Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Outdoor advertising is one of the oldest and purest forms of communication. Until now, however, it has remained largely undocumented. Advertising Outdoors looks at the creative ingenuity of art directors and copywriters who devise the artwork and ideas for outdoor advertising, to explore how their artistic input drives an industry that supplies large-scale frames, billboards, transit shelters, bus sides, taxis, airships and many other locations. David Bernstein also analyses the rise of commercial art and the development of advertising, with close reference to successful advertising campaigns.

This book will be of enormous interest to designers, advertising professionals and clients, though no less accessible to any reader who is intrigued by the complex mechanics of the apparently simple world of advertising.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Booklist Review

Our cityscapes and highways are punctuated by billboards' big, splashy images and clever messages designed to sell everything from underwear to cigarettes, milk to athletic wear. Outdoor advertising has become a tradition, and Bernstein surveys this commercial art form from the late nineteenth century on in this colorful, high-energy volume. Being British, his focus is continental, but the U.S. naturally makes a strong showing, and the contrast in transatlantic styles is instructive. Bernstein's earliest examples include the brilliant illustrations and posters of artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha (see boxed review, p.761), who instigated a taste for strongly graphic compositions in outdoor advertising that lasted well into the 1930s and 1940s before the camera finally replaced the artist's hand as the primary medium. Many intriguing trends are traceable both in Bernstein's expert commentary and in contemplating the visual and linguistic puns of contemporary billboards, as images and words compete boisterously for our attention, and styles range from the elegant and soothing to the confrontational and provocative. --Donna Seaman