Helmut Krone, The Book

Book excerpt: Helmut Krone led the Creative Revolution which changed advertising. Forty years after he'd created the Volkswagen Beetle campaign it was voted `the most famous campaign ever'. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. He has been inducted into Art Directors' Halls of Fame from New York to Berlin. Before Helmut Krone advertising art direction was either `old' commercialised art or `new' graphic design. And advertising was thought of as salesmanship. His thinking led into account planning, affected marketing and changed the design of ads. Krone gave us ads which command attention, are witty, understated and demand complicity to decode. He questioned all of advertising's formal devices: logotypes, headlines, body-copy and studio photography. He explored the tensions between the meanings of words and the meaning of images - still the way modern advertising gets us to realise new thoughts. The book shows nearly all of Krone's print work: graphic designs which modernised advertising and art direction - and changed graphic design.