Taschen did a series of books under the heading “All-American Ads” for every decade from from the 1900s up to the 1980s. They’re cheap and commonly found in libraries, so even if your local library doesn’t have them you can just use an inter-library loan to get them sent over. Use these books to find corporations that went to Helvetica, and from there you can start tracking down non-advertising pieces.

There are several good books on Vignelli that will have a lot of “after” images, and for the high-profile identities like American Airlines you should be able to track down “before” images with help from librarians. You should also contact the Knoll furniture company and see if there is somewhere in England that you can look over a collection of their identity materials pre and post Vignelli.

http://typophile.com/node/19230

fantastic guys, both sources should come in handy :)

Quick Update:

WOW! just what i was looking for, and i cant believe my university has the All-American Ads series on its shelf and has a book called Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 which looks fantastic for the Penguin lead

thanks!

Theres actually not a lot of Helvetica used by Penguin a lot of it seems to be... cant find it now, but not helvetica, was a different type face based on Akzidentz Grotesk (spelling)

That would be Standard, a British and American "clone" of AG.
There wasn't always a compunction to stick rigidly with one sans face for a corporate style.
Standard, Helvetica, Univers, Venus...

some good examples of pre and post war material from the same source. i have plenty of random pieces but neither are from the same original source such as Coca Cola.

There will be NO pre-war examples.

im also struggling to find any companies that switched from x typeface to helvetica in the 60's

Monkey see, monkey do.

also if anyone has any other pointers about things i should included in the essay they will be well received as tbh im am awful at writing essays.

This is a larger problem. The easiest fix is to hire an English major, assuming that they still exist…

DEFINITELY hire an English major…

@crazyreaper: When asking for help on a bulletin board for something as important as a dissertation, be sure to cite it properly, lest your committee bust you for plagiarism. According to APA 6.0 the proper way to do this is:

Dean, C. (2012, October 24). Re: Thread title (Online forum comment). Retrieved from http://url of the thread

In this case, replace my name and date with the time and person who answered your question.

Chris — That 23 Oct 2012, 3:48 am comment is spam. Those dissertation paper spammers try to disguise themselves. You’ve got to be on the lookout.