Sequential Circuits advertising time line created

Long weekend! And I just couldn't get myself in the blogging mood.

Flipped through some magz to try and get my brain into gear.

Nothing.

Looked through the many Blogger drafts that I've created with small bits of ideas.

Nothing.

So, rather than try to fight the obvious, I decided to instead focus on something more administrative in nature. So, I cleaned up a few things and then create another advertising timeline - this time for Sequential Circuits. You can see the "advertising timeline tool" link near the top of the blog - and the SCI timeline joins the ARP, Korg, and Moog timelines that were created when I launched the tool back in April.

The tool works like this:

You can navigate along the timeline in two ways. Move your mouse along the scrolling line at the bottom of the each timeline, or even more convenient, just click on the side images to bring them into focus. You can actually click quite rapidly on them to quickly fly through the ads.

Then, to view the blog post/high res ad created for each one, just click on the image that is in focus.

Easy as that!

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you may have guessed that I generally separate SCI's advertising into three fairly distinct periods - Pre-Mattos, Mattos, and Post-Mattos. And it's easy to see the evolution of these periods in the ads that have been added in the timeline.

The Pre-Mattos period (up until mid-1979 or so) is generally characterized as consisting of... well... very general-looking ads. Top title, sub-title (if available), photo, ad-copy. Nothing ugly. No gratuitous sex in the form of females in bikinis laying over keyboards or anything. Just some good ol' mid-70s ads.

But then something happened. Magic, as I like to call it. SCI met John Mattos, an illustrator that had done a bit of previous artwork for A&M before moving (back) to California. Working through an ad agency, Mattos started illustrating for SCI - posters, ads, etc, and it was during this Mattos period from about 1980-1982 that some of the best synth marketing design artwork was ever produced. You can read more on John Mattos in this blog post.

With the synth advertising industry in general starting to become more trendy, along with the advances in printing technology, the Post-Mattos period of 1982-onward is characterized mostly by a more "slick" advertising look. Nice colour photography with darker backgrounds that new print technologies could handle, allowed SCI to shine with the best of them.

And Sequential Circuits was definitely one of the best.

More timelines to come!