Ode to a Grecian Travel Brochure

Trifolds from the National Tourist Organization of Greece

Howdy from the first truly warm day of the year in New York!

I started this letter a long time ago, in the midst of a real east coast winter. It was February, on a snowy-then-rainy-then-windy trip to “upstate” New York (15 minutes north of Yonkers), and my bones were thawed slightly by a collection of Grecian travel brochures I found at Pretty Funny Vintage. They appear to all be published by the National Tourist Organization of Greece in the ‘60s (full disclosure, I have never been to Greece). What I love most about these brochures is how they all use different techniques — photography, collage, watercolor, bold graphic drawings — yet somehow they still feel like a cohesive whole. I picked out my favorites, then went back to the house to eat kbbq from H-Mart and two entire pies from Noble Pies with my friends. It was the perfect winter weekend, and now that it’s finally summer I wanted to share this warm weather ephemera with the rest of you.

This brochure for the Argolis region bucks the conventions of our contemporary, Instagram-driven concept of Greece’s white-washed cliffside houses and pristine waters, but somehow its chunky serif, juicy tomato red, and cut paper box buildings still manage to capture what (I imagine) it feels like to actually walk through a Grecian village.

I love this lady’s sassy little finger point, and how a polygonal box of text stands in for her flowing white dress.

Zero points for legiblity, but lots of points for the framing device that shows you the sights through a collaged arch on each page.

Black and white watercolor — esoteric! Plus, the perfect red.

My favorite of the bunch — a limited, blocky color palette, with a smattering of the tiniest details (a boat’s delicate mast, a red dome-topped church, a wisp of a cloud ) against a massive, sand-colored cliff. You can feel the heat coming off of this one.

Meteora is a Grecian rock outcrop with a huge complex of Eastern Orthodox monasteries. I looked it up — the monasteries really do perch atop the cliff formations like that, but the effect is a little more Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and a little less like something out of a demented Dr. Seuss book illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch. This brochure’s artwork reminds me of the stop motion movie Mad God,¹ the first five minutes of which I watched against my will last year. Points for artistic license here, even though this does not make me want to go to Greece.

We’ll end with a cute screen-printed map. The orange juice halftone, contrasting deep blue ocean, and improbably placed ancient coin combine to make a map that’s more evocative than it is useful (my favorite kind of graphic design!). Greece seems like a bad place to take a road trip (too many islands), but I would like to unfurl this in the passenger seat of a convertible like the one so delicately rendered in the top right corner.

I once read a tip from a very successful (in a cool way, not a LinkedIn way) newsletter writer who said that you should never apologize for sending out a Substack late, or for taking a break. So I’m not going to apologize (that would also feel weirdly big-headed of me) but I will acknowledge that it’s been a pretty long time since I sent my last Ok, Perfect. I started this project during an extremely fallow freelance period during which I was spinning out about money and needed something to occupy my hands and my mind. So I’ve been gone for a good reason — I’m WORKING, thank god — but there have been many weeks this year where I’ve written “Write Ok Perfect post!!” on my to-do list and never got around to it, even when I did seem to have the time.

Since my last newsletter, Substack as a platform has grown in popularity.² And as I read all of the lovely little people in my inbox and watched them (especially other designers) use this platform to do cool things with their careers, I sometimes had one of those post-turning-30 pangs of regret where I thought about all the shapes my life isn’t forming, all the paths I didn’t take.³ It was a futile, self-aggrandizing exercise — as if I had kept up with this tiny silly goofy newsletter in the last six months, by now I would be partner at Pentagram, hired by Beyoncé to do Renaissance tour visuals, and have a witty-but-informative corner column in the New York Times Magazine? I’ve instead realized that like many things in my life, this newsletter — or more accurately, my own practice of writing — will ebb and flow, and right now, it will flow. Writing this brings me a lot of joy and I’m glad to send it to you today. I hope to be back with more soon.

Ok? Ok. 🆗

1. I will not link to Mad God but you can look it up for yourself and determine if I’m correct.

2. Substack Notes have also gotten ten thousand percent more annoying.

3. I think about this all the time re: a baking Instagram account I used to have that got relatively popular. I almost quit my full time job to bake cakes! And online friends I made at the time are now pastry chefs, food writers, industry professionals, etc. I’m glad I am not a pastry chef now (bad at pie dough) but you guys, what if!?!?