Helmut Krone. The Book: Graphic Design and Art Direction (Concept, Form and Meaning) After Advertising's Creative Revolution [Hardcover]

"...Every art director, copywriter, planner, account person and client should read it... Clive Challis has done an excellent job.

Helmut Krone (1925-96) was a leading seditionary in the Creative Revolution (1954-64) that transformed graphic design and advertising, i.e., his campaigns for Volkswagen & Avis ("We try harder"). The book contains 800 illustrations: Krone's work, the work which influenced him, and the work his superceded. Relying on primary sources, the book incorporates Krone's portfolios, notes, and manuscripts; the records at Doyle Dane Bernbach; the contemporary trade press; and nearly 150 interviews with colleagues, competitors, and other seditionaries.
The book is conceived as the definitive primer, not only on Krone, but on the arrival of modern advertising art direction; the thinking behind it and the questions which Krone asked himself in order to provoke new meanings from design, typography and photography -- methods which continue to stimulate new and relevant solutions today. 280p. Large format: 252mm x 339mm x 30mm. ART-GRAPHIC DESIGN.

The Creative Revolution (1954-64) was essentially the tussle between design and meaning; between form, beauty and concept; between telling and receiving. In graphic design and advertising it changed everything.
Helmut Krone (1925-1996) was a leading seditionary. He started out as a graphic designer who despised advertising -- and finished up as an art director claiming to be a graphic designer, 'the only one in hard-core advertising ,' he said.
Krone shaped the two most important ad campaigns ever: for Volkswagen and the 'We try harder.' campaign for Avis. These two campaigns explored the difference between graphic design and advertising art direction -- in fact Krone's work defined modern art direction for print.
Krone's work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. He has been inducted into Art Directors' Halls of Fame from New York to Berlin.

"Krone understood that a message targeted purely at the eye lacks recall - aimed a couple of inches higher, at the brain, it sticks.

Anyone involved in design or advertising should read this." David Stuart, co author of 'A smile in the mind.' and co-founder of the design group, The Partners.
"I really enjoyed it. It's educational, instructive and most importantly, entertaining. A real tour de force.

Helmut Krone was the Godfather of modern art direction. He gave it the look, the attitude and the style that turned advertising into a smart industry.

If you really want to be a great art director then this is the one art director you have to study."
John Hegarty, founder partner Bogle Bartle Hegarty

Clive Challis worked as an advertising art director in New York and London and before that as an editorial designer on the London Sunday Times magazine.

For the past seven years he has headed the advertising course at Central Saint Martins, Europe's premier artschool. He was recently selected to teach the first Cannes Academy at the International Advertising Festival.

He lives in north London and listens to Radio 4. But has no cats.

"Ogilvy had written thirteen rules about how an ad like this should be... I gave my damnedest to break as many of these rules as possible. When Ogilvy said that the text always should be put in an antique typography, I put it in a grotesque one. When he said that the logo always should be clearly exposed, I'd hidden it.. I think I managed to break seven of his rules.' [There were 14 and Krone broke nine.]
"...Putting a full point in a headline was an act of sedition. It broke the pace and invited inspection - maybe even circumspection - of the statement. Of course this is exactly why Krone used one: he had statements to make which he wanted to be examined. Received wisdom in admaking circles was that this was antithetical to the way advertising worked..."
"...in a house ad of '72 DDB quoted its first client...: 'I got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth.' A few lines down they explained why; it was because: 'People are as smart as we are.' ...[that]thought informed the strategy, the look of the photography, the choice of the photographer, the tweaked 'classic page', the restraint of the copy, the technical-manual typeface, the openness of the body copy setting, the lack of superlatives... lack of adjectives; headlines which didn't scream.

The Volkswagen campaign changed everything in advertising."
"Concept made us. Concept killed us. In the beginning we did a fresh thing - concept advertising. But it had about it a naked look... it wore thin ,' he wrote. 'I would have put more emphasis on treatment, a little less on concept.'"
"Krone...: interrogated his products - in isolating their peculiarities he also absorbed their spirit... [account people] remarked on his dismissal of the strategy, but in the years before planners, that function, the representation of the consumer within the agency and the identification of their need lurking within the product, was often better administered by a creative person..."