Our new line of prints: Vintage Ad Follies

The first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. OK—we admit that we are addicted to vintage advertising art and travel posters. So you’d think that after studying old advertising art for decades, creating over 80 classic poster designs for our Spirit of Nashville Collection, then doing more than 50 designs for our Art & Soul of America Collection, we might have gotten tired of the stuff.

As you’ll see, we have only dug in deeper, cranking out loads of new art that looks like it was found in a dusty corner of a defunct print shop. (We put the FUNK in defunct by salvaging and recycling pieces of our older designs and giving them new life with new color palettes and themes.)

All of this has resulted in our latest series of classic prints called Vintage Ad Follies: it’s a collection of faux advertising prints for products that never actually existed—but probably would have if we were alive back in the 1940s and 50s. Some of the designs were created for special occasions—like the upcoming elections, or prints for baby showers and decorating nurseries. Others have no real reason for existing whatsoever, except for the fact that we always wanted to illustrate a poster promoting bacon, chocolate milk, or hula dancers.

 
America is going to be sick of the elections by the time they finally get here in November—so we have created some art to help everyone survive by poking fun at the whole spectacle. (We are equal-opportunity spoofsters, so we have created something for political pundits on both sides of the isle.) Here are the first 2 designs in a series that will grow with the headlines for the next several months!

The style gurus at Fab.com love our prints so much that they will feature our new poster collections 4 times this year (on Feb 23rd, May 17th, August 30th, and November 15th.) For each of these special sales, we will introduce new lines of prints, building on our love of hand-lettering, illustration, and adapting bits of old public domain art to create new prints with an old look and feel. This is a peek at some of the new designs we’ve just completed for the Fab.com sale.

Some of these are designs already available on our Anderson Design Group Studio Store site. Others will be for sale exclusively on Fab.com from February 23-25. Enjoy!

Our pals at Farm Boy Brands asked us to create a few more designs for their upcoming apparel collections. (They create cool stuff for folks who dig life on the farm.) We love working with them—our illustrative design is a natural fit with their vintage-Americana style.

The process works like this: their art director sends us a list of phrases and shirt colors. We sketch up rough ideas. Once they sign off on our sketches, we roll up our sleeves and fine-tune the designs to reproduce in 3 to 5 solid ink colors for screen printing or stitched designs on t-shirts, pillow cases, hats, etc. The hat shown above is a spin-off from a best-selling shirt Ligia designed last year.

Andy sketched up this concept for the Sunride Sunset shirt. With a simple color change, this design went from a rugged dude shirt to a sassy chick-tee!

Ligia got her hands dirty creating two design options for the Get Your Dirt On shirt. While both options were very cool, the simpler, cleaner design won out in the end.

Here are two more shirt designs we did for the 2012 catalog. All of these designs will be featured in the Farm Boy Brands Spring/Summer 2012 Collection and Fall/Winter 2012 Collection.

Check out all the fabulous Farm Boy/Farm Girl designs at their official web site!