The fact that communication has a strategic value on a par with that of product design has been a given since the first globalization of the mid-1800s. But it was with the advent of the historical avant-gardes in the 1920s that the product-image combo began to be more complex and detailed. In 1924, the young Herbert Bayer, still a student at the Bauhaus, designed a booth for Regina toothpaste, where the product is suggested by the smile of a beautiful young woman, with the brand’s name broadcast by a speaker and even a sort of smoke signal emerging from the top of the advertising box. The toothpaste was missing: the communicative booth concentrated on effect, not the product per se. In 1933 Fortunato Depero further boosted this concept with his Campari pavilion, where three-dimensional letters loomed, displaying only the typography of the brand without the presence of any beverages or any packaging.
Also Olivetti, a company always studied as a worldwide case history by all the giants of the tech sector (Apple, first of all), often worked in terms of the passage from product to concept communication. While the first years of Olivetti graphics focused on the visual associations of great illustrator-painters like Teodoro Wolf Ferrari (the M1 and Dante Alighieri) or Xanti Schawinsky (the MP1 and the red-lipped starlet), with Giovanni Pintori the advertising of the Ivrea-based company shifted towards the concept expressed by the machine, rather than its physical formulation. Images were created to address the idea of calculation, with abstract solutions reminiscent of programmed art, the perfect visual summary of the new ‘civilization of machines.’ The next step in this history of emancipation from the image of the product to the pursuit of communication of the brand’s philosophy was to use media that are completely extraneous to graphic design.
