Monday, March 22, 2010

Aries Music Inc. Modular, July 1977


Aries Music Inc. modular synthesizer advertisement from page 48 of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine July 1977.

Between spending time doing a stint at a tradeshow booth, attending an art auction (that included eating lots of cupcakes) and some marathon Fallout 3 sessions, it has been a busy week. But I remembered coming across this quarter-page advertisement from Aries while flipping through CK the same time I had come across that Oberheim SEM Evolution full pager earlier this month. This ad only appeared once in the July '77 issue.

I had overlooked this advertisement when I blogged about this early Aries ad, so I was quite excited to come across it. I haven't seen it online either - maybe because, surprisingly, the ad doesn't include an actual photo or image of an Aries modular.

But it does include my very favorite thing about Aries advertisements...

THE LOGO!

To me, the prismatic-inspired 'A' symbol really did a great job positioning Aries both artistically and technically. Robert Leiner, owner of the most comprehensive Aries Web site I've ever come across, calls the logo 'spiffy'. I have to agree.

There is one problem with this ad that really gets under my skin. You see, the logo pulls my eyes upward, directly to the only ad-copy in the advertisement.

From a design perspective this is great - Zenbecca commented on this aspect of the logo in my previous Aries blog post. But from a grade-10-grammar-teacher perspective, the sporadic use of capital letters would get your hand slapped with a ruler pretty quickly.

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It may be the smallest text in the ad, but now, whenever I look at this ad, all I see is this sentence.

My irritation with capitalization disasters is a pet-peeve that I picked up over twelve years ago when I first started working in a communications and public relations department. My boss used to get mad at me all the time for not capitalizing properly. I don't claim to know all the rules... but I know the text above is breaking a few of them.

I'll even admit that I have trouble with my own blog posts. I changed the capital letters in this sentence back and forth a number of times before deciding which words should be capitalized:
Aries Music Inc. modular synthesizer advertisement from page 48 of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine July 1977.
And don't you dare go back to old blog posts to see if I have been consistent. Because I probably haven't. But then again, my boss doesn't see these posts.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

From the errant capitalization to the wonky lines of text, this ad is nothing short of charming. In the way that bake-sale ads in church bulletins are charming.

That said, I bet it still sold a few synths...and I wonder how many “bucks” they received.

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