JKR

Google have made every page of every issue of Life magazine, from the mid-thirties to early seventies, available online, advertising included. You can scroll through or use the search tool to navigate by topic. It’s quite something, and a great design resource. Here though, are the covers for the corresponding week in September, taken at broadly five year intervals, from the collection. There is no doubt that Life is a classic brand, but it’s interesting how over time more and more information and clutter seep onto the cover – all, I’m sure, for sound commercial reasons, but all to the dilution of the brand’s strength and evidence of a depleting confidence in allowing images to speak for themselves.

And below is the inside front cover advertising from the same issues, which show surprisingly little change from the thirties, through the Mad Men era, and into the seventies. Long copy broadly ruled the day. To come up to date, one might hypothesise that as magazine design became more cluttered, advertising simplified to cut through the noise.

On the subject of ads, below are two early gems thrown up with the keyword “packaging” which show that even this humble subject was once the stuff of breathless copy celebrating innovations of tomorrow…