By the 1970s many believed the modern era was drawing to a close in art, design, politics, and literature. The cultural norms of Western society were being scrutinized, and the authority of traditional institutions was being questioned. Pluralism emerged as people began to dispute the underlying tenets of modernism. The continuing quest for equality by women and minorities contributed to a growing climate of cultural diversity, as did immigration, international travel, and global communications. Accepted viewpoints were challenged by those who sought to remedy bias and distortion in the historical record. The social, economic, and environmental awareness of the period caused many to believe the modern aesthetic was no longer relevant in an emerging postindustrial society. People in many fields embraced the term postmodernism to express a climate of cultural change. These included architects, economists, feminists, and even theologians. Maddeningly vague and overused, postmodernism became a byword in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
In design, postmodernism referred to the work of architects and designers who were breaking with the international style so prevalent since the Bauhaus. Postmodernism sent shock waves through the design establishment as it challenged the order and clarity of modern design, particularly corporate design. (Some observers reject the term postmodern, arguing that it is merely a continuation of the modern movement. Late modernism and mannerism are proffered as alternative terms for late twentieth-century design.) Design forms and terminology have political and social meaning, expressing attitudes and values of their time; postmodernism gained a strong foothold among the generation of designers who emerged in the 1970s. Perhaps the international style had been so thoroughly refined, explored, and accepted that a backlash was inevitable. Historical references, decoration, and the vernacular were disdained by modernists, while postmodern designers drew upon these resources to expand the range of design possibilities.
As the social activism of the late 1960s gave way to more self-absorbed, personal involvement during the 1970s, media pundits spoke of the “Me Generation” to convey the spirit of the decade. The intuitive and playful aspects of postmodern design reflect personal involvement. Postmodern designers place a form in space because it “feels” right rather than to fulfill a rational communicative need. As radically different as a psychedelic poster and a visual-identity manual might be, both are corporate designs, intended for or relating to a body of people with common values. Postmodern design, on the other hand, is often subjective and even eccentric; the designer becomes an artist performing before an audience with the bravura of a street musician, and the audience either responds or passes on.
The umbrella term postmodernism does not tell the whole story, because while architecture may fit rather neatly into historical categories (Victorian, art nouveau, modern, and postmodern), graphic design is far too diverse to fit such a simplistic system. Just three examples of graphic-design expressions having no parallel in architecture are World War I posters, the work of the Push Pin group, and the psychedelic poster. Graphic design, rapidly changing and ephemeral, was never dominated by the international style the way architecture was. Postmodern graphic design can be loosely categorized as moving in several major directions: the early extensions of the International Typographic Style by Swiss designers who broke with the dicta of the movement; new-wave typography, which began in Basel, Switzerland, through the teaching and research of Wolfgang Weingart; the exuberant mannerism of the early 1980s, with significant contributions from the Memphis group in Milan, Italy, and from San Francisco designers; retro, the eclectic revivals and eccentric reinventions of earlier models, particularly European vernacular and modern design from the decades between the world wars; and the electronic revolution spawned by the Macintosh computer in the late 1980s, which drew upon all of the earlier thrusts.
Precursors to postmodern design
During the 1960s, supermannerism and supergraphics were words coined to describe breaks with modern design. Like many art history labels, supermannerism was first used disparagingly. Mannerism was originally used as a label for the stylish art of the 1500s, which broke with the natural and harmonious beauty of the High Renaissance. Mannerism departed from Renaissance norms by taking liberties with the classical vocabulary of form; the term supermannerism was first used by advocates of the purist modern movement to describe work by young architects whose expanded formal range embraced the pop-art notion of changing scale and context. Zigzag diagonals were added to the horizontal and vertical structures of modern architecture. An architecture of inclusion replaced the machine aesthetic and simple geometric forms of the international style.
In the late 1960s, the application of graphic design to architecture in large-scale environmental graphics extended the formal concepts of art concret and the International Typographic Style. Supergraphics became the popular name for bold geometric shapes of bright color, giant Helvetica letterforms, and huge pictographs warping walls, bending corners, and flowing from the floor to the wall and across the ceiling, expanding or contracting space in scale changes relative to the architecture. Psychological as well as decorative values were addressed, as designers created forms to enliven dismal institutional architecture, reverse or shorten the perspective of endless hallways, and bring vitality and color to the built environment.
Philadelphia-born Robert Venturi (b. 1925) is the most controversial and original architect branded with the supermannerist label. When Venturi looked at the vulgar and disdained urban landscape of billboards, electric signs, and pedestrian buildings he saw a vitality and functional purpose and urged designers to learn from the hyperbolic glitter of places such as Las Vegas. Venturi saw the building not as sculptured form but as a component of the larger urban traffic/communication/interior-exterior environmental system. Uncommon uses and juxtaposition of materials, graphic elements from the commercial roadside strip, billboards, and environmental-scale lettering were freely added to his architectural vocabulary. Venturi sees graphic communications and new technologies as important tools for architecture; his proposal for the Football Hall of Fame (Fig. 22–1) featured a giant illuminated sign that would have been visible for miles on the approaching interstate highway.
Supermannerist architect and former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Charles W. Moore (1923–93) designed a large condominium project at Gualala, California, in the mid-1960s. He called on graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1932) to bring the walls and ceilings of this large architectural project to life through the application of color and shape (Fig. 22–2). Solomon, a San Francisco native and painter who had studied graphic design at the Basel School of Design during the late 1950s, used a palette of pure hue and elementary shape in compositions that transformed the totality of the space. In 1970 the American Institute of Architects presented its medal to Solomon for “bold, fresh, and exciting designs clearly illustrating the importance of rational but vigorous graphics in bringing order to the urban scene.”
Both the name supergraphics and the idea caught the public’s fancy; by 1970 supergraphics were being used in corporate identification systems, in interior design for shops and boutiques, and to brighten factory and school environments, bringing about greater graphic-design involvement in environmental design.
Early Swiss postmodern design
Tendencies toward postmodern graphic design first emerged from individuals working within the dictates of the International Typographic Style. The main thrust of this movement was toward neutral and objective typography; the playful, unexpected, and disorganized were rarely allowed to encroach upon its cool clarity and scientific objectivity. One of the earliest indications that a younger generation of graphic designers was starting to enlarge its range of possibilities in the 1960s was the 1964 advertisement (Fig. 22–3) for the printer E. Lutz & Company by Rosmarie Tissi. Different kinds of copy printed by the client—headlines, text, halftones, and solids—are illustrated by elemental symbols. Rather than align these images in boxes ordered on a grid, the five images appear to have been intuitively and randomly placed. The ruled lines forming the edges of the squares on which these images rest have lost-and-found edges to engage the viewer, who must fill in the missing lines.
In 1966 Siegfried Odermatt (b. 1926) designed a trademark for the Union Safe Company that is the antithesis of Swiss design, for the letterforms in the word Union are jammed together to form a compact unit suggesting the sturdy strength of the product, sacrificing legibility in the process. In full-page newspaper advertisements for Union (Figs. 22–4), placed during prestigious banking conferences, Odermatt treated this logo as pure form to be manipulated visually, creating a plastic dynamic on the newspaper page. Odermatt and Tissi have always used strong graphic impact, a playful sense of form, and unexpected manipulation of space in seeking logical and effective solutions to design problems.
When Odermatt and Tissi turned to typeface design, their originality of form produced unexpected letterforms, as can be seen in Tissi’s cover for an issue of Graphis (Fig. 22–5). A presentation folder designed by Tissi for the printing firm Anton Schöb (Fig. 22–6) achieves typographic vitality by overlapping and combining letterforms. Placing text typography on geometric shapes whose configuration is generated by the line lengths of the text is a technique Odermatt and Tissi used frequently during the 1980s and 1990s (Figs. 22–7 and 22–8).
Another Swiss designer with a strong interest in complexity of form is Steff Geissbuhler (b. 1942), who joined the J. R. Geigy pharmaceutical company in the mid-1960s. In a capabilities brochure for the publicity department (Fig. 22–9), his swirling typographic configuration becomes a circular tunnel moving back into space. He moved to Philadelphia and established an independent design practice before becoming a partner at Chermayeff & Geismar Associates. While at Chermayeff & Geismar he created corporate identity programs for Merck, Time Warner, NBC, Telemundo, the Union Pacific Corporation, the Toledo Museum of Art, Crane & Co., and the May Department Stores Companies, among others. Complexity of form is never used as an end in itself; the dynamic of multiple components forming a whole grows from the fundamental content of the design problem at hand (Fig. 22–10). Careful structural control enables Geissbuhler to organize vast numbers of elements into a cohesive whole.
Other Swiss designers were interested in using typography as a means of bending the traditions of modernism to experiment and express their ideas for communication with the viewer. Bruno Monguzzi (b. 1941) is an extraordinary graphic designer, typographer, and teacher. After studying in Geneva and London he began his career at Studio Boggeri in Milan in 1961. His typographic solutions express the subject matter through an innovative bond of form and function (Fig. 22–11).
Odermatt, Tissi, Geissbuhler, and others working in the 1960s did not rebel against the International Typographic Style; rather, they expanded its parameters. In the 1970s, this development was followed by a revolt, as practitioners and teachers schooled in the International Typographic Style sought to reinvent typographic design. These new directions were quickly labeled new-wave typography.
New-wave typography
Just as Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold, and others employed a new approach to typographic design in the 1920s, some forty years later opposition to the cool formalism of the modernist tradition emerged first in Switzerland and then spread around the world. In 1964 young Wolfgang Weingart (b. 1941), who had already completed a three-year apprenticeship in typography, arrived in Basel from southeastern Germany to study with Emil Ruder. Weingart joined Armin Hofmann on the faculty of the Basel School of Design in 1968. As a student, Weingart had worked under the influence of Ruder and Hofmann; as a faculty member, however, he taught type differently than his mentors. Weingart began to question the typography of absolute order and cleanness. He wondered if perhaps the international style had become so refined and prevalent throughout the world that it had reached an anemic phase. Rejecting the right angle as an exclusive organizing principle, Weingart achieved a joyous and intuitive design with a richness of visual effects. Ideology and rules collapsed in the face of his boundless energy. Drawing on broad technical knowledge and a willingness to explore the untried, he turned up the intensity of the page.
From 1968 until 1974, Weingart worked with lead type and letterpress systems. In his teaching and personal projects he sought to breathe a new spirit into the typography of order and neatness by questioning the premises, rules, and surface appearances that were hardening the innovations of the Swiss masters into an academic style. Time-honored traditions of typography and visual-language systems were rethought. To emphasize an important word in a headline, Weingart often made it white on a chunky, black rectangle. Wide letterspacing, discarded in the fetish for tight type that came with the changeover from metal to photographic typographic systems in the 1960s, was explored. In response to a request to identify the kinds of typography he designed, Weingart listed “sunshine type, bunny type, ant type, five-minute type, typewriter type,” and “for-the-people type.” The humor and expressive metaphors Weingart used to define his work find close parallels in his typographic invention.
But by the mid-1970s Weingart set off in a new direction, turning his attention toward offset printing and film systems. He used the printer’s camera to alter images and explored the unique properties of the film image. Weingart began to move away from purely typographic design and embraced collage as a medium for visual communication (Fig. 22–12). A new technique—the sandwiching or layering of images and type that have been photographed as film positives—enabled him to overlap complex visual information (Fig. 22–13), juxtapose textures, and unify typography in unprecedented ways. He was especially intrigued by the graphic qualities of enlarged halftone dots (Fig. 22–14) and the moiré patterns produced when these dot matrices are overlapped and then shifted against each other. His design process involved multiple film positives and masks that were stacked, arranged, then exposed with careful registration to produce one negative, which went to the printer. In color work such as his poster for Das Schweizer Plakat (The Swiss Poster) exhibition (Fig. 22–15), the process was extended to allow the interaction of two colors, using overprinting to build dimensional layers of illusionistic forms.
Weingart advocates the “Gutenberg approach” to graphic communications: designers, like the early typographic printers, should strive to stay involved in all aspects of the process (including concept, typesetting, prepress production, and printing) to ensure the realization of their vision. By the time homogenized versions of Weingart’s innovations were assimilated into the mainstream of graphic design, he had moved on to new explorations.
In October 1972, Weingart traveled to the United States and delivered presentations at eight prominent design schools. His new design sensibility fell on fertile soil. Young designers who spent time at Basel afterwards came to the United States to teach and practice. These included Dan Friedman (1945–95), April Greiman (b. 1948), and Willi Kunz (b. 1943). A new typographic vocabulary began to filter into an American design profession that had grown bored with the redundancy of sans-serif and grid-based corporate systems. Weingart and others who pioneered the typographic new wave strongly rejected the notion of style and saw their work as an attempt to expand the parameters of typographic communication. Their work was so widely imitated, however, especially in design education, that it gave rise to a prevailing typographic approach in the late 1970s and 1980s. Specific design ideas explored by Weingart and his students in the late 1960s and early 1970s and adopted a decade later include letterspaced sans-serif type; bold stair-step rules; ruled lines punctuating and energizing space; diagonal type; the introduction of italic type and/or weight changes within words; and type reversed from a series of bars.
Dan Friedman, an American who studied at the Ulm Institute of Design in 1967 and 1968 and with Weingart at the Basel School of Design from 1968 to 1970, rethought the nature of typographic forms and how they could operate in space; he called his Typografische Monatsblätter (Fig. 22–16) magazine cover a visual manifesto for a more inclusive typography. After returning to the United States, he taught courses at Yale University and the Philadelphia College of Art in 1970 and 1971. At a time when letterpress typography was collapsing but the new photographic and computer-generated processes were still evolving, Friedman addressed the problem of teaching the basics of a new typography through syntactic and semantic investigations, using such ordinary copy as a daily weather report (Fig. 22–17). After exploring principles of rhythm, harmony, and proportion, students were given a neutral message in 30-point Univers 55 and 65. A sequence of design operations ranging from simple to complex was conducted, varying the effects of the message through changes in position; weight and scale; slant (roman to italic); line, word, and letter spacing; clustering; symbolic gesture; and pictorial confrontation. Another concern was the evaluation of legibility and readability, for Friedman believed that “legibility (a quality of efficient, clear, and simple reading) is often in conflict with readability (a quality that promotes interest, pleasure, and challenge in reading).” He urged his students to make heir work both functional and aesthetically unconventional. Exploration of the spatial intervals between letters, lines, and words gave some works by Friedman and his students a deconstructed quality—that is, the syntactic structure has been pulled apart. Nevertheless, even in the most random solutions, an underlying structure is evident. The 1973 publication of this work in the journal Visible Language had a widespread influence on typographic education in the United States and other countries.
Friedman’s graphic design, furniture, and sculptural works were paradigms of the emerging postmodern currents. His formal background at Ulm and typographic experimentation at Basel were synthesized as he played formal structure against spontaneous and expressive forms. Texture, surface, and spatial layering were explored in his work; organic and geometric forms were contrasted. Friedman believed that forms could be amusing to look at and provocative, and he freely injected these properties into his designs. As his work progressed, he rejected the term postmodernism in favor of radical modernism, which he defined as a reaffirmation of the idealism of modernism altered to accommodate the radical cultural and social changes occurring in the late twentieth century.
On the West Coast, April Greiman established a studio in Los Angeles after studying with Weingart and Hofmann in Basel during the early 1970s. Weingart observed, “April Greiman took the ideas developed at Basel in a new direction, particularly in her use of color and photography. All things are possible in America!” While Greiman drew from Basel design, she evolved a new attitude toward space (Fig. 22–18). Typographic design has usually been the most two-dimensional of all the visual disciplines, but Greiman achieves a sense of depth in her typographic pages. Overlapping forms, diagonal lines that imply perspective or reverse perspective, gestured strokes that move back in space, overlap, or move behind geometric elements, and floating forms that cast shadows are the means she uses to make forms move forward and backward from the surface of the printed page. Greiman’s typographic space operates with the same governing principle defined by El Lissitzky in his PROUN paintings but never applied to his typography.
Strong tactile qualities are found in Greiman’s work, as textures resulting from enlarged four-color process screens and repetitive patterns of dots or ruled lines contrast with flat shapes of color or tone. The intuitive dispersal of numerous elements could collapse into chaos, but a point-counterpoint organization maintains order by pulling the eye into the page through dominant elements that quickly lead to others as the viewer moves through the page’s richness of form.
In collaboration with the photographer Jayme Odgers (b. 1939), Greiman moved graphic design and photographic illustration into a new realm of dynamic space (Fig. 22–19). Graphic elements become part of the real space of photographs. Odgers’s wide-angle photographs with extreme depth of field have objects thrusting into the picture space from the peripheral edges.
Swiss-born Willi Kunz played a role in introducing the new typography developed at Basel to the United States. After apprenticing as a typesetter, Kunz completed his postgraduate studies at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. He moved to New York City in 1970 and worked there as a graphic designer until 1973, when he accepted a one-year appointment to teach typography at the Basel School of Design while Weingart was on sabbatical. Inspired by the research of Weingart and his students, and with the type shop at his disposal, Kunz began a series of typographic interpretations of writings by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan. These were hand-printed and published under the title 12 T y p o graphical Interpretations (Fig. 22–20). McLuhan’s thoughts on communications and printing were visualized and intensified by contrasting type weights, sometimes within the same word; geometric stair-step forms; unorthodox letter, word, and line spacing; lines and bars used as visual punctuation and spatial elements; and textual areas introduced into the spatial field.
After Kunz returned to New York and established his design office, his exhibition poster for photographer Fredrich Cantor (Fig. 22–21) was hailed by Print magazine as a “quintessential example of Post Modern design.” The contrasting sizes of the photographs, the mixed weight of the typography, the diagonal letterspaced type, and the stepped pattern of dots covering part of the space all heralded the arrival of a new typographic syntax.
Kunz does not construct his work on a predetermined grid; rather, he starts the visual composition and permits structure and alignments to grow through the design process. He builds his typographic constellations with concern for the essential message, the structure unfolding in response to the information to be conveyed. He might be called an information architect who uses visual hierarchy and syntax to bring order and clarity to messages, as seen in a lecture series and exhibition schedule announcement (Fig. 22–22). Kunz’s working method is not unlike the process used by Piet Zwart, in that he believes design must be resolved by working with the actual typographic materials and generally does not spend a large amount of time on preliminary sketches. After the basic ideas are formed, he has actual type material set and then develops the final solution from a careful probing of the organizational possibilities of the project.
As new-wave typography spread, many designers working in the International Typographic Style began to test their precepts against the exploratory design attitudes that were emerging. Dada photomontage techniques were used; grids were established and then violated; functional elements of 1920s new typography were used as decorative elements; and designers began to define the overall space as a field of tension, much as Zwart had done half a century earlier. Moreover, intuition and play reentered the design process. This can be seen in the work of designer and educator Kenneth Hiebert (b. 1930), who retained the harmonious balance achieved through experience with grid systems but, in designs such as his 1979 “Art/Design/Play” poster for a Paul Rand exhibition (Fig. 22–23), introduced texture, a small dot pattern, and a wider typeface range, and shifted forms on the grid.
A very early application of the architectural term postmodern to graphic design was the title of a 1977 Chicago exhibition curated by Bill Bonnell: Postmodern Typography: Recent American Developments. Ironically, the exhibition included works by Steff Geissbuhler, April Greiman, Dan Friedman, and Willi Kunz—all of whom had come to America after work or study in Switzerland.
The Memphis and San Francisco schools
A new movement in postmodern design swept into international prominence as the 1970s ended and the 1980s began. This work was pluralistic, eclectic, and hedonistic. Designers were deeply enamored of texture, pattern, surface, color, and a playful geometry. Innovation occurred in many cities and countries around the globe, with important contributions from diverse groups, including architects and product designers in Milan, Italy, and graphic designers in San Francisco, California.
An important inspiration for all areas of design emerged in 1981, when global attention was concentrated on an exhibition of the Italian design group Memphis, led by eminent Italian architectural and product designer Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007). The group chose the name Memphis to reflect the inspiration they drew from both contemporary popular culture and the artifacts and ornaments of ancient cultures. Function became secondary to surface pattern and texture, color, and fantastic forms in their lamps, sofas, and cabinets. The Memphis sensibility embraces exaggerated geometric forms in bright (even garish) colors, bold geometric and organic patterns, often printed on plastic laminates, and allusions to earlier cultures, such as the use of marble and granite for table and chair legs evocative of columns in Greco-Roman architecture. In Memphis designs, form no longer follows function—it becomes the reason for the design to exist. Christoph Radl (Fig. 22–24) headed the Memphis graphic design section. The experimental attitude, fascination with tactile and decorative color pattern, and exuberant geometry had a direct influence on postmodern design throughout the world. Memphis exploded onto the scene just as the prosperous 1980s began and helped set the stage for an extravagantly decorative period of design.
Postmodernist architect Michael Graves (1934–2015) was another source of design inspiration. Graves became known in the 1960s for private houses designed in the minimalist tradition of orthodox modernism influenced by Le Corbusier. In the late 1970s, he rebelled against the modernist tradition and expanded his range of architectural forms. Classical colonnades and loggias were revived and combined with visual elements inspired by cubist paintings. Graves’s geometry was not the cool purism of Mies van der Rohe; it was an energetic, high-spirited geometry of decorative surfaces and tactile repetitive patterns. His visual motifs are expressed in a poster designed by Philadelphia graphic designer William Longhauser (b. 1947) for an exhibition of Graves’s works (Fig. 22–25). In this poster, which became an influential postmodern design in itself, a background pattern of repetitive dots is produced by the letters M I C H A E L letterspaced on a grid. In a later poster by Longhauser for an AIGA lecture by Bob Greenberg of R/GA (R/Greenberg Associates), letterforms and images of Greenberg become objects resonating through time and dynamic space (Fig. 22–26).
The design community and art schools in San Francisco were strongly influenced by the international style. This direction was punctuated by the flowering of the psychedelic poster in the late 1960s, proving to Bay Area graphic designers that tremendous potential existed for innovative form and color. In the early 1980s, San Francisco postmodern design emerged quickly, earning the city a reputation as a center for creative design. Michael Vanderbyl (b. 1947), Michael Manwaring (b. 1942), and Michael Cronan (1951–2013) figured prominently in the evolution of the medium. An ongoing dialogue between these and other San Francisco designers enabled them to learn from each other as they forged the Bay Area postmodern movement. The range of graphic possibilities they explored together conveyed a cheerful optimism, a warm sense of humor, and an unbridled attitude about form and space. Freely drawn gestures, a sunny palette of pastel hues, and intuitive composition are often found in their work. Grays were often used with tints of lavender, turquoise, and peach.
Vanderbyl’s poster for California Public Radio (Fig. 22–27) is an important harbinger of the emerging school. The palette, repetition of ruled lines, and overall pattern of radio waves on the background foretell the new directions. Forms such as the lines and gestures signifying radio waves are carefully selected for their symbolic meaning; they also play strong decorative and structural roles. Vanderbyl paid homage to the exuberant furniture and textile designs of Memphis in a promotional mailer for Simpson Paper Company (Fig. 22–28) and aimed his wit at postmodern architecture in a poster series that used graphic images to make editorial comments about aspects of the movement (Fig. 22–29). This series shows the emergence of a self-referential attitude within design disciplines. In graphics for products ranging from woolen knit caps to office furniture (Fig. 22–30) Vanderbyl combines a casual postmodern vitality with a typographic clarity echoing his background in the ordered typography of the International Typographic Style. The Hickory Business Furniture catalogue cover is part of a systematic design program combining informational graphics with vibrant visual expression.
In Bay Area designs, elements are given symbolic roles and become part of the content. A lyrical resonance permeates the color, form, and texture in Michael Manwaring’s graphic and environmental designs. In his series of posters for Santa Cruz clothing (Fig. 22–31), graphic forms and color serve the function of a traditional headline, linking lifestyle values to consumer products. In Manwaring’s brochure cover for Barr Exhibits (Fig. 22–32), the juxtaposition of a dimensional exhibition in the shape of the letter B against a grid pattern of small squares denoting floor plans and structural elements conveys the essence of the client’s activity.
Although the San Francisco designers share a set of gestures, shapes, palettes, and intuitive spatial arrangements, personal attitudes are evident in their work. Michael Cronan often built his compositions with shapes that become symbolic vessels or containers for color. His Beethoven Festival poster (Fig. 22–33), designed with Shannon Terry, uses the repetition of diagonal and curved forms to bring order and harmony to the composition. Three treatments of display typography are unified by their structural relationship to the edges of the rectangle and the green architectural elements.
The ornamental and mannerist postmodern design styles spawned by diverse international sources, including Memphis, Michael Graves, and San Francisco designers, became a dominant design direction during the 1980s. In a decade when economic expansion and materialism were fueled by abundant energy supplies and heavily leveraged debt, architects around the world decorated façades with arches, pediments, and colonnades, and embellished them with marble, chrome, and pastel colors. Graphic designers used lush palettes and ornamented their work with gestures, textures, and decorative geometric elements. Surface and style often became ends in themselves.
Retro and vernacular design
During the 1980s, graphic designers gained a growing understanding and appreciation of their history. A movement based on historical revival first emerged in New York and spread rapidly throughout the world. Called retro by some designers, it was based on an uninhibited eclectic interest in modernist European design from the first half of the century, a flagrant disregard for the rules of proper typography, and a fascination with eccentric and mannered typefaces designed and widely used during the 1920s and 1930s that were more or less forgotten after World War II. The prefix retro suggests the term retrograde, implying “backward-looking” and “contrary to the usual.” Retro may be considered an aspect of postmodernism because of its interest in historical revivals, yet it paraphrases modern design from the decades between the wars rather than the Greco-Roman and Renaissance motifs employed by many architects. The term vernacular design refers to artistic and technical expression broadly characteristic of a locale or historical period; it closely relates to retro design. Vernacular design is the paraphrasing of earlier commonplace graphic forms, such as baseball cards, matchbook covers, and unskilled commercial illustrations and printing from past decades.
The New York approach to retro began with a small number of designers, including Paula Scher (b. 1948), Louise Fili (b. 1951), and Carin Goldberg (b. 1953). They rediscovered earlier twentieth-century graphics, ranging from the turn-of-the-century Vienna Secession to modernist but decorative European typefaces popular during the two decades between the world wars. Their approach to space, color, and texture is often personal and original. Unorthodox attitudes about the accepted rules and regulations of design and typography permit them to take risks and experiment by exuberantly mixing fonts, using extreme letterspacing, and printing type in subtle color-on-color combinations. They are, however, typographic precisionists seeking a sublime level of visual organization. In many of their designs, typography does not play a role secondary to illustration and photography but moves to center stage to become figurative, animated, and expressive. The self-consciously eclectic aspects of retro continue a trait of New York design: Scher credits Seymour Chwast of Push Pin Studios and his use of Victorian, art nouveau, and art deco forms as an important inspiration; Fili worked with Herb Lubalin, who often called upon the extravagance of Victorian and art nouveau typographic themes. Scher and Fili moved New York’s tradition of historicism forward into the 1920s and 1930s.
Paula Scher, an outspoken designer with an ironic sense of humor, worked for CBS Records during the 1970s, when music graphics were characterized by generous budgets, elaborate photography and illustrations, and opportunities to experiment. The highly successful recording industry crashed in 1978 as inflation, skyrocketing production costs, and slumping sales took a powerful toll. By 1979, tight budgets often forced Scher to develop typographic solutions based on imagination, art- and design-history sources, and her fascination with obscure and little-used typefaces. Art deco, Russian constructivism, and outmoded typefaces were incorporated into her work.
Russian constructivism provided important typographic inspiration (Fig. 22–34). Scher did not copy the earlier constructivist style but used its vocabulary of forms and form relationships, reinventing and combining them in unexpected ways. Her use of color and space are different; the floating weightlessness of Russian constructivism is replaced by a dense packing of forms in space with the weight and vigor of old wood-type posters. After Scher formed the Koppel & Scher studio in partnership with Terry Koppel (b. 1950) in 1984, their “Great Beginnings” booklet (Fig. 22–35) announced their new partnership with period typographic interpretations of the first paragraphs of great novels. Retro designs became a national phenomenon in 1985 after Scher designed the first of two folios for a paper manufacturer, presenting twenty-two complete fonts of “an eclectic collection of eccentric and decorative type,” including such anomalies as the 1911 decorative script Phyllis, the playful 1925 Greco Rosart (renamed Greco Deco by Scher), and the quirky, thick-and-thin sans-serif Trio. Designers suddenly had access to complete fonts of eccentric 1920s and 1930s typefaces whose availability had vanished with hand-set metal type. The close paraphrasing of resources has been a controversial aspect of some retro designs (Fig. 22–36).
Retro thrived in book-jacket design. The work of Louise Fili, who developed a deep love of typography while working in her college’s type shop, is highly personal and intuitive. After working for Herb Lubalin and art-directing Pantheon Books from 1978 to 1989, she launched her own studio. Her early work evidenced Lubalin’s influence and then grew in power and originality from this starting point. Fili routinely vacationed in Europe each summer after the annual crunch of producing cover designs for Pantheon’s huge fall list, and her travels inspired the development of an original approach to American book-jacket design. Eccentric letterforms on signs at little Italian seashore resorts built between the world wars fascinated her, as did graphics from the same era found in French and Italian flea markets and used-book stalls. These vernacular graphics incorporated textured backgrounds, silhouetted photographs, and modernistic sans-serif typefaces with decorative elements or exaggerated proportions. After World War II, design sensibilities shifted, and these typestyles and techniques fell into disuse. When typography converted from metal to photographic methods in the 1960s and 1970s, the outmoded faces were not converted to the new processes. Fili responded to them with fresh eyes and began to introduce them into her work.
Fili’s work is elegant and refined, possessing great subtlety and even softness. Seeking the right graphic resonance for each book, she searches for the appropriate typeface, color scheme, and imagery by producing volumes of tissue layouts. Although the death of hand-set metal typography made many old typefaces unavailable, Fili works around this problem and uses now-forgotten faces—such as Iris, a condensed sans serif with thin horizontal strokes, and Electra Seminegra, a bold geometric sans-serif face with inverted triangles for the crossbar of the capital A—by restoring letterforms from old printed specimens and commissioning hand-lettering of the missing letters or even an entire title. In Fili’s book covers, color and imagery resonate with the essence and spirit of the literature, almost as though she has developed a sixth sense for interpreting the author’s work (Fig. 22–37).
Carin Goldberg developed a fine-tuned reverence for type as an assistant to Lou Dorfsman at CBS in the 1970s, where every type proof entering the offices was hand-altered and improved. She then worked at CBS Records under Paula Scher, whose curiosity, reverence for design history, and attitude toward her work were vital influences. When Goldberg opened a design office she focused on book jackets because her primary interest was in single-surface, poster-like areas. She describes her work as being 90 percent intuition and acknowledges the influence of early modernist designers, especially A. M. Cassandre. Goldberg’s early experience as a painter informs her attitude toward space, as does an architectural orientation inspired by classes she shared with architecture students in school and by the location of her studio adjacent to her husband’s architectural office. She says she “paints with [her] T-square”—functioning as a typographic precisionist with a painterly orientation. This explains the personal attitude that underlies her work, transcending her myriad and eclectic sources (Figs. 22–38 and 22–39).
Lorraine Louie (b. 1955) and Daniel Pelavin (b. 1948) embraced the general resonance of the retro approach. Shape, spatial composition, and color are primary vehicles in Louie’s work. A series for the literary journal the Quarterly (Fig. 22–40) uses a large Q as a sign for the publication. Colorful geometric shapes balanced within the space energize each issue. Pelavin dates his affinities for 1930s and 1940s work to pre–World War II “late moderne” architecture and furniture from his college days in Michigan. High school industrial arts and drafting classes helped him develop formidable lettering skills. Pelavin draws inspiration from Gustav Klimt, the Vienna Workshops (Fig. 22–41), and streamlined art deco forms. He combines a reductive abstraction with precise mechanistic forms (Fig. 22–42).
When Scher and Fili created their first designs in what later became known as the retro idiom, many veteran designers, raised on formal purity and typographic refinement, were appalled to see the return of these exiled letterforms and eccentric spatial organizations. But retro, like new-wave typography in the late 1970s and early 1980s, refused to go away, and more and more designers and clients responded to its energy and fresh approach. It crept into the design vocabulary as designers dared to use such eccentric typefaces as Empire, Bernhard Fashion, and Huxley. Precise spacing, scale relationships, and color combinations give the best retro designs their remarkable vitality.
Other original voices explored reinvention of historical models quite differently from the New York designers. At the Duffy Design Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Joe Duffy (b. 1949) and Charles S. Anderson (b. 1958) designed nostalgic revivals of vernacular and modernistic graphic arts from the first half of the century. Historical graphic resources as diverse as Aztec ornaments and Ouija boards were plumbed for their form and color. Anderson recalls growing up in the small town of Boone, Iowa, and being impressed by old graphics from the 1940s that had never been thrown away. The walls of an old print shop in town were covered with graphics from an earlier era, and a retired artist who had created ubiquitous clip art as a newspaper illustrator made an indelible impression on the designer. Inspiration came from humble, coarsely printed spot drawings on old matchbook covers and newspaper ads; the warmth of traditional typefaces and nineteenth-century woodcuts applied to grocery-store packaging (Fig. 22–43); decorative emblematic labels; and trademarks recalling postage stamps, official seals, and pictorial trademarks of an earlier time. The power of graphic design was demonstrated by the Classico spaghetti sauce labels, when sales of this product, packaged in old-style mason jars with ornately illustrated and designed labels, soared to ninety-two million dollars within two years in spite of a limited advertising budget.
In 1989, Anderson left the Duffy Design Group and opened the Charles S. Anderson Design Company. He declared his intent to give images or messages “a tangible and inherent artistic value. We see a new modernism evolving. One not based on sterile minimalism and an absence of humanity, but one that is rich in cultural vocabulary and personal expression.” The firm’s work reflects a genuine enchantment with textural properties, as enlarged details from cheap printing, such as comic books, and overall patterns based on spot illustrations find their way into designs. A subsidiary company, the CSA Archive, was formed to manufacture publications and other products. These ranged from a set of watches with whimsical illustrated faces to a massive collection of historical and original line illustrations (Fig. 22–44).
In London, one of the more original visions of the 1980s emerged as Neville Brody (b. 1957) designed graphics and album covers for rock music and art-directed English magazines, including the Face and Arena. Although Brody has been influenced by the geometric forms of the Russian constructivist artists, especially Rodchenko, and by Dada’s experimental attitudes and rejection of the canons of the ruling establishment, it would misrepresent his philosophy and values to label him a retro designer reinventing past styles. As an art student at the London College of Printing in the late 1970s, Brody wondered if “within mass communications, the human had been lost completely.” While confronting the decision whether to pursue fine art or graphic design, Brody recalls asking: “Why can’t you take a painterly approach within the printed medium? I wanted to make people more aware rather than less aware, and with the design that I had started to do, I followed the idea of design to reveal, not to conceal.” Brody’s work evolved from an effort to discover an intuitive yet logical approach to design, expressing a personal vision that could have meaning to his audience.
Brody has stated that he never learned the rules of correct typography, which left him free to invent working methods and spatial configurations. His typographic configurations project an absolute emblematic authority that evokes heraldry and military emblems (Fig. 22–45). He designed a series of geometric sans-serif typefaces for the Face, bringing a strong graphic image to the magazine. Headlines became objects, with each carefully crafted to express content. Brody viewed the magazine as a multidimensional object existing in time and space and maintaining continuity from issue to issue. This continuity was explored when graphic elements such as the contents page logo were deconstructed into abstract glyphs over several months (Fig. 22–46). Brody’s ability to load a layout with levels of meaning is seen in the opening spread of an interview with Andy Warhol (Fig. 22–47): The repeated photograph echoes Warhol’s use of repeated images; the large W is actually the M from a feature on the popular singer Madonna from the month before, turned upside down and bringing a small portion of a photograph and part of a headline with it, paraphrasing Warhol’s use of existing graphic material. The oval within a circle and the cross above it refer to the sexuality of Warhol’s life and work.
Seldom have a designer’s hard-won accomplishments been as plagiarized as Brody’s distinctive work was in the late 1980s. As clones of his typefaces and emblematic logo designs appeared all around the world, Brody designed a new quarterly magazine, Arena, using the clean, informational attributes of Helvetica type in dynamic ways. Large scale, strong value contrasts, and clear, simple layouts characterize his art direction of this publication.
The major thrust of postmodern graphic design is a spirit of liberation, a freedom to be intuitive and personal, and a willingness to go against the modern design so dominant through much of the twentieth century. Designers felt free to respond positively to vernacular and historic forms and to incorporate these into their work. An atmosphere of inclusion and expanding possibilities enabled many designers to experiment with highly personal, even eccentric, ideas. From the mid-1980s onward, designers became increasingly fascinated with the potential of computer-assisted design, not only as an efficient production tool but also as a potent catalyst for innovation. The unfolding strands of postmodern design became intertwined with electronic capabilities.