99c Meal at Arby's

This newspaper ad for an Arby’s promotion has many indicators of dated or old-times design trends. Dating back to 1975, this ad vertisement design communicates an Arby’s promotion for a ninety nine cent meal at the establishment in the city of Charlotte North Carolina. There are many incohesive inconsistencies throughout the design. Firstly, there is a variety of illustrative or decorative differences in each third of the piece. At the top third, we see the premise or attention-grabbing section of the ad. “99 cent meal at arby’s” with a decorative 80’s like pop rainbow like sunshine sort of vector illustration. This creates balance with the piece by being particularly heavy on colors at the top. Going further down, though, we see a realistic illustration of the arby’s meal being promoted. Further down still is the Arby’s logo of the time, also in a unique art style from the prior two illustrations. All together, this design employs three different types of illustrative techniques which creates strange division amongst the text elements of the piece. 

Multiple different fonts and typefaces are used throughout this ad. Right below the bubbly title text, we get a round sans-serif typeface labeling in a bullet-point list which items come with the meal being advertised. Below that, with similar type but smaller and thinner, we see the main body copy explaining the meal in an elevator pitch format. We then get bolder text than we’ve seen so far below the burger illustration. Even below that, we get even bolder until we reach the very bottom, with bold, non-rounded (blocky) text with the establishment’s address. The design is very bold and heavy as you get further down. 

An interesting detail of this design is how the text and imagery interacts with each other in multiple places throughout the piece. For one example, we see the “99 cent meal” text following the path of the “rainbow” at the top of the page, with the “at Arby’s” text overlapping with the following section of the ad to create depth. However, this is the only place in the entire ad that presents such a desire on the designer’s end to play with 3D space in this way. The only exception would be the small portion of the top of the Arby’s logo peeking out from its section into the “body” section of the ad. There is also seemingly no consistent rule for text size throughout the piece.