Computer Love #001
Exploring the archives of 80s-90s computer ads.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on one of the greatest inventions maybe ever, The Internet Archive. More specifically, looking through pdfs on the Magazine Rack. If you’re not familiar with the Magazine Rack, it’s a bunch of digitized magazines on pretty much every subject matter you’d want to browse. It’s a great source of inspiration, and if you’re a scavenger and avid collector like me, a great place to save old drawings, magazine clippings, and other elements to repurpose for future designs.
If you’re not familiar with part of my practice, I love collecting bits of design from the past to re-contextualize into something brand new. I enjoy the challenge of blending pre-existing ideas with new ones, merging past and present. Anyway, I’ve been knee deep in the Computer magazines, hyperfixating on how computers and new technology were advertised to us when they first appeared, and how that narrative has shifted over the decades. The introduction of personal computers felt engaging and curious, all very diverse and interesting. Ads for computers now feel more minimalist and stale, with marketing campaigns being reused and copied by competitors to appeal to consumers.
Digging through magazines like Byte, 8000 Plus Magazine, and Compute, each page feels fresh, experimental, different. The language used to describe computers is always decorated with “portable”, “personal”, “versatile”, and “new” alongside flashy technicolor patterns, arranged still life photography, stylized airbrush graphics and sci-fi backdrops to remind you that the future is here. Some favorites below:
I also love finding examples of artwork made on the digital softwares they’re advertising. Oftentimes I’ll see graphics designed in these programs aiding in the ads themselves, showing off it’s capabilities for improving the productivity of an artist’s work process. As tech companies continued to push personal computers and new gadgets, the selling point became about saving time.
Including some cool artwork below, I see this style of early computer graphics illustrations making a resurgence in the art world often. There is something very sincere and playful about them that I think we’ve all grown to embrace, hence our desperation to revisit this style.
Here are some early versions of Adobe programs if you’re curious
I found this crazy ad for a program that claims to improve poster design and wanted to share it (despite the weird “girl takes off glasses and suddenly she’s hotter” trope). A lot of these programs seem to thrive on advertising what they see as efficiency — focusing on providing pre-designed templates, fonts, effects, and assets you can choose from in an archive. The “after” poster clearly reflecting a range of the new graphic design that can be enhanced by new and improved software, with it’s skewed type, maximalist composition, and geometric computer generated patterns. All of these things have what I would consider a “computer’s touch”. This digital fingerprint becomes the core DNA of all computer generated artwork to follow, using our new tools unapologetically and playfully.
Here are some other misc. clippings I’ve collected of design I’ve enjoyed while digging around in these magazines. I’ve saved many of these so I could track down which fonts they were using.
I do miss this era of art & design exploration (clearly), and think we need to get back to making unapologetically fun and colorful artwork. Luckily we are starting to see that with design trends picking up on nostalgia and retro type, revisiting parts of the past while combining it with the new. As a big supporter of anti-design, this is what I find so appealing about the introduction of New Wave music and artwork that picked up in the late 70s-80s (but that’s for another time, we don’t have to get into that now). Design is too serious!! Be fun!!! Make ugly things!!
Anyway, naturally this love for seeking out all things computer related led me back to Pinterest. I found myself in a wormhole of digital airbrushed artwork and seemingly limitless photographs of anonymous people with no context of when or why the photographs were taken.
A while ago I discovered and bookmarked this article on Yugoslavian Computer Magazine Cover Girls of the 80s-90s. The content of the magazines themselves are like the ones on Magazine Rack, nothing fancy or extremely exciting about the text on the inside. The visuals, however, are a different story — the covers gracing us with women posing with keyboards and computer monitors. Very cool!
Going to sign off this email with a playlist of electronic/minimal wave songs dedicated to computers and all things digital technology, enjoy! Thanks for reading!
