The first honest car commercial

People who buy cars based on commercials are the biggest suckers of all.

I'm sorry, but someone had to tell you.

You bought sizzle. You bought the illusion that:

• your car will somehow create a new empty lane — hell, your own freeway overpass — by which you can speed away from life's eternal traffic jam
• every coastal highway will empty completely, so you can hug the hairpin turns at high speed while the ocean sparkles for you alone
• similarly, every city is glass and gleaming and completely empty, while your car glides along its sheening streets, every pane reflecting city lights, to the one place where everyone is — a swank nightclub
• your car pulses with power and can turn any highway into Le Mans, which is the biggest lie of all: Any car lets you race dangerously along our streets and byways. The commercials leave out whether you should
• your car can fly
• you drive more safely, with devices that let you see cars and objects behind you, or the car beeps on approaching cars, or will brake for you if you get too close to a car in front of you or bring you back into your lane if you drift — which makes me wonder if you should be driving at all if that's what it takes to safely convey you
• you need an enormous truck — damn the gas bill! — to pull your Enormous Boat up the Steep Mountain Grade and Haul Stuff, even though you don't have a boat or haul all that much stuff, it turns out
• getting this car makes you cool, either because a sports figure says so, or an animated stuffed monkey mocks you if you don't drive the cool car in the coolest possible way, or your car rises out of the ocean to escort you to a tropical beach party

Shame on you!

Finally comes the first honest car commercial. You might have missed it. Built on ephemera, car advertising must constantly move onto the next message before the structure of the last commercial collapses and your attention wanes.

This one should have stuck around longer. Watch and see why.

Sure, it still perpetuates the classic car illusion, suggesting in an irrelevant fantasy setting that drivers can race along the city streets like stunt drivers (by the way, if the commercial warns at the bottom, in teensy type, "Professional drivers on closed roads. Do not attempt," you are being sold a pipe dream). But it contains the truth I've never seen in any other commercial — the real reason people want a new car, especially one like this.

To screw the other guy (or girl).

"While others go in circles … and repeat themselves," the narrator intones as similarly silver BMW, Mercedes Benz and Audi cars chase each other on a vast dry lake bed, "we choose to carve our own path in the pursuit of exhiliration."

The Lexus — the better car, driven by a better person, even though the car is the exact color of the others and indistinguishable at high speed — races into the center of the circle, cutting off one of the cars to get in.

Let me repeat that: Cutting off one of the cars.

"The 306-horsepower Lexus GS," the narrator finishes, practically panting, "Experience the next level of performance! And there's no going back!"

The Lexus skids to a sharp left turn inside the circle and races out of it — cutting off one another of the cars.

The last shot, from overhead, reveals that the cars have together carved the Lexus logo into the desert dust.

At last, something real, authentically applied: A new car can truly make you superior. As such, your place in a lane is more necessary, your destination more important, your presence more notable.

You may not be able to race like a stunt driver on surface streets (peculiar phrase, by the way), at least not for long distances, because everyone else drives at the speed limit and eventually you have to too. But you have unlimited chances to cut off people at the last moment and roar away — until you again meet up with law-abiding citizen drivers. And you take those chances, time and again.

Your car is your permission. Your ordination. The rest of us understand, shouting huzzahs in the confines of our car, "Typical *%&##@ (fill in the name of the car)!"

We know you by the one special feature that marks your ascent, no matter your brand or the color you chose — patented virulent anti-turn signal™® technology.

My Medici, Part II: And a little pink dog shall lead them

Jay Ward and Rocky & Bullwinkle might have inspired this bit of nonsense.

Microscopically speaking, Greg Archer has been to me what the Medici family was to Michelangelo, a great patron making his art possible.

Microscopic in scale, not in passion. Michelangelo had tour bus-sized blocks of Carrara marble; I had 4 1/2- by 6-inch glossy cardstock.

{Maybe a better analogy — though still grossly out of scale — would be Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, and the Westvaco paper company (now Mead Westvaco), and the role those companies played in advancing American graphic design in the middle of the 20th Century.} 

Greg Archer,
wearing the
cyclists' cap I
got to design.

Greg's role as patron was the same as those giants: "Here is your design playground. Have fun!"

One difference: "Oh, and take the dog with you."

Greg needed a regular flow of printed marketing materials to alert bicycle enthusiasts to his shop, The Rest Stop, on a shady street near downtown Sacramento. And he wanted to amass a collection of useful textiles tying The Rest Stop to customers' daily lives. Sacramento is a bicyclists' city with its own amazing playground, a paved trail that snakes more than 30 miles from the Sacramento River up along the banks of the American River toward Folsom Lake and beyond.

The penny-farthing and the controversial image of an early bicycle design, attributed
to Leonardo da Vinci student Gian Giacomo Caprotti (or a complete hoax), make
appearances as secondary characters.

From the beginning, Greg gave me wide flexibility in designing his promotions. The one constant: each had to include a pink dog, the mascot Greg inherited when he bought the shop from Larry and Yvonne Robinson.

I don't know if the dog has a name or who created it (if you have information, you'd feature prominently in a future blog post!) It's bright pink, and its bug eyes remind me of the logo for the Mooneyes speed-performance car parts company I knew from childhood (as the world's worst builder of Revell model hot rods, even of the SnapTite® kind).

Though likely created in the early 1980s, the dog has an earlier feel, as if a stray from underground comics or psychedelic rock posters. I love that it has nothing to do with bicycles or bicycle parts, and would love to know its genesis.

Tiny and unassuming, the dog was nonetheless the 800-pound gorilla of every design, innocently but relentlessly imposing itself. Rather than grouse about it, I had to decide early how to incorporate it creatively. So I rebuilt it digitally in order to dismember and manipulate it.

A cardinal tenet of graphic design is that a business logotype is — usually — sacrosanct, with strict rules about its use, size, placement, color, typeface, and association with other logos should they appear together in the same promotional material. All for good reason: Brand identity is the most powerful and succinct public face of an entity, and deviations can send off or conflicting messages.

One of my favorites, inspired by owning a real dog
(not pink) and bearing witness to her desires
and capabilities.

My son, with many design opportunities already, notes that the design dictates BMW automobiles imposes on its logo use and placement offers no flexibility for alternative designs for a dealership campaign he worked on. Choose any BMW website and you'll see the same gray banner and precise placement of the circular checkered blue-and-white car medallion. 

Greg liked breaking that tenet. Though the dog's presence was paramount, no fences were built around where it was and what it did. Even the carefully drafted typographic treatment for The Rest Stop could be manipulated.

As a result, the dog became hero and jester in promotions, a silent Teller (and customers were Penn Jillette), for no reason more important than sending the message: This is a business for and about fun; come on in, visit.

Sacramento opens the city to an arts celebration
the second Saturday of the month. Though off
the usual circuit, The Rest Stop did its part
with bicycle-related artwork — and this
Lichtensteiny thing.

Market forces, including Internet sales, compelled Greg to close The Rest Stop. He re-emerged with Archer Bicycle Repair, for which I was fortunate to design logos.

Though our business relationship grew to include design for a jujitsu program Greg helped teach, and by extension his business partner's jujitsu camp, The Rest Stop's closure spelled the end of design laboratory, to experiment for public scrutiny. And Greg had more ideas than market forces allowed; but that's another blog post to come.

Here are some of the many promotions I got to help with:

Another favorite: When I felt confident that
The Rest Stop's customers would need only to see
the dog to know for whom the bicycle bell tolls.

Dog, just hanging out, atop the bicycle that da Vinci's student may have invented
but probably didn't. Don't let facts get in the way of a picture opportunity.

To know art is to mock it gently …

All good things having to come to an end, it seemed fitting that the last things customers would see were the searing, earnest eyes of the faithful, put-upon pink dog.