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Brown bag
Promotional mailer for Irving Werbin, 1957. (Actual) brown paper bag.
August 27, 2010

Brown bag

Tony Palladino once said this promotion for a packaging designer was one of his fondest advertising concepts. It’s an early example of his flair for finding unexpected graphic power in found objects (see also: this and this). The humble brown paper bag — one of the last things one might expect to advertise the services of a Madison Avenue designer — arrived in the prospective client’s mailbox, letterpressed simply in a gothic type that matches the object’s simplicity, but with the typographic twist of combining the name of the designer and his specialty.