Layouts for photography
As a free-lance commercial artist, my client was usually the art director of an ad agency. The ad agency’s client was the product manager of a company wanting to present and sell their product.
All of my assignments in those days were for a printed result: posters, brochures, magazines and medical journals. The medical journal ads were directed to only doctors and those in the medical field (not to the public). I never made storyboards for what has become the very repetitious tv advertising. (The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries permitting direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.)
In the 1980s and 1990s, I took directions knowing that my layouts would be a guide for choices made later by the art director and client, working with a chosen photographer. Some final printed pieces, matched my layouts. Clearly, some were quite different because of various reasons.
I have chosen, here, only my medical/pharmaceutical layouts that I illustrated for VICOM Associates and Foote Cone & Belding in San Francisco.
This first example is where the photograph preceded the layout. I was shown this photo and I rendered the image on rough black cover stock. The client was shown the layout with the bold headline and press down type, and the position of the copy block with the Abbott logo.
“The Horsehead Nebula is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion molecular cloud complex.” Wikipedia
In the small print at the bottom left, the type reads:
Newborn stars are formulated by intense ultraviolet energy radiating from older stars nearby. In the ensuing recombination of forces, the entire nebula is illuminated in a brilliant display of light. (Photo was courtesy of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.)
The art director for this job, was Mark Baldridge, who in his spare time, studied the universe!
For this ad, below, I was given the instructions of the matching headdress and jewelry. The case holding the contact lenses was not yet available to me.
The photographer and art/creative director made the decision to turn the model with a lens on her finger to created the double spread ad showing new copy, logo and the product.
These were pretty good matches of layout to print:
There were many of my layouts that left my drawing board of which I never was shown a result.
Why, all white?
Looking back, there was never an instruction to show anyone other than a caucasian.
If an ad had only one patient in the ad, the person would be white. To show otherwise, was to say the medical product was for a population that had a high incidence of a certain medical condition (such a sickle cell disease).
If an ad showed a large group of patients (for example, a doctor’s waiting room) then I had the chance to show a variety of ethnic people.
This first layout and print ad (below) were for colored contact lenses for the Barnes-Hind, Soft Mate, product page. I was not to show a younger or an older female.When the printed page was to be shown to a perspective patient, the very blue eyes were the selling point. And why do these three appear to be bare?
It is written that nearly 80% of the world’s population has brown eyes. (These contact lenses were not for them.) Since about 2014 there is a procedure for persons with dark eyes, that is deemed, dangerous. It is a surgical changing of the the color in each eye’s iris. (Eeek!)
The next layout, for Nasalide AQ, was one of the only times I could suggest a person of color
There were many more opportunities to show a doctor or a nurse, as a person of color.
Ann Thompson