Smoke Em
if You Got Em
There is something so striking about seeing cigarette ads from the past, especially as a younger person who was never alive to see smoking advertised out in public. Tobacco is a product that has been grown and used in the Americas for as long as humans have lived there. By the time this product had begun to be advertised, it was always sold as a product of Americana. It was more than just a drug but was the culture of the nation.
This book takes a look at tobacco advertising from its beginning to its ending when it was banned. I had a fun time researching this project, from researching, playing with this found imagery, and then even binding it together.
Research
The research not only included reading up on tobacco history and how it was advertised, but also looking through countless old advertisements to find imagery I could use.
Spreads
Every spread is a different period that had its own unique look and idea behind it. All of the imagery used is from an old advertisement that was edited and tweaked to make the whole spread feel like an ad that tells a story.
At first, the simplest of ads were just printed text with little imagery and here I tried to make it look like a printed newspaper ad, with a slight overlay of text behind.
I certainly struggled with poor-quality images throughout this project, but through experimentation, I was able to get the files much cleaner looking.
