Bernard Owett Endowed Scholarship

The Bernard Owett Endowed Scholarship was created in 2007 by a community of friends to honor Bernie Owett (ADVT 50), a distinguished and dedicated member of the ArtCenter and advertising communities. This scholarship provides support to undergraduate students in the Advertising (now Creative Direction) program who demonstrate merit and financial need.

Biography:
Bernie graduated from ArtCenter’s advertising department in 1950. He spent his entire career with J. Walter Thompson where he was named Vice President in 1965, Senior Vice President in 1968 and Creative Director in 1974. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) in 1975, and was a member of the Art Directors Club. Bernie illustrated several children’s books published by E.P. Dulton, was a contributing editor for Backstage newspaper, and directed TV commercials and promotional films. Bernie was a charter member of The Society of Art Center Alumni and was voted Alumnus of the Year by Art Center in 1970. He was appointed to the school’s Advisory Board in 1972 and was an annual giver to several of ArtCenter’s scholarships.

During his ArtCenter days, Bernie was one of seven outstanding alumni featured in a film called, “The Film,” about the lives of Art Center students. It was directed by Photo alumnus David-Oliver Pfeil. The film was shown as part of the 1972 graduation ceremony at the 3rd street campus, at which Bernie gave the commencement address.

A copy of his address is below. Please read!

1972 Commencement Address by Bernie Owett

“In trying to think of a title for these remarks,
I seem to get stuck somewhere between Chairman Mao
LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM and Bob Dylan
IT’S ALL JUST STARTING NOW, BABY BLUE.
I don’t even know how to address you.
Ladies and Gentlemen used to be the easy words,
but Women’s Lib has a hate for the word Ladies.
So I guess I’ll just say, “Hello, people”.
After all, I should be forgiven, having just seen myself in my first feature role.
That would fluster anyone.
A whole two minutes.
I’m used to shooting 58 seconds, but from the
other side of the Ariflex.
But there is something both charming and shocking standing here.

I refuse to believe it’s over twenty years since I sat
where you are now, with my parents, ·and listened to someone
wish me well out there in the real world.
It doesn’t seem like thousands of ads
and hundreds of commercials ago.
But I guess it was. Because then Audrey Hepburn was the newest star, Marilyn Monroe was still posing for calendars,
Johnny Ray was singing CRY, the book we were reading was
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, the movie we were standing in line for
was A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
and the Korean War was several months old.

If the world then seemed complicated to us graduates, our mission as graphic designers was simple enough: Use sans serif type only.
If that wasn’t possible, use only one type face per ad. Use huge and dramatic graphic shapes, preferably arrows. Preferably, one black, one vermillion.
And most important, try not to smear your pastels.
In those primitive, pre-magic marker days, how you drew was almost more important than how you thought.

So we went our separate ways to Chicago or Detroit or New York and we were told by our interviewers that they could always tell an Art Center portfolio, that they all looked alike.
I assumed that they meant they all looked pretty good because all of us were getting jobs right away.
Sometimes as pasteup boys, sometimes, if we were lucky,
as assistants. And then it was up to us.

I don’t think that anyone says that Art Center portfolios look alike these days.
The competition from other schools may be a bit keener,
but most of all, too many different styles of living,
of music, of fashion, too many new appliances and social
and sexual and political influences have erupted in the last decade to limit any of us to one look again.
Too much is available, too much is possible.
But back then, we were all a little bit more alike.

How it affected art directors was just that:
Salesroom. Research was big.
For awhile, art directors were overwhelmed by statistics, Statistics that proved what?
That a square halftone with a headline underneath and copy under that was the ideal ad.
Well, that was one of the delusions.
Another delusion was that TV commercials should be created by movie men.
Hell, a commercial was a mini-movie, wasn’t it?

But luckily for art directors, the clients
who had to approve these commercials were used to
profit and loss statements, not to shooting scripts.
So the TV storyboard was born.
A comic strip for the VP of marketing to approve.
In Hollywood, an art director was a guy who designed sets,
so naturally, the commercial producer didn’t look too kindly on this artist type.
Art directors were supposed to know from wallpaper,
not from zooms and lenses and lighting and performance.

Now, in print advertising, the art director had been
a pretty big cat.
It’s true that he’d worn the heavy brogues and the Ivy league suits and you couldn’t always tell him from
an account type of a copywriter.

Because he’d been taught that an art director is first of all a businessman.
And he may have had to work· within research-proven confines
that would make the sonnet-form look as open as a ballpark.
But as a mock musical of the early sixties put it:
“Everybody wants to be an …art director;
Everybody wants to…call the shot!”
After all, when half the print ads had square halftones,
the square halftones had better be good.
But now that the art director was moving off the motionless
print page… into: action; roll sound; camera-
And somewhere back in the late fifties or early sixties,
the art director took the TV storyboard and ran with it.

Previously, there’d been the old copywriter/art director war.
A war for creative control.
A holy war, believe me, Brothers and Sisters. And a dirty one.
But about that time the combatants changed and the producers joined the fray. The hostilities lasted into the 60’s.
We good guys won.
In my case it happened when one of the agency’s big-time movie man producers said, “If you’re so goddamned knowledgeable, Owett, produce the goddam spot yourself!”
And I did.
It happened in that way and in other ways all over town.

We were looking_ good. Damned good.
For one thing, we played it smart.
We relied on our old buddies the still photographers.
We took stills and type and put them on the animation stand.
That gave us a bold postery look and for awhile type in every style
.from Adornadas to Zeppelin bounced all over the tube.
Someone called the style “Graphic.” and that classy label established us.
Maybe something else helped.
Maybe the rich, beautiful, prose type of writer thought there was something _a trifle common and demeaning about TV, and maybe they let go their stranglehold.
The word “film” had not yet acquired its magic. No capital F.

But the tempo of TV art direction picked up.
At Doyle Dane, Bob Gage did a spot for Chemstrand, using stills and
Century Schoolbook type, outlining the model’s legs. It wound up in the Museum of Modern Art.

And yes we’d come of age.

At J. Walter Thompson, art director Jack Wohl hired still photographer Howard Zieff (incidentally, an Art Center graduate) to direct a moving picture commercial. It looked like a Zieff still come to life, and back then that was looking very good indeed.
Now the gates were opened to still photographers, although since
they were non-union, we had to call them consultants.
Men like Penn, Avedon, Sokolsky, the .ate Mark Shaw, Horn and Griner, Bert Stern, Dick Richards, Harry Hamburg, Richard Heimann – they all moved into film thanks to us.
The art director was really in charge.

Instead of the limitations of the print ad, he now had a medium where
everything was additive. The director could add. So could the actor, the announcer, the sound , the music, the cutting, the storyboard
could only get better once it got on film.

The Art Director was established.

Just about this same time, a new movement began.
Honesty.
In contrast to the brag and boast of the past, the buy! buy! buy! we learned something single and profound: honesty sells.
A line like “We’re only Number 2” could probably never had been sold to a client 10 years before. Now it was a national wonder.

This change was important because it had nothing to do with style.
Content was emerging as a force.
By 1965 there were so many beautiful spots around that it was
increasingly tough to get your own spot seen. ,.
So… dreamy soft focus was the in thing. We counter attacked with quick cuts. Quick cuts were in? Let’s go to continuous action.
Speed ’em up? Slow ’em down. ·
Everything was possible. And everything that was possible proliferated. Mini-everythings. Mini-dramas, mini-farces, mini-musicals; improvisations, serials, spoofs.
Every style of animation from Peter Max to Silly Symphony.
All coexisting with White Knights, and Imperial Crowns.
These were the Sixties.

Our work mirrored the times. As it had in the Fifties.
As it always does.
But the Seventies are here.
The party’s over. Spots become less lavish, more severe.
Budgets are tighter.
Again, reflecting the changed mood of the Seventies, the depressed economy. The stand-up pitchman was upon us.
Want him to go away?
Don’t worry, he will. TV commercials have a way of correcting themselves, because when everybody’s message looks alike, nobody’s message is doing much selling.

And that’s the point I want to stress.
If you use art nouveau, you’re 1968;
art deco, you’re 1969. Fads date fast.
You’ve heard the cliches about the speed of
communications today, so I won’t belabor it, but
I’d like to offer a favorite example:
Last spring, one of the beautiful people wore hot pants at
Regine’s in Paris. That was on a Wednesday.
On Thursday Women’s Wear Daily wrote it up.
On Monday, Life had the story. In color.
By Friday you could buy them in Ohrbach’s.
Last month a New York area store advertised LOSER HOT PANTS for a buck.
Talk about rise and fall.
And that’s a manufactured product with all the pattern cutting, stitching, modeling, mass production,
buying and selling, and wearing that went on in between.
Design an ad or a TV spot or a product that rides entirely on some fad,
some trend, and it’s apt to look mighty-like
loser hot pants" before it ever hits the public.
A trend can be positive – but once it becomes known as a trend it’s done for.

But even more.
Let’s go back to trends again. And counter trends.

Show me a trend and I show you a counter trend.
The media are always spotting trends.
They have to. They need news to feed their giant output.
If it isn’t there at first sight, screw a stronger lens on the Pentax and look again.
Do a feature on nude movies, sexual permissiveness. A trend. On the other hand, you could do a feature on Jesus freaks. Religion. A trend.

Or a feature on the Beatles split-up. The death of rock. A trend.
On the other hand, do a feature on Carol King,
Don Mclean, the new rock. A trend.
How about a feature on men’s cosmetics?
Or a contrary one on skinheads?
The Revolutionaries? Or the cooling off?
Health foods? Or diet dangers? ·
Haven’t you seen all these stories?
Within a few days of each other? Be aware of them. But beware of them. None of them is necessarily the wave of the future.
People basically remain the same.
One of the most dynamite plays on Broadway right now is about
Queen Elizabeth One.
Now you know that playwright Robert Bolt’s habits of thought
and feeling have to be as far from Queen Elizabeth’s as the star Arcturus. Or do they?

Inside our Mylar covers, are we that different today? Don’t we want love?
Don’t we need food? And shelter? And sex?
Don’t we care about other people?
Did you ever really see a girl with kaleidoscope eyes?
Straight?
Doesn’t Shylock say something like, IF YOU PRICK US, DO WE NOT BLEED?
Doesn’t Mick Jagger say something like, WE ALL NEED SOMEONE WE CAN BLEED ON.

Take A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. The story pivots on whether or not Thomas More will sell out. And that’s history.
So what else is new?
I know it can be boring studying Old Masters, but would you really say that Al Durer was over the hill?
Or even Whistler?
We’re back to content again.

The French, as is their custom, have a saying.
“The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”
The point is you want to communicate, right?
And what is it that you want to communicate?
Surely not that you know there’s a new trend.
Or that you’re hip to the erotic drawings of Turner.
You want to — correct me if this is already 2001, and your name is Hal you want to tell people how you feel about things, what moves you, what leaves you cold, who you are.
Hell, even Hal had his drives.
Do we ever change that much? If we did, all art and writing would be dead. Deader than Latin.
There are all kinds of valid styles around.
And there will be all kinds of new ones.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.

What’s coming next?
Don’t ask me.
That’s what we’ll be asking
We want your fresh eyes, fresh insights, fresh attitudes, your enthusiasm and desire to do things in a more meaningful way.

If the job of an artist is to interpret his generation to his
generation, you couldn’t ask for a quicker way of doing it,
or a quicker way of getting a response.
That goes for film, or any other advertising or product design.
In most cases, it will only be less than a few months from the time you conceive an ad till the whole country sees it.

So whatever you want to communicate will get across in a hurry. And all advertising reflects its creators, just as they themselves reflect the times, the national mood.
A package design makes a statement not only about the product but
about its designer. About -how the designer thinks things should be.
Every conceivable technique is open to you.
You’ve been well schooled in every needed skill.

But content counts. A * lot. *

And if you see life differently- than, say, I see it, that can’t
help but come out in your works.
And believe me, we didn’t really use it all up in the Sixties.
Any more than Fellini used up the movie.
Or Vonnegut the novel.
I’m not putting down the little revolutions going on all the time.
In life, in attitudes, in ways of expression.
You’ll find every life style you can think of among the people you’ll meet in our business.
Every kind of political and economic attitude.
And even the clothes to express them.
You’ll find people pretty hard to startle. Let alone shock.

But you’ll find that if you can really say the things that really count,
We’ll hear you. They’ll hear you.
And isn’t that what you really want?

Peace and good luck."