A Future That Was So Totally Pimpin’

As a child born in the early 1960s, I can remember when every print ad in National Geographic seemed to be done in this style: Painting of athletic and slim white man and woman in some otherwise impossible, wildly desirable setting, madly enjoying some consumer item that, it seems, would not be that all interesting, actually, if you, say, lived in a bleeding-edge, part-glass, woodland home cantilevered over a stream, or a couple dozen stories above a headlamp-lit New York City street.

Both are by illustrator Charles Schridde. As the awesome Paleo-Future notes, the top pic is from a Motorola television print campaign:

This series ran in Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post from 1961 until 1963 and was immensely popular for its elegant, futuristic look.

Though the Western-themed stuff Schridde seems to most paint these days does zero for me, thankfully, his work is preserved on the web, in books like Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising and The Golden Age of Advertising – the 70s. Click on the pics to see close-ups. Thanks to FFFFOUND, StrangeHarvest, Paleo-Future, and The World of Kane for the links.