Designing to persuade, guide and be remembered: advertising from print to the web

Design as mediation

The history of advertising design is not simply a succession of styles. It is also a history of how messages are organized to circulate among businesses, institutions and audiences. A poster, a television commercial and a website create different conditions for reading, but they involve fundamental choices in common: what information to emphasize, how to establish a hierarchy, and what relationship to build between words and images.

The experience of Chile offers a concrete context for examining this mediating role. According to Chile’s National Library, graphic practices in the first half of the twentieth century developed across publishing, typography, posters, illustration, corporate imagery and advertising. Photography, type and illustration were used to compose a range of materials—from logos and leaflets to magazines and exhibition stands—and to connect producers with consumers. By the late 1960s, the establishment of design schools and the institutionalization of the discipline helped turn these practices into an autonomous profession.

That history also makes it difficult to reduce design to decoration. In a mass culture, manufacturers, publishers and service providers needed to inform people about products and new offerings; design coordinated visual resources to communicate across different formats. Form was not a neutral addition: it affected what people saw first, what they could understand and what they were likely to remember.

From product features to a place in the mind

Advertising practitioner Juan Galera offers a broad periodization of twentieth-century advertising. For the 1950s and 1960s, he describes an emphasis on product features and benefits, alongside techniques such as the unique selling proposition and testimonial advertising. In the 1960s, he argues, image and creativity gained prominence: persuasion could rely less on listing attributes and more on a visual or emotional idea capable of distinguishing a brand.

Volkswagen’s «Think small» campaign, which Galera cites as an example, helps examine this shift without turning it into a formula. Its interest is not simply that it may now look old-fashioned. The important questions are how each choice serves the communication: what the tone contributes, how attention is directed, and how the work creates a recognizable difference for its audience. The idea of positioning, which Galera associates with the 1970s, also shifts attention to the place a product occupies in consumers’ minds relative to its competitors.

These categories are tools for interpreting tendencies, not rules that describe every campaign from a decade. Objectives, media and audiences varied, and rational arguments, humor, testimonials and visual devices could be combined. That is precisely why calling a piece «retro» says little about how it was conceived or what it did: analysis must return to its message and context.

An identity that works across formats

The visual program for the 1972 Munich Olympics, developed under Otl Aicher’s direction, shows how design can operate as a system. Rather than creating a poster in isolation, the work brought together grids, colors, pictograms and printed materials so that different elements—including signs and communication pieces—could be recognized as parts of one identity.

The distinction between an individual piece and a system is practical. A campaign or institution needs to maintain continuity as its format and point of contact with the public change. Repetition, legibility and consistency help sustain that continuity; they do not require every element to be identical, but allow variations to remain recognizable. Visual identity therefore extends beyond a logo: it includes the decisions and rules that organize communication as a whole.

Graphic systems can also serve public information and wayfinding. Pictograms, for instance, can communicate directions to people who do not share a written language. In such cases, clarity is not merely an aesthetic quality; it is part of the design’s purpose and its ability to make an environment legible.

From the analog studio to the screen

Computerization transformed graphic production, but the change was gradual and did not make earlier questions obsolete. A general history of graphic design describes desktop publishing as a gradual shift from analog procedures to digital ones; the growth of the web added a medium in which information had to be organized and presented on pages and, eventually, in interactive environments.

From the industry’s perspective, Gràffica highlights the 1998 iMac as a practical milestone for small studios: it brought together in an accessible environment tools that could previously require more equipment and resources. The publication also identifies FontLab 3 for Mac, released in 1998, as part of the changes in access to typeface creation. These examples help show how technology affected workflows without crediting a single machine or program with inventing digital design or making the profession automatically accessible to everyone.

The screen changed the conditions of production and reading, but it did not remove the need for clarity, hierarchy and legibility. In print, a composition must work on a fixed surface; on the web, information must also be organized within a page and suited to the medium’s possibilities. The channel changes the constraints and opportunities, not the need to consider who the design is for and what it needs to communicate.

How to compare advertising across periods

Historical comparison is most useful when it begins with the problem each design sought to solve. An image can attract attention, explain a product or suggest an association. Typography can organize content, establish a tone or distinguish a voice. A graphic system can make a campaign recognizable across different formats. None of these functions can be inferred merely from a piece’s resemblance to a particular decade.

Between printed posters of the 1970s and digital communication at the end of the century, media, pace and production possibilities changed. There were continuities too: advertising design still depended on how information was ranked, how image and text related, and whether a message could be communicated clearly. Recognizing this mixture of change and persistence makes it possible to appreciate graphic decisions in context rather than treating them as a collection of nostalgic appearances.