I walk pretty much the same route to and from work each day in downtown Chicago, so I get the privilege of seeing all the new on-the-ground advertising campaigns as they debut. Usually a number of instances per campaign, in fact—instantly fell in love with the newest installment of Ray-Ban’s Never Hide ads for their new Rare Prints, for example.

Last week, the Art Institute of Chicago released a bus shelter ad promoting The Lunch with the Masters Visit, which sounds like a good time! The graphic presence of the poster, however… well, it left much to be desired. My first impression a block away was one part curiosity and one part skepticism. I saw a LOT of white space, a strange backward-S contour, and it felt straight out of the year 2000.

The subtext reads, Now with 100% of your daily recommended culture. Follow the path of photos. Is it a narrative; a sort of ‘day in the life’ setup? Maybe. There is a lunch scene in the middle of the sequence, after all. But my biggest hang up was the very specific look of the piece; a formation of haphazardly-placed rectangular photographs that seem to exist to mimic the Art Institute of Chicago logomark.




Fast forward a few evenings. I’m walking through the local Metra Rail train station, and I am stopped in my tracks (pun!) before a series of ads for Advocate Health Care.

HUH?

Feeling like I’ve seen this ad somewhere before, I think back to that Lunch with the Masters poster. I don’t know about you, but I was blown away by the similarities. And just so you have a point of geographical reference, this train station is ONE BLOCK from that bus shelter displaying the AIC poster. Close enough so, that I briskly marched back to it for suspicion confirmation.




This Advocate Health Care poster series won’t be collecting any awards, but what matters is that same graphic approach of this ’school of fish’ formation of non-gridded photographs. In addition to the formation, the white background and the border-free imagery take on the same minimalist approach that many turn of the century designers applied to their work.

Wether this is a style worth bringing back, I don’t know. Although it sort of works for the AIC Lunch with the Masters poster, it seems to lend nothing to Advocate Health Care. But the fact that both of these campaigns are live at the same time is a design coincidence that definitely caught my eye.

From the looks of their crisp, bright white website, Inventory Magazine is absolutely bursting with class and style. A curation of Ideas in Product, Craft & Culture— I like that.

The site is a work of art, from designer Stuart Hobday. His work is consistently intelligent, grid-loyal and always, always fresh as hell.