing industry in the 1960's and its full advantages had not yet been exploited. The Sixties started the age of mass-communication. US agency Doyle Dane Bernach’s "Think Small" ad for the Volkswagen Beetle in 1960 showed a new style of advertising that used stimulating images and thoughtful copy rather than the ‘hard-sell’. The late Sixties was a time of great slogans such as ‘Beanz meanz Heinz’, Esso’s (Exxon’s) ‘Put a Tiger in Your Tank’ and ‘High Speed Gas.’

Advertising could be seen on posters and in magazines and heard on radio, but the most significant post-war development and influence on advertising was television. This forced the advertising industry to reinvent new ways of selling by the use of visual and aural methods.

Not only has advertising been used to promote goods and services but also, since the early 1960's, to raise the awareness of social matters, such as anti-drug abuse campaigns. A young Charles Saatchi created a striking newspaper ad showing the tar collected in a smoker’s lungs for the Health Education Council.

Advertising is an important part of our urban civilisation because it mirrors the best and worst of our contemporary life. Focusing on a particular era of advertising gives an amazing insight into the life of that period.