Drawings and posters

In this section you can find the materials produced by the Advertising and Communication Department of the company from the 1910s through to the 2000s. Pirelli understood the importance of advertising from the very outset, paying particular attention to it as a form of experimentation, innovation and quality, involving artists, designers, photographers and writers in its conception and creation. Especially since the post-war period, Pirelli has achieved some of the highest levels in the history of its visual communication, with the contributions of great Italian and international graphic artists and designers, such as Alan Fletcher, Gerhard Forster, Franco Grignani, Bruno Munari, Bob Noorda, and Raymond Savignac. In 1960, the company’s advertising work was entrusted to Agenzia Centro, a rare and interesting example of an in-house company agency, which experimented with new advertising strategies in the 1970s and ‘80s. In the 1990s, it was the turn of major international agencies – and Young & Rubicam in particular – which created global advertising campaigns with endorsers from the world of sport and cinema. The section of the archive devoted to visual communication contains a whole variety of materials (sketches, layouts, paste-up layouts and proofs, and final printouts), so you can retrace the history of corporate advertising strategies, of clients, and advertising graphics, as well as the production and printing techniques that were used before the advent of computers: from sketches and layouts made until the 1960s by artists and graphic designers using painting techniques, through to the use of photocomposition for camera-ready copy in the 1970s and ‘80s.