Scanning Around with Gene: Dinner Time Is TV Time
The political conventions, upcoming debates, and election season means spending more time in front of the television, often around dinner time. I’m a plate-on-the-lap…
Scanning Around with Gene
Gene Gable combs through his extensive personal collection of vintage magazines, trade catalogs, old instruction manuals, product brochures, promotional pamphlets, and advertisements to bring this collection of ephemera and design...
Scanning Around With Gene was a long-running, popular weekly column on CreativePro.com written by designer and collector Gene Gable.
We have also collected a number of these great articles in the book Scanning Around with Gene, Volume 1: The Graphic Arts — a free downloadable for CreativePro members.
Scanning Around with Gene: The Best Type Book with No Typesetting
I rarely feature any single work here at Scanning Around with Gene for fear it could easily turn into a weekly book review. But…
Scanning Around with Gene: Three Cheers for Good Old Dad!
A recent visit to my childhood home, where my 89-year-old mother still rules the roost, resulted in the discovery of a small envelope of…
Scanning Around With Gene: The Almost-Lost Art of Decal Printing
If all my dreams came true and I had unlimited time and funding, I’d spend a good deal of it prowling around Chicago visiting…
Scanning Around With Gene: You Meet the Nicest People on the Train
While old movies taught me that train travel was romantic back in the day, I thought modern train travel was akin to riding a…
Scanning Around With Gene: Small. Noisy. Underpowered. Beloved.
In recent advertising, Volkswagen has brought back a vintage Beetle to serve as the company’s talking “spokescar,” complete with surprise interviews at dealerships and…
Scanning Around With Gene: From Camelot to Carousel to Acrobat
My very first trip to Adobe headquarters, which was then in Mountain View, California, was in 1992 to get a preview of a brand-new…
Scanning Around With Gene: Les Merveilles Du Monde
Long before there were Happy Meals or super hero trading cards, many merchants gave away educational materials along with their products, and kids like…
Scanning Around With Gene: The Horse and Buggy Printer
Type designers and graphic artists tend to fall into two categories. You either like ornate old typefaces or hate them. I’m a big fan…
Scanning Around with Gene: On the Colorful Road Again
In part one of this two-part look at Arizona Highways magazine, I poked fun at the “grandma” quality of this publication and was thrilled…
Scanning Around With Gene: Super-Saturated High-Intensity Highways
There are a group of magazines that only seem to appear at your grandmother’s house or in really old doctors’ office waiting rooms. These…
Scanning Around With Gene: PageMaker Memories from 6 to 72 Point
There is a Salvation Army store that happens to be on the way to my bank, both of which I visit quite often. Mostly…