[quote]Advertising without posters is like fishing without worms.[/quote]I love this ad by Target for their line of old wood type inspired designs and vintage styled casual wear. I’m a huge fan of wood type, and love to create lino-block and wood type letterpress prints. Target actually teamed up with the folks at the Hamilton Wood Type museum to create the Vintage Varsity collection.
Target does such a fantastic job of connecting with their audience, always landing on exactly the right slope of the trend curve. In this case, the popularity of letterpress and vintage type can be found everywhere, even in a digital world… case in point, the letterpress iPad app which allows users to experience some of the pleasure and challenges of typesetting by hand. And by “some of the challenges,” I really mean none of the challenges, since you don’t really need to worry about things like not tightening your furniture enough and having all your letters fall out when you pick up your chase to put it on press, and you don’t need to be able to read upside down and backwards.
If you love the look of wood type prints, check out this video about The Hatch Show Print studio. I’ve watched it over and over again – I think partly because I love listening to Jim Sherraden’s voice. The work is beautiful too.
Post Script
This weekend I took a little adventure road trip to Bellingham with a girlfriend – the mission? Some decent Mexican food, and of course a shopping expedition to Target to get a Hamilton Wood Type Museum t-shirt. For a featured collection, it wasn’t well promoted in-store. Also, the design of the collection struck me as odd as well – incongruous colour combinations – too much beige! I’m really happy with the shirt I got though.
Thanks to the miracle of smart-phones and internet technology, we found a great Mexican restaurant that we probably would have walked right past except that it had 4.5/5 stars on Yelp! Moral? Never judge a restaurant by it’s plastic tablecloths, and always leverage the power of mobile marketing.
