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Midcentury North American Restaurant Placemats
Today’s collection is a grab bag of midcentury North American restaurant placemats. Most of these date from the late 1940s through the ’50s, when the postwar boom and expanding highway system put long-distance vacations within reach for a growing middle class in both the US and Canada.
Roadside diners, motor lodges, and destination restaurants sprang up to serve this new wave of car-bound tourists, often positioning themselves just off major routes or in the heart of resort towns. Nonetheless, economics were still the driving force behind many design decisions, resulting in limited color palettes and, often, a mix of stock and custom illustration (note the two different restaurants using the same floral border). This kind of tourist ephemera is clearly the progenitor for a certain breed of present day nostalgia-forward design (I call it Heartland Hodgepodge on are.na) that relies on the many of the same tricks seen here; flat but expressive illustrations, sketches of storefronts, dichromatic palettes, mismatched type, and layouts that feel busy but deliberate have been polished and reimagined to sell everything from coffee to pickleball.
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