Brands & Products Research

Search for books, ebooks, articles, and more

• Brand Name Products
• Inventions
• Design Industrial
• New Products
• Advertising
  • TIP:Use the asterisk (*) to broaden your search: advertis* will search advertise, advertisement, advertisements, and advertising.
• Logos symbols

TIPS:

• Try searching the specific brand name e.g. Coca Cola or company e.g. Revlon, or type of product e.g. toys (for LEGOs); dolls (for Barbie dolls)
• Use synonyms, alternative, & related terms: cars OR automobiles; for kitchenware: kitchen utensils; tableware; household appliances
• To search for information about a specific time period:
  • add ‘history’ to one of the search suggestions above, e.g. brand name products history; design industrial history
  • add a century'  e.g. design industrial 19th century 
  • for decades in the 20th century, spell it out e.g. nineteen sixties

  Company / Designer / Trade Association web sites

• May include useful information about product, company, or designer
• May include images
• Content and number and size of images vary
• Ease of use of sites vary
• Look for company "archives" or timelines to see historical and milestone information
• Images may be limited to objects currently in production and/or available for sale
  Examples:   General Electric    Philippe Starck

Collector or object-dedicated web sites
Sites organized by collectors or by other knowledgeable, interested parties can be very informative and include, or lead to, useful images

Example:   Eva Zeisel Forum     Toaster Museum    

Google patent search

• Finds patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued from 1790 to the present
• Includes 8 million patents and 3 million patent applications
• Includes the scans of the original documents with image