Most people remember the Super Bowl ads they loved. Graphic designers remember how they were built.
Go back through the Super Bowl archives and you’ll see, you're not just watching commercials. Far from it in fact. You're watching decades of visual decision-making play out in real time. Type choices. Colour palettes. Logo placement. How much was shown. How much was held back. Every era leaves fingerprints.
Early Super Bowl advertising was unapologetically graphic. Big type, with logos front and centre. Brands weren't subtle because they didn't need to be. Attention was guaranteed. Designers focused on copy impact first. If someone walked into the room halfway through, they still knew who the ad was for.
The 90s and early 2000s leaned into recognisable visual systems. Consistency mattered as people's behaviors started to become less predictable. You could spot a brand from a single frame. Colours didn't shift for mood. Logos didn't disappear for storytelling. Design did its job quietly while celebrities and spectacle did the talking.
By the late 2000s. Something changed. Fewer logos. Softer palettes. More white space. Visual identity stopped trying to dominate the frame and started supporting narrative instead. The work trusted that recognition could happen without shouting.
The archives show this shift clearly. Type got smaller. Layouts breathed. Brands became comfortable letting design sit in the background, knowing it would still register.
You also see the rise of systems thinking. Ads stopped existing in isolation, while visual language carried across campaigns, social, packaging, and physical spaces. The Super Bowl became one moment inside a much bigger identity machine. Designers were designing frameworks that could flex.
Looking through the archives now, designers see the cycles. Moments where simplicity outperformed spectacle. Moments where one good layout did more work than a thousand visual tricks.
Hierarchy still matters. Space still matters. Story still reads on screen.
The Super Bowl just happens to be the biggest place to watch that truth play out, year after year.
Shot of the good stuff.
