Finally gotten round to the December issue of Design magazine from 1968. The beautifully illustrated cover was by Ron Hackett and illustrates the Play prototypes for under-fives article on the inside pages. Ron’s special interest, by the way, is the Boer War.

In this month’s edition is also a lovely back cover illustration for the British Poster Design Awards 1968/69, which looks very modern indeed. There are also great ads for playplax, which I remember using at primary school, and for a comfortable chair that promises to reduce ‘Executive Backache’, featuring the great British bobby.

Yet again there is also another colourful and creative ad from Windsor & Newton and an interesting spread on a classification for analysing the design of proprietorial symbols by Hans Weckerle, a Swiss typographer. This is followed by a 4 page visual article by two, at the time, recent graduates (Anthony McCall and Mike Bygrave) that presents a record of events that led up to the design student crises of 1968. I have also included a small article titled Puff of the year, a title awarded by the magazine itself to over-inflated product or design merchandising – this time it’s for the wonderful Americana chopper (or handheld vegetable chopper).

An illustration by Charlie Riddle illustrates an article on supermarket shopping that I have chosen not to include in this post (I don’t have time to scan and upload all articles, but full articles can be found here: http://www.vads.ac.uk/diad/). There is also a half page on ‘automatic headway control’, which, at the time, was a futuristic concept. Now, of course, it is something that is already in operation.