It looks like there are huge cellular outages going on right now, and I know that’s a pain for a lot of people. How are you supposed to read The Autopian and get the soul-enhancing benefits we provide if those ones and zeroes beamed over the air can’t get to your little hand-computer? It’s bad, real bad, but as a way of taking the pain away, just a bit, I invite anyone who still has internet access to enjoy this wonderful 1973 (maybe 1975) guide from the Bell System (what AT&T used to be called) describing how to paint vans.
This guide is a great example of what many may think of as the Golden Age of corporate design, when wonderful and meticulous and likely fussy designers set clean, rational, and subtly beautiful standards for typography, logo design and usage, colors, proportions, grids, all that stuff, and these designers tended to be absolutely draconian about the enforcement of these rules.
This guide is a real rabbit hole to dive into because of the sheer number of vehicles shown; they’re mostly vans, but I love that designers did the measurements for so many of them. They start with Fords:
That’s an early Econoline there. Note the use of the elegant king of typefaces, the Swiss master Helvetica, and the really fascinating color scheme choices that the Bell System used: look at that green! It’s like, what, a lichen green?
I love these colors because they feel so unexpected for a company. They’re not flashy or attention-grabbing, they feel strangely institutional, but in a reassuring instead of a depressing way. That gold/yellow/ochre is almost a school bus color or perhaps a hard hat/safety equipment hue, a hint at the notion that these vans do work, real work. And that blue, well, it just works.
Also, I don’t think I knew they had a logo on the roof!
Picture it without the blue stripe. It just doesn’t work! Besides, blue ties in with the Saul Bass-designed Bell System logo. Here, watch his pitch for this simplified logo, because it’s a motherflapping icon:
Is that video almost a half hour long? Hell yeah it is. Get comfy.
Here’s a bit of the copy from the guide about “van trucks” and explaining why there’s a broken line running through the ochre stripe:
Let’s see some more vans!
Oh yeah, they didn’t forget the old Econolines!
Or the Mopar workhorse, the Dodge Tradesman!
Look at the lovely, sporty, and subtle treatment for official Bell System sedans! I guess they used these to transport dignitaries or the mimmified body of Alexander Graham Bell, set in the back seat.
These look like Ford F-series trucks, and I think its interesting the livery is limited to the doors and a solid lichen green on the rear sections.
And, holy crap, Bell System Jeeps and Broncos? To be fair, this livery feels a little phoned-in. Still, it’d be very cool to have a Bell System Bronco.
I hope these massive companies figure their shit out, so everyone can read our site, like the Almighty intends. It’s also worth remembering that the first T in AT&T stands for “telegraph.” Good luck trying to get them to install one, though.
“Grey green”…EMD was very fond of a similar color at one point. And I’m blown away by the attention to detail on the logo…so many dimensions!!
On a similar note, I love NASA’s 70’s style guide, if just because there’s like 7 pages between a Plymouth Valiant and the Space Shuttle, that this progression is perfectly natural to them. Most of the automotive liveries are pretty plain, but the Special vehicle scheme (white with blue on the bottom and the Worm in red) is fantastic enough I once mocked up a C4 Corvette accordingly in Microsoft Paint, and it worked. You know, in case 40 years ago, they needed something akin to the U2 chase cars.
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/nasa_graphics_manual_nhb_1430-2_jan_1976.pdf
What I’m curious about is why the blue stripe is *always* slightly thicker than the ochre stripe. On the vans, with the vertical relationship of the stripes, this makes sense. But on the hood and trunk of the sedans, with centerline symmetry?
The blue is more visually dominant than the reflective yellow tape on a white surface. So even though they’re technically different sizes, and would be noticeably different if viewed carefully, at a glance the blue and yellow would appear the same.
It’s explained on Page 8 of the linked document:
„In the diagrams below, you will notice that the blue stripe is slightly wider than the ochre. The adjustment has been made because the blue color tends to visually contract; its slightly larger size makes it appear equal to the ochre.“
My God, that video is incredible. Better than at least half the episodes of Mad Men. The sound design in particular—”Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” as the bed for the women’s fashion? Damn. If I’d been at that presentation, I’d have been tearing the old logos off the wall by the 20 minute mark.
Sign me up, Saul Bass.
Also, I didn’t know/remember that the logos were reflective, which is a freaking brilliant detail.
I lived the instrumental, “beautiful music” (Google it, kids – it was a big radio format up until the ’80s, kind of like ambient for the really old), Muzak-style version of “Magical Mystery Tour” at the end.
Yes!
yes yes this is the high quality van content we all crave
I concur!
Today they call that color Cactus Gray or some such. It’s one of the limited common shades of what I call the baby food palette that curses contemporary trucks and cars. (Looking at you Hyundai. Would it kill you to offer the Santa Cruz in a real color?) I was last a Bell customer in 1983 (black plastic desk phone with a rotary dial I had to lease from the company and return) then left the country for years. By the time I returned, anti-monopoly forces had Louisville Sluggered the gum ball machine that was Bell Telephone and scattered Ma Bell’s children wide and far. Ah, memories.
Also: That “Love Bell” van briefly shown as too modern really would have been the bomb had the students of Paris ’68 had unnerved corporate America a little bit more, although the 1980s backlash probably would have been even worse than it was.
if you’d like the actual truth, I did it this morning between 8-8:45 or so. I try to do Cold Starts the night before but I went out to a show last night and didn’t do it. I often do these in a scramble in the mornings. Here’s how you can tell: if it goes up EXACTLY at 8:30, it was done the night before, and scheduled. If not, morning scramble!
I’m at like 85-90% Just need to get some strength and stamina back. I get sleepier easier than I used to but I’m starting “cardio rehab” soon and that should get that all sorted!
Once again I’m nostalgic for that postwar era of economic integration and corporatesse oblige that was peaking (or even just past its peak, but visible only in retrospect) in 1969. The American alternative to the European welfare state was embodied in the Bell System idea of a regulated monopoly with guaranteed returns for reliable and safe “widows and orphans” investments and a generous pay and benefits structure for a highly unionized workforce, with modest (though not as stingy as now) supplementation by government for those outside the warmth of a corporate blanket. All that, and phone service was cheaper, more prevalent and more reliable than in Western European markets as well, subsidized by profits from business and long-distance services.
The film included a few black faces (the resolution was too low to see if there were any Asians, indigenous peoples, distinguishable Hispanics or other visible minorities in there) among the numerous shots of AT&T’s proletariat and showed gender bias that would have seemed incredibly dated for corporate communications even five years later, but very large companies subject to regulation and union pushback (which usually went the other way until the ’50s and ’60s) and sensitive to public opinion were far more likely to do something positive in that regard than companies that weren’t. And it’s interesting that the film brought up the contemporary issue of difficulty recruiting younger employees due to perceptions of the company as too regimented and too old – not unlike the corporate efforts (labeled as “woke” by idiots and the truly awful) toward more responsible and inclusive practices as labor shortages resumed in the late 2010s. (In the interim the issue was managed in more traditional ways – rampant employment insecurity and expanding debt, with a soupçon of white backlash – as those who reached legal working age after Prop 13, the ’81-’82 unemployment spike and the air traffic controllers strike can attest.)
Yeah, I get that a fond look back at the age of corporate benevolence is about as accurate overall as Ostalgie, but when modern developed economies have pretty much shredded any expectations of reliability and stability and most of the gains from the new system accrue to a fortunate few as the pain falls upon everyone else, can you blame me?
Car culture’s part of broader culture, yo.
Great comment, thanks for the read.
+1 for Ostalgie, I had never seen the term but it is perfectly German.
I was particularly interested to see that Black women were mostly shown with afro/natural hair, which in 1969 was still a political statement that was then the norm in the ’70s (my youth) but somehow went away for so long that it’s become almost a political statement again.
Through the whole thing you could see a sort of well-intentioned but ultimately clueless effort at not being gender-discriminatory (eg common use of indeterminate terms like “workers” instead of “workmen”), and then WHAM comes the fashion for ladies segment. Gives an idea of just how sudden “women’s lib” really was; as you say, just 5 years later, this sort of thing would have been red-flagged left and right, but in 1969 I guarantee they thought they were enlightened.
Yup, it’s only fifty years ago that a woman couldn’t get her own credit card or bank account. And if some people today had their way, we’d regress back to that.
It wasn’t illegal to grant women the same access to financial instruments as men, but (as was the case between the Supreme Court decided that it was contrary to public policy to enforce racially restrictive deed covenants in 1948 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and for that matter afterwards) it was legal and common practice to restrict such access by refusing to extend credit to single women or inquiring about marital status (and requiring a husband’s signature), family plans, and so forth. This prevented women from establishing credit in their own names, which then restricted them from most of the freedom of the free enterprise system, and this wasn’t banned under federal legislation until 1974. And one wonders what Betty Ford’s reaction might have been had Gerald vetoed it (my guess is not good), but I don’t think that was ever a possibility.
“It wasn’t until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, that women in the U.S. were granted the right to open a bank account on their own.”
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/when-could-women-open-a-bank-account/
Looks like my calculator is working just fine, pal.
That’s a glib answer that ignores the real-life implications.
You seem like the kind of dude who would point out the very few *codified* examples of redlining, just for fun.
This comment is good enough that I wish there were a way to save comments here.
I have a monastic shrine to Saul Bass in my house. I wish that logo and typeface design would go back to being as simple as things once were. This reminds me that I think Pizza Hut did the world a solid when the adopted a new wordmark and logo a few years back that is very reminiscent of the 70s-80s one. Clean design. Yup.
Speaking of old great phone company logos… The GTE logo was bad ass, too bad they had to go and merge with Bell Atlantic a quarter decade ago which created the monstrosity that today is known as Verizon. I worked for GTE for a few years, and they were a great company before the Verizon merger. I guess I’m really showing my age here now, aren’t I?
I could just weep at the beauty of this. A single tear of joy rolling slowly down my fabulous cheekbones.
I agree, but realize that this corporate PR voodoo hides an ugly truth. By this time period, AT&T was a bona-fide monopoly that was squeezing everybody dry. This is why we broke it into pieces in the 1980’s.
Unfortunately, most of the “baby bells” created by the breakup were acquired by just one of them, Southwestern Bell, and that’s the entity we know today as AT&T. So the oligarchs just shuffled the deck chairs around and it’s business as usual.
The rest re-merged into Bell Atlantic, which you know better as Verizon.
That was the other side of the benevolent monopoly, and a touch o’ the ol’ Stalinism was a common comic trope of the times (Lily Tomlin’s operator; Johnny Fever’s abject fear of the phone company, etc.) that wasn’t entirely unjustified. To extend the Ostalgie metaphor – there was kind of a Phone Company Stasi too.
“Paulie hated phones, and wouldn’t have one in his house”
Speaking as the son of an AT&T worker who lived the breakup, breaking the monopoly may have been good but it wasn’t quite the benevolent gesture one might think. At least according to my father (I have not done my own independent research to verify) the company that sprang up as a major competitor, MCI, was in the pockets of the politicians and moneyed interests who benefitted financially from the breakup. Given the way MCI horribly screwed me a decade later for a chunk of change I have a fair amount of lingering resentment for that bunch. Also, as others have noted a bunch of the Bells wound up re-consolidating anyway.
Yeah, my dad was with Illinois Bell (and then Ameritech) for about 30 years, and told me similar stories. He ended up taking his pension in AT&T stock, so after he died my mom was an unknowing millionaire for a couple of years before the bubble burst.
I love that video so much, I watch it at least once a year!
It’s my understanding that Torch has several decades’ worth of emergency stories queued up on the Autopian back-up server (a Japanese market NEC PC-6001), with a sophisticated algorithm (written in BASIC) that will crawl the archive for relevant articles and post them to the website in the event of force majeure. Copies will also be printed on an old Epson MX-80 dot matrix for distribution by USPS Jeep to Corinthian Leather members.
It’s actually a shame we haven’t seen the article about those experimental nuclear-powered Beetles yet, but when the time comes it’ll make for great reading from the fallout bunker.
Stop stealing my jokes.
This was a big, modern step up from the old solid gray-green paint of the older livery. It was almost GI-issue olive drab, but I’m pretty sure it was a shade lighter than “real” O.D.
A few “Baby Bells” kept some variation of this scheme alive for a short time after the breakup of AT&T, but it didn’t take long for them all to settle mostly on all-white vehicles with a logo. Often in various, inconsistent sizes across the fleets.
My high school cafeteria was painted that same gray-green.
Fine for a van, less so for a room where you’re supposed to consume food.
You should make printable paper model cars based on those drawings!
I wonder if simplified design on those trucks was decided to make easier paint rapairs after smashing front or rear, when driver was rushing to emergency fix of telephone lines after tree-braking storm?
My grandpa worked for Cincinnati Bell, they also had a fleet of Vega’s which he said were the go to cars for when it snowed.
Interesting – so did my father-in-law.
I love these dives into graphic design. But isn’t the bell logo on the roof facing the wrong direction?? I didn’t know it was there either, but now that I do, I want it rotated 180 degrees. It’s just wrong like that.
Maybe it’s just me being old or nostalgic but I love the old, company liveries.
Nah, it’s because they are better haha
Memories – I had a Tonka telephone bucket truck as a little kid, same grey/green and white. Pretty sure it had the Ma Bell logo. Used the swing arm as a crane after the plastic bucket broke. This was 1980 or so.
Contrast the classic friendly and reassuring Bell logos with the modern menacing and world-dominating Death Star logo. Says a lot about modern corporate goals and identities.
Just yesterday, during my workout, I watched The Taking of Pelham 123, and the street scenes were fantastic! All that old iron and in a rainbow of colors! Lots of vehicles in their various liveries, too. I don’t recall seeing an AT&T van, though.
I like flipping on reruns of Rockford, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak just to see the old cars on the road. The body roll in the car chases is simply amazing.
It’s amazing any of them had door handles left!
One of the best parts is that the lichen green was matte. It definitely increased the functional look/feel of these.
Sal Bass was an amazing guy – responsible for so many of the iconic logos of the 20th century AND the most compellingly crazy of the ’70s odd killer animal scifi flicks, Phase IV. Ants, people, ants!!
RIP the United Airlines “tulip.”
Plus, his title work is unmatched.
I’m glad I’m not the only one! When the merger happened, I was like “just call it Continental United” or something so you can keep one of the all time best logo designs. But no…United and that half-assed globe instead. Sigh.
Continental had a Saul Bass logo before it switched to the globe. That shitty logo killed two classics!
Long live the “meatball!”
You’re gonna make me be that guy, aren’t you? The second T is for telegraph!
This livery? It’s like a warm hug from my childhood, just one of those fixtures of the landscape from a particular time.
Like Amazon delivery trucks will be for the children of today.
That ATT logo is timeless though.
Thank you for taking the hit and not making me be that guy.
It’s absolutely necessary to mention the fantastic video for this Bell Ford Econoline that sold on Bring a Trailer a while ago.