Some "blast from the past" eye candy from some of the most famous manufacturers and products from yesterday and today. If you work in enterprise manufacturing, your company or competition is likely on this list -- and products you consume/use surely are.
Also of note are some of the excellent taglines -- for instance, a promotional match book for Sprite describes it as: Tart & Tingling -- Taste It! (My tagline for that tagline is, "all sorts of awesome".)
Some are striking; others, strange. The Mountain Dew logo seems to depict a murder scene playing out at a country outhouse, making me wonder if there's an origin story that could be uncovered through some sort of forensic branding exercise. CSI: Madison Avenue, anyone?
"Mad Men", indeed.
Regardless of the branding back story, ad shops and visual designers of today would be well-advised to take a tour through the history, for style points alone. And packaging designers could definitely take a few cues from the Listerine bottle below, which would look just as at home on the top shelf of my local bar as it would the top shelf of my medicine chest.
While the consumer packaged goods companies impressed, the same is not quite as true for original technology company logos (included on this helpfully-titled link from Gizmodo "The original logos of tech companies were all terrible.")
Warning to Applefans: throw out everything you thought you knew about Apple's vaunted ubersimple design aesthetic, as evidenced by the crazy, sash-wrapped woodcut of Isaac Newton pictured below.
