Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

I’m such a book junkie.

There’s a new one out for all you kitsch-mavens, advertising art gurus, and mid-20th-century style hounds. Warren Dotz and designer Masud Husain have just released Ad Boy: Vintage Advertising With Character, a compendium of cool brand identities culled from what must be a spectacular collection of ephemera. Although it is a followup to his previous book Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertising Character, Warren says this one is quite different. Although I haven’t yet got my hands on a real live copy, there is a preview available on Amazon. The table of contents shows the book is arranged by subject matter: Mechanical Men, Scottish Plaid, Genies, etc.

I asked Warren if he had information on the creators of all these mascots, but he said it’s so hard to trace that he doubts if he has even 10% of the designers’ names. If any of you old retired illustrators and designers are the culprits and you read this blog – gee, a lot of us advertising and illustration historians would sure like to know who did what and when!

Today Jon Hicks posted some sketches and early prototypes of the icons he designed for Linotype’s FontExplorer app.

Also worth checking out are the similar posts he has written about designing the icons for Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird.

Germany’s Iconwerk create some very slick, and quite legible, pieces of icon design. Simplifying images down to their most basic essence can be a tricky task, and the folks at Iconwerk are no slouches.

(via The Skinny)