Scanning Around with Gene: The Art of Fire Prevention
In 1968 when I was 12 my school took part in a city-wide competition where students produced small posters promoting fire safety. Despite my…
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: Let’s All Pile in the Station Wagon!
Until Chrysler introduced the first mini-van in 1983, most American families with more than two kids probably owned a station wagon at one time…
Scanning Around With Gene: Teaching Kids About Industry
Kids grow up these days taking a lot of things for granted. The electricity that comes out of the wall, the gasoline in our…
Scanning Around With Gene: Being a Boy in 1939
The 1930s were interesting times. The impacts of the Great Depression were considerable, which made for hard times for many Americans. But it was…
Scanning Around With Gene: The Amazing Story of Measurement
Lately I’ve been accumulating various comic-book stories of big industry with titles such as “Rubber, a Wonder Story,” and “The Story of Shoes Through…
Scanning Around With Gene: The Era of "Mad" Women
I haven’t had a television for the last couple of years, so I’ve never seen the series “Mad Men,” though from all the media…
Scanning Around With Gene: Things That Are Within Five Feet of My Desk
Every so often I feel the need to show images that don’t fit any particular theme but that I can’t resist hanging on to…
Scanning Around With Gene: The Sex Appeal — and Bad Reputation — of the Fiat
I’m old enough to remember when Fiats were a fairly common site on American roads — not as popular as Volkswagens, but surely more…
Scanning Around With Gene: How Does Your Garden Grow?
This look at look at the Smithsonian collection of seed catalogs offers some great examples of vintage printing technology and type design.
Scanning Around With Gene: Typographic Treasure from the Bottom of the Box
My life is full of entirely too many poorly marked boxes full of who knows what. I spend a lot of time moving one…
Scanning Around With Gene: A Printed “Teaching Machine” from 1894
I grew up in the era of so-called “new math,” a fairly radical and short-lived attempt during the mid-1960s to introduce children to complex…
Scanning Around With Gene: When Advertising was King-sized
Last week I took a look at the artistic covers of vintage Fortune magazines and described how that publication set out to be the…