The first wave of modern design in America was imported by talented European immigrants seeking to escape political totalitarianism. They provided Americans with a firsthand introduction to the European avant-garde. The 1940s saw steps toward an original American approach to modernist design. While borrowing freely from the work of European designers, Americans added new forms and concepts. European design was often theoretical and highly structured; American design was pragmatic, intuitive, and less formal in its approach to organizing space. Just as Paris had been receptive to new ideas and images during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York City served as a cultural incubator in the middle of the twentieth century. It nurtured creativity, and its prevailing climate attracted individuals of great talent and enabled them to realize their potential.
Unique aspects of American culture and society informed the American approach to modern design. The United States is an egalitarian society with capitalistic values, limited artistic traditions before World War II, and a diverse ethnic heritage. In this highly competitive society, novelty of technique and originality of concept were much prized, and designers sought to simultaneously solve communications problems, present information directly, and satisfy a need for personal expression. This phase of American graphic design began with strong European roots during the 1940s, gained international prominence in the 1950s, and continued until the 1990s.
Pioneers of the New York school
More than any other American designer, Paul Rand (1914–96) initiated the American approach to modern graphic design. Born Peretz Rosenbaum, he changed his name at the outset of his professional life. When he was twenty-three years old, Rand began the first phase of his design career, as a promotional and editorial designer for the magazines Apparel Arts, Esquire, Ken, Coronet, and Glass Packer. His magazine covers broke with the traditions of American publication design. A thorough knowledge of the modern movement, particularly the works of Klee, Kandinsky, and the cubists, led Rand to the understanding that freely invented shapes could have a self-contained life, both symbolic and expressive, as a visual-communications tool. His ability to manipulate visual form (shape, color, space, line, value) and skillful analysis of communications content, reducing it to a symbolic essence without making it sterile or dull, allowed Rand to become widely influential while still in his twenties. The playful, visually dynamic, and unexpected often found their way into his work. A Direction magazine cover (Fig. 19–1) shows the important role of visual and symbolic contrast in Rand’s designs. The handwritten Christmas tag on a crisp rectangle contrasts sharply with the mechanical stencil lettering of the logo on a torn-edged collage element; a Christmas package wrapped with barbed wire instead of ribbon was a grim reminder of the spread of global war. Rand seized upon collage and montage as means to bring concepts, images, textures, and even objects into a cohesive whole (Fig. 19–2).
From 1941 until 1954 Paul Rand applied his design approach at the Weintraub advertising agency. His collaborations with copywriter Bill Bernbach (1911–82) became a prototype for the now ubiquitous art/copy team working closely together to create a synergistic visual-verbal integration. Campaigns they created for clients, including Ohrbach’s department store, featured entertaining puns and wordplay supported by Rand’s whimsical integration of photography, drawing, and logo (Fig. 19–3). The image visually reinforces the headline. After leaving the agency, Rand became an independent designer with increasing emphasis on trademark and corporate design. The 1946 book Thoughts on Design was the first that he both wrote and designed (Fig. 19–4). Illustrated with over eighty examples of his work, it inspired a generation of graphic designers.
Rand understood the value of ordinary, universally understood signs and symbols as tools for translating ideas into visual communications (Figs. 19–5, 19–6, 19–7, and 19–8). To engage the audience successfully and communicate memorably, he knew that the designer needed to alter and juxtapose signs and symbols. A reinterpretation of the message was sometimes necessary to make the ordinary into something extraordinary. Sensual visual contrasts marked his work. He played red against green, organic shape against geometric type, photographic tone against flat color, cut or torn edges against sharp forms, and the textural pattern of type against white. In addition, Rand took risks by exploring unproven ideas. In his poster design for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, design becomes play and the futurist concept of simultaneity is evoked.
For all his visual inventiveness, Rand defined design as the integration of form and function for effective communication. The cultural role of the designer was to upgrade, rather than serve, the least common denominator of public taste. During the early period of Rand’s career, he made forays into the vocabulary of modern art but never parted from an immediate accessibility of image (Fig. 19–9).
During a design career in a life cut short by illness, Alvin Lustig (1915–55) incorporated his subjective vision and private symbols into graphic design. Born in Colorado, Lustig alternated between the East and West Coasts and between architecture, graphic design, and interior design. At age twenty-one he began a graphic design and printing business in the rear of a Los Angeles drugstore. On projects for the Ward Ritchie Press, Lustig created abstract geometric designs using type rules and ornaments.
Sensing that Lustig’s work was created by an “artist who might possess a touch of genius,” publisher James Laughton of New Directions in New York began to give him book and jacket design commissions in 1940 (Figs. 19–10 and 19–11). As New Directions published books of outstanding literary quality, Lustig’s design methodology—searching for symbols to capture the essence of the contents and treating form and content as one—received a positive response from its literary audience. For 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (Fig. 19–12), a delicate magnolia flower is brutally nailed to rough siding; these contradictory photographic symbols represent the violence and hatred behind the civilized façade in human affairs. Believing in the importance of painting for design and design education, he considered the artist’s pure research into private symbols the wellspring for the public symbols created by the designer (Fig. 19–13).
In 1944 Lustig became the visual design research director of Look magazine, a position he held until 1946. By 1950 he was becoming increasingly involved in design education, and in 1951 he was asked by Josef Albers to help develop a graduate graphic design program at Yale University. His eyesight had begun to fail, however (he had been diagnosed with diabetes in his teens), and he was totally blind by the autumn of 1954. In the face of this overwhelming difficulty, Lustig continued to teach and design until his death more than a year later, at age forty.
In 1939, twenty-four-year-old Alex Steinweiss (1916–2011) was named the first art director of Columbia Records. The modern design sensibilities of the 1940s were applied to record-album design as Steinweiss searched for visual forms and shapes to express music using fresh approaches. (Fig. 19–14). Often Steinweiss approached space informally; elements were placed on the field with a casual balance sometimes bordering on a random scattering of forms.
Bradbury Thompson (1911–95) emerged as one of the most influential graphic designers in postwar America. After earning an economics degree from Washburn College in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas, in 1934, Thompson worked for printing firms there for several years before moving to New York. From 1945 until 1959 he served as art director of Mademoiselle and from 1945 until 1972 as design director of ARTnews. His designs for Westvaco Inspirations, four-color publications demonstrating printing papers, continued from 1939 until 1961, making a significant impact. A thorough knowledge of printing and typesetting, combined with an adventurous spirit of experimentation, allowed him to expand the range of design possibilities. Westvaco Inspirations used letterpress plates of art and illustration borrowed from advertising agencies and museums. With a limited budget for new plates and artwork, Thompson used the type case and print shop as his “canvas, easel, and second studio.” He discovered and explored the potential of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings as design resources (Fig. 19–15). Large, bold organic and geometric shapes were used to bring graphic and symbolic power to the page. Letterforms and patterns were often enlarged and used as design elements or to create visual patterns and movements. Four-color process plates were taken apart and used to create designs (Fig. 19–16) and often overprinted to create new colors. In sum, Thompson achieved a rare mastery of complex organization, form, and visual flow. For Westvaco Inspirations 210 (Fig. 19–17), a photograph loaned for use as a printing specimen was the catalyst for Thompson’s typographic invention. Typography gained expression through scale and color.
During the 1960s and 1970s Thompson turned increasingly to a classical approach to book and editorial format design. Readability, formal harmony, and a sensitive use of Old Style typefaces marked his work for periodicals such as Smithsonian and ARTnews, United States postage stamps, and a steady flow of books, including the monumental Washburn College Bible. From 1956 until shortly before his death, Thompson was a visiting professor at the Yale School of Art, where he inspired several generations of young graphic designers.
The sensibilities of the New York school were carried to Los Angeles by Saul Bass (1919–96). He moved from New York to California in 1946, and he opened a studio there two years later. Paul Rand’s use of shape and asymmetrical balance during the 1940s was an important inspiration for Bass, but while Rand’s carefully orchestrated compositions used complex contrasts of shape, color, and texture, Bass frequently reduced his designs to a single dominant image. While studying at Brooklyn College Bass had been introduced to constructivism and the Bauhaus by his teacher György Kepes, who had worked with Moholy-Nagy.
Bass had a remarkable ability to express the nucleus of a design with images that become glyphs, or elemental pictorial signs that exert great graphic power (Fig. 19–18). Although Bass reduced messages to simple pictographic images, his work is not simply the elemental graphics of constructivism. Irregular forms are cut from paper with scissors or drawn with a brush. Freely drawn, decorative letterforms are often combined with typography or handwriting. There is a robust energy about his forms and an almost casual quality about their execution. While images are simplified to a minimal statement, they lack the exactitude of measurement or construction that could make them rigid.
Motion pictures had long used traditional portraits of actors and actresses in promoting films, and mediocre and garish typography for film titles. Then producer/director Otto Preminger commissioned Bass to create unified graphic materials for his films, including logos, theater posters, advertising, and animated film titles. The first comprehensive design program unifying both print and media graphics for a film was in 1955 for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm. Bass’s symbol for this film about drug addiction is a thick pictographic arm thrusting downward into a rectangle composed of flat cutout shapes and bracketed with the film title (Fig. 19–19). The titles for this motion picture were equally innovative (Fig. 19–20). Accompanied by staccato jazz music, a single white bar thrusts down onto the screen, followed by three more; when all four reach the center of the screen, typography appears, listing the featured performers. All of these elements, except one bar, retained for continuity, fade. Then, four bars sweep in from the top, bottom, and sides to frame the film-title typography, which suddenly appears. This kinetic sequence of animated bars and typography continues in perfect synchronization to the throbbing wail of jazz music through the credits. Finally, the bars thrust into the space and transform into the pictographic arm of the logo. From this beginning, Bass became the acknowledged master of the film title. He pioneered an organic process of forms that appear, disintegrate, reform, and transform in time and space. This combination, recombination, and synthesis of form was carried over into the area of printed graphics.
A typical Bass motion picture design program can be seen in the 1960 graphics for Exodus. Bass created a pictograph of arms reaching upward and struggling for a rifle, conveying the violence and strife connected with the birth of the nation of Israel. This mark was used in a comprehensive publicity program, including newspaper, magazine, and trade advertisement posters (Fig. 19–21), film titles, and even stationery, shipping labels, and other routine printed matter. Each individual item was approached as a unique communications problem. The simplicity and directness of Bass’s work enables the viewer to interpret the content immediately.
In addition to his film graphics, Bass created numerous corporate-identity programs. He also directed a number of films, ranging from the outstanding short film Why Man Creates, which used a kaleidoscope of film techniques probing the nature of human creativity and expression, to a feature-length motion picture.
George Tscherny (b. 1924), a native of Budapest, Hungary, immigrated to the United States as a child and received his visual education there. Tscherny headed the graphic design department for the New York design firm George Nelson & Associates before opening his own design office in 1956. Tscherny has functioned as an independent designer, which is unusual in a profession where partnerships, large staffs, and staff positions are the norm. An intuitive and sensitive designer, Tscherny possesses an ability to seize the essence of the subject and express it in stunningly simple terms. The results are elegant, to the point, and disarmingly simple. Tscherny’s vocabulary of techniques for solving design problems includes type, photography, simple calligraphic brush drawing, and bold, simple shapes cut from colored papers. Regardless of technique, his process of reducing complex content to an elemental graphic symbol expressing the underlying order or basic form of the subject is constant (Figs. 19–22 and 19–23).
The New York firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar, founded by three youthful designers in 1957, did important work. Their decision to call their firm a design office instead of an art studio reflected their attitudes toward design and the design process. Robert Brownjohn (1925–70) had studied painting and design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and architecture under the distinguished architect-teacher Serge Chermayeff (1900–96). Ivan Chermayeff (b. 1932), Serge’s son, had worked as an assistant to Alvin Lustig and as a record-album designer; a close friend from the graduate graphic design program at Yale University, Thomas H. Geismar (b. 1931), had served two years with the United States Army as an exhibition designer and then freelanced.
The initial contribution of these three to American graphic design sprang from a strong aesthetic background and an understanding of the major ideas of European modern art, which had been reinforced by their contacts with the elder Chermayeff, Moholy-Nagy, and Lustig. A communicative immediacy, a strong sense of form, and a vitality and freshness characterized their work in the early months of the partnership. Images and symbols were combined with a surreal sense of dislocation to convey the essence of the subject on book jackets and posters (Figs. 19–24 and 19–25). Typographic solutions, such as the record-album cover for Machito and His Orchestra (Fig. 19–26), used color repetition and unusual letterforms to express the subject matter. A fine sense of both typographic and art history, developed as a result of the principals’ wide-ranging educational backgrounds, enabled them to solve problems through inventive and symbolic manipulation of forms and imagery. Solutions grew out of the needs of the client and the limitations of the problem at hand.
In 1960 Brownjohn left the partnership and moved to England, where he made significant contributions to British graphic design, especially in the area of film titles. Particularly inventive was his title design for the motion picture Goldfinger. Brownjohn’s typographic designs for the credits were 35mm color slides projected upon a moving human body filmed in real time. This integration of two-dimensional graphics with figurative cinematography inspired numerous other experimental titling efforts. Meanwhile, the firm, renamed Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, played a major role in the development of postwar corporate identity, discussed in chapter 20.
Graphic design education at Yale University School of Art
In 1950 Josef Albers was appointed director of the art school at Yale University. During the same year he invited Alvin Eisenman (1921–2013) to direct the graphic design program, providing the genesis of the first such program to be supported by a major university. In addition to teaching, Eisenman was appointed typographer and successor to Carl Purington Rollins at the Yale University Press. According to John T. Hill, a Yale colleague, “Both Albers and Eisenman shared a passion for type and typography. From his teaching at the Bauhaus, Albers brought exercises that examined letters and typography as formal elements devoid of their literal function. Eisenman brought a rigorous study of classic type design and the traditions of fine book design and printing” (Figs. 19–27 and 19–28). Eisenman was joined in 1951 by Lustig, who remained on the faculty until his death in 1955.
As a result of Eisenman’s vision, for over half a century leading graphic designers, photographers, printmakers, and other innovative visual artists have taught in the Yale graphic design program. The program has contributed to the advancement of professional instruction in graphic design and design education internationally, as many of its alumni have become prominent designers and educators around the world. In addition to Eisenman and Lustig, the faculty has included Norman Ives, Paul Rand, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, Armin Hofmann, Alexy Brodovitch, Walker Evans,, John T. Hill, Inge Druckrey (b. 1940), Dan Friedman, Philip Burton, Douglas Scott, Christopher Pullman, and Sheila de Bretteville (b. 1940), the current director. The list of visiting lecturers also reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century graphic design. It includes luminaries such as Lester Beall, Otl Aicher, Raymond Savignac, Dieter Rot (1930–98), Peter Brattinga, Robert Frank (b. 1924), Kenneth Hiebert, Anton Stankowski, George Tscherny, April Greiman, Wolfgang Weingart, Rudolph de Harak, Bob Gill, Shigeo Fukuda, Steven Heller (b. 1950), Jan Tschichold, Steff Geissbuhler, Adrian Frutiger, Greer Allen (1922–2005), Matthew Carter, and Malcolm Grear (b. 1931).
A member of the first class under Albers and Eisenman, Norman Ives (1923–78) received his MFA in graphic design in 1952. While an undergraduate at Wesleyan, Ives had developed a love for literature and the classics that became a part of his overall vision. In his early paintings one senses overtones of Arp and Klee, and in his typographic work, the playful approach and expressive use of letters found in the work of Apollinaire, Sandberg, and Werkman. After graduation, Eisenman asked Ives to join his newly assembled faculty. Ives immediately proved to be a naturally gifted teacher and was admired for his succinctness, dearth of rhetoric, and insightful criticism and generosity.
Ives began making collages in the late 1950s, initially using triangular shapes of the same size cut from letters and words on posters and broadsides. These were then glued to grids drawn on boards (Fig. 19–29). Although they retained their colors and forms, they were detached from their original sources, an aspect that distinguished them from the scraps used by Schwitters, who preserved much of the identity of
his materials.
An editorial design revolution
During the 1940s, only a few American magazines were well designed. Among them were Fortune, a business magazine whose art directors included Will Burtin and Leo Lionni (1910–99); Vogue, where Alexander Liberman replaced Mehemed Fehmy Agha as art director in 1943; and especially Harper’s Bazaar, where Alexey Brodovitch continued as art director until his retirement in 1958 (see chapter 17). One of Agha’s assistants at Vogue during the 1930s, Austrian-born Cipe Pineles (1910–91), made a major contribution to editorial design during the 1940s and 1950s, first as art director at Glamour beginning in 1937, and then at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle. Pineles often commissioned illustrations from painters, resulting in editorial pages that broke with conventional imagery (Fig. 19–30). With support from her husband, CBS design director William Golden (1911–59), she penetrated the bastion of the male-dominated professional design societies by becoming the first woman admitted to membership in the New York Art Director’s Club. Producing design work for clients such as Lincoln Center, Pineles continued her distinguished career until her death and made a significant contribution to design education through her teaching at the Parsons School of Design in New York.
Born in the Netherlands, Leo Lionni studied economics in Italy from 1931 to 1935. While in Italy, he became acquainted with the futurist artist Filippo Marinetti, who encouraged him to paint. Lionni’s career as a graphic designer began when he worked as a designer and art director for Motta, an Italian food distributor. In 1939 he moved to the United States, where he was hired as art director at the pioneering Philadelphia advertising agency N. W. Ayer, whose clients included the Container Corporation of America. He also contributed to the war effort with designs such as his 1941 poster “Keep ‘em Rolling,” in which three tanks and the image of a welder are integrated with an American flag. In 1949 he became art director at Fortune magazine, where he remained until his retirement in 1961 (Fig. 19–31). Lionni gave the magazine a unique identity, largely through his innovative use of photography. In addition, he served as Olivetti’s design director in America and was coeditor of Print magazine from 1955 until 1959.
Over the course of the 1950s a revolution in editorial design occurred, spurred in part by the design classes Brodovitch taught first at his home and then at the New School for Social Research in New York. The seeds for an expansive, design-oriented period of editorial graphics were sown in these classes. One of his students, Otto Storch (1913–1999), later wrote, “Brodovitch would dump photostats, type proofs, colored pieces of paper, and someone’s shoe lace, if it became untied, on a long table together with rubber cement. He would fold his arms and with a sad expression challenge us to do something brilliant.” Brodovitch’s students learned to examine each problem thoroughly, develop a solution from the resulting understanding, and then search for a brilliant visual presentation. His impact on the generation of editorial designers and photographers who came into their own during the 1950s was phenomenal, and he helped editorial design experience one of its greatest eras.
Storch, working as an art director at the Dell publishing house, was unhappy with the subject matter in his assignments. Keenly interested in Brodovitch’s design of Harper’s Bazaar, Storch joined the art directors, photographers, fashion and general illustrators, and packaging, set, and typographic designers who gathered to learn from the master. After class one evening in 1946, Brodovitch reviewed Storch’s portfolio and advised him to quit his job because he showed potential but his position did not. A seven-year period of freelancing followed, and then Storch joined the McCall’s Corporation as assistant art director for Better Living magazine. In 1953, he was named art director of McCall’s magazine. When this major women’s publication developed circulation problems in the late 1950s, a new editor named Herbert Mayes was brought in to revitalize the magazine. In 1958 Mayes gave Storch a free hand to upgrade the graphics, and an astounding visual approach developed. Typography was unified with photography as the type was designed to lock tightly into the photographic image. Headlines often became parts of illustrations. Type warped and bent, or became the illustration, as in Figure 19–32, where it takes on the shape of a mattress.
Scale was explored in this large-format publication, whose 27 by 34.5 centimeter pages provided abundant space for design. Small objects became large graphics. Subjects such as a beautiful ear of fresh summer corn (Fig. 19–33) were presented as full double-page layouts. Storch and the photographers who worked with him went to great lengths to produce unexpected and poetic photographic essays. Foods and fashions were often shot on location instead of in the studio.
Storch ranks among the major innovators of the period. His philosophy that idea, copy, art, and typography should be inseparable in editorial design (Fig. 19–34) influenced both editorial and advertising graphics. Success made the management at McCall’s more conservative, and opposition to Storch’s creative layouts began to build. After nearly fifteen years as art director of McCall’s, he resigned to concentrate on editorial and advertising photography.
After gaining experience in studios and an advertising agency, Vienna-born Henry Wolf (1925–2005) became art director of Esquire in 1953. Wolf also studied under Brodovitch, and he redesigned Esquire’s format, placing greater emphasis on the use of white space and large photographs. When Brodovitch retired in 1958, Wolf replaced him as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Wolf experimented with typography, making it large enough to fill the page on one spread and then using small headlines on other pages. Wolf’s vision of the magazine cover was a simple image conveying a visual idea. His “Americanization of Paris” cover (Fig. 19–35) inspired letters asking where instant wine could be purchased. The sophistication and inventiveness of the photography commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar during his tenure were monumental achievements (Figs. 19–36 and 19–37).
In 1961 Wolf left Harper’s Bazaar to design the new magazine Show (Fig. 19–38), a short-lived progressive periodical. Often using his own photographs for editorials, Wolf explored new design territory through his imaginative art direction. He then turned his attention toward advertising and photography.
In the late 1960s, broad factors at work in America ended the era of large pages, huge photographs, and design as a significant component of content. Television eroded magazines’ advertising revenue and supplanted their traditional role of providing popular entertainment. At the same time, public concerns about the Vietnam War, environmental problems, the rights of minorities and women, and a host of other issues produced a need for different magazines. The public demanded higher information content, and skyrocketing postal rates, paper shortages, and escalating paper and printing costs shrank the large-format periodicals. Esquire, for example, went from 25.5 by 33.4 centimeters to a typical format of about 21 by 27.5 centimeters. Major weeklies including Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post ceased publication.
Editorial design after the decline
Many predicted the death of the magazine as a communications form during the 1960s; however, a new, smaller-format breed of periodicals emerged and thrived by addressing the interests of specialized audiences. Advertisers who wished to reach these audiences bought space. The new editorial climate, with longer text, more emphasis on content, and less opportunity for lavish visual treatment, necessitated a new approach to editorial design. Layout became more controlled, and the use of a standard typographic format and grid became the norm.
A harbinger for the future evolution of the magazine as a graphic communications form can be found in the work of Peter Palazzo (1926–2005), design editor of the New York Herald Tribune from 1962 until 1965. Palazzo received considerable acclaim for his overall typographic design of this newspaper, the editorial design approach of the Book Week supplement and the New York supplement, and the conceptual power of many of the images he commissioned. In the weekly New York section, Palazzo established a three-column grid and a consistent size and style for article titles, which were always bracketed by a thick ruled line above and a thin rule below (Fig. 19–39). The total effect was somewhere between the newspaper (with its dominant masses of text) and the magazine design of the period (with engaging visuals and ample white space). After the New York Herald Tribune ceased publication in April 1967, the New York supplement continued as an independent city magazine.
During the late 1960s American graphic design slowly started to become a national profession. New photographic typesetting and printing technology permitted excellent work to be produced in smaller cities; professional educational programs developed around the country. Two national design magazines—Print, published in New York from 1940, and Communication Arts, launched in the San Francisco area in 1959—communicated to an increasingly nationwide design community and played a major role in defining the profession and its standards.
A new breed of editorial art directors who were as much editors as designers emerged in some cities, including Atlanta and San Francisco. They helped shape the editorial viewpoints and philosophies of their publications. One prototype for this new editorial designer is Dugald Stermer (1936–2011), who left a studio job in Texas in 1965 to return to his native California and become art director of Ramparts magazine. Public opposition to the Vietnam War and concerns about a host of other social and environmental issues were exploding, and Ramparts became the journal of record for the movement. Stermer developed a format using Times Roman typography with capital initials, two columns of text on the page, and centered titles and headings. The dignity and readability of classical, traditional typography thus packaged the most radical periodical of the era. Stermer made a major contribution in the use of images, often placing full-page illustrations or photographs on covers and at the beginnings of articles. Stermer and editors Warren Hinkle, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern came perilously close to being indicted for conspiracy as a result of the December 1967 cover design (Fig. 19–40). At a time when many young Americans were burning their Selective Service registration cards as a matter of conscience, this cover depicted four hands holding burning facsimile draft cards of Stermer and the three editors. Convincing arguments by attorney Edward Bennett Williams persuaded the grand jury not to indict the four.
In contrast to the consistent format adopted by Stermer, the design of Ms. magazine by Bea Feitler (1938–82) depended heavily on diversifying typographic style and scale to bring vitality and expression to this journal of the women’s movement. Social conventions and standard design thinking were challenged by the Ms. 1972 Christmas cover (Fig. 19–41). The traditional holiday greeting, normally expressing “good will to men,” is directed toward “people.” Feitler had an original approach to typography and design that depended not on consistency of style but on a finely tuned ability to make appropriate choices uninhibited by current fashion or standard typographic practice. In a single issue of Ms. magazine her graphic range included fifteenth-century Garamonds with ornamental initials, simple geometric sans-serif types, and novelty and illustrated letterforms. After her tenure at Ms., Feitler became active as a freelance designer of periodicals and books.
A number of currents—the conceptual approach to cover design, the role of art director expanding into the editorial function (as illustrated by Stermer), and the growing taste for nostalgia, ephemera, and popular culture partly inspired by 1960s pop art—dovetailed in the work of Mike Salisbury (b. 1941), who became the art director of West, the Sunday supplement of the Los Angeles Times, in 1967. For five years, until the newspaper terminated it because its advertising revenue failed to meet production costs, Salisbury made West a vital expression of California culture. The visual delights of vernacular artifacts, ranging from orange-crate labels to blue jeans advertising (Fig. 19–42) to customized cars, were featured in editorial spreads researched by Salisbury and designed with a combination of randomness and order in original layouts that intensified the pages of the publication.
In 1974 Salisbury redesigned the entire format of Rolling Stone, a rock-and-roll newspaper repositioned as a tabloid magazine (Fig. 19–43). The element of surprise became Salisbury’s primary design tool for giving Rolling Stone visual energy. Typography was used differently for each article in an issue, and the range of illustrations and photographic approaches knew no bounds. In addition to redefining Rolling Stone’s format, Salisbury established an uninhibited, freewheeling design approach that influenced the layout of many popular, specialized, and regional periodicals for a decade. He also worked as a consultant designer or art director for Oui, City, and New West.
The new advertising
The 1940s were a lackluster decade for advertising. Repetition of hyperbolic slogans, movie-star testimonials, and exaggerated claims were the mainstays of the decade, though they were punctuated by occasional design excellence. On 1 June 1949 a new advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, opened its doors at 350 Madison Avenue in New York City with a staff of thirteen and less than half a million dollars in client accounts. Copywriter Bill Bernbach was the partner with responsibility for the creative area, and his initial staff consisted of art director Bob Gage (1919–2000) and copywriter Phyllis Robinson (b. 1921). Doyle Dane Bernbach “took the exclamation mark out of advertising” and made it talk intelligently to consumers. The company’s first client was a budget department store badly in need of a fresh image. In contrast to the crowded space and multiple messages of much advertising of the period, Doyle Dane Bernbach used white space effectively to focus the reader’s attention toward the headline and image on crowded newspaper pages.
For each campaign they developed a strategy surrounding important advantages, distinguishing characteristics, or superior features of the product. In order to break through to consumers bombarded by perpetual commercial messages, Bernbach sought an imaginative package for this information. His major contribution was combining words and images in a new way. Traditionally, a copywriter’s headline and body copy were sent to the art director, who then made a layout. In the Bernbach approach, a synergistic relationship between visual and verbal components was established. Paul Rand had developed a bellwether approach to advertising in the 1940s, integrating words and phrases in a freer organization, using visual metaphors and puns seldom seen in advertising. Now Bernbach and his colleagues removed the boundaries separating verbal and visual communications and evolved visual/verbal syntax: word and image fused into a conceptual expression of an idea so that they become completely interdependent (Fig. 19–44). In the Volkswagen campaign, “strange little cars with their beetle shapes” were marketed to a public used to luxury and high horsepower as status symbols.
This approach to advertising led to a new working relationship, as writers and art directors worked as “creative teams.” In addition to Gage, Bill Taubin (1916–98), Helmut Krone (1925–96), Len Sirowitz (b. 1932), and Bert Steinhauser (1929–2002) rank among the art directors who produced outstanding creative work in collaboration with Doyle Dane Bernbach copywriters. Because concept was dominant, the design of many Doyle Dane Bernbach advertisements was reduced to the basic elements necessary to convey the message: a large, arresting visual image, a concise headline of bold weight, and body copy that stakes its claim with factual and often entertaining writing instead of puffery and meaningless superlatives. Often the visual organization was simple and symmetrical, for design arrangements were not allowed to distract from the straightforward presentation of an idea. Advertising stereotypes were replaced by real people from America’s pluralistic society (Fig. 19–45). The potency of this approach was demonstrated when a public-service ad spurred federal legislation and Steinhauser, the art director, received a letter of thanks from President Lyndon B. Johnson after the bill was passed.
Doyle Dane Bernbach became a training ground for what was eventually called “the new advertising.” Many writers and art directors who developed there joined spin-off agencies. These boutique agencies, small shops that emphasized creativity rather than full marketing services, challenged the dominance of the monolithic multimillion-dollar agencies during the flowering of advertising creativity in the 1960s. The notion grew that there were superstars in advertising, a perception fed by a proliferation of awards, competitions, professional periodicals, and annuals. By the 1980s Doyle Dane Bernbach had evolved into a more traditional large advertising agency.
Nonprint advertising also flourished in the middle of the twentieth century. Regular television broadcasting started in 1941, and immediately after World War II television began its spectacular growth as an advertising medium. By the early 1960s television was the second-largest medium (after newspapers) in total advertising revenue, and the largest medium in major national advertising budgets. Print art directors began turning toward the design of television commercials, the newly ubiquitous genre with great, if ambivalent potential: on the one hand, it might, for example, expand public understanding of cinematic form by adopting techniques from experimental film; on the other, at its worst, it might become an unavoidable blight on the public consciousness.
The “new advertising” developed at the same time as the “new journalism,” and comparisons were inevitable. The journalistic approach of writers like Tom Wolfe (b. 1931) replaced traditional objectivity with subjective responses as a component of reportage. The journalist experienced a story as a participant rather than as a dispassionate observer. By contrast, although the new advertising remained oriented toward persuasive selling techniques and subjective emotional appeals, its methods were more honest, literate, and tasteful. In the 1970s advertising became increasingly involved in positioning products and services against their competitors, and the general level of print advertising creativity declined.
American typographic expressionism
A playful direction taken by New York graphic designers in the 1950s and 1960s involved figurative typography. This took many forms—letterforms became objects; objects became letterforms. Gene Federico (1919–99) was one of the first graphic designers to delight in using letterforms as images (Fig. 19–46). Another approach to figurative typography used the visual properties of the words themselves, or their organization in the space, to express an idea. Don Egensteiner’s “Tonnage” advertisement (Fig. 19–47) is an example of the visual organization of type taking on connotative meaning. Typography was sometimes scratched, torn, bent, or vibrated to express a concept or introduce the unexpected to the printed page.
Another typographic trend that began slowly in the 1950s was a reexamination of nineteenth-century decorative and novelty typefaces that had been rejected for many decades under the influence of the modern movement. This revival of interest was inspired by Robert M. Jones, art director of RCA Victor Records, who established the private Glad Hand Press in 1953. Jones had a fondness for colonial and nineteenth-century printing and exercised this interest in hundreds of pieces of graphic ephemera produced at the press. In addition, he often set typography for his record-album designs using wood type.
Phototypography, the setting of type by exposing negatives of alphabet characters to photographic paper, was attempted as early as 1893, with limited results. During the 1920s inventors in England and America moved closer to success. The year 1925 saw the quiet dawning of a new era of typography with the public announcement of the Thothmic photographic composing machine, invented by E. K. Hunter and J. R. C. August of London. A keyboard produced a punched tape to control a long, opaque master film with transparent letterforms. As a given letter moved in position in front of a lens, it was exposed to photographic paper by a beam of light. The Thothmic was a harbinger of the graphic revolution that came a half-century later.
Commercially viable photographic display typesetting in the United States began when the Photo-Lettering firm was established in New York in 1936. It was headed by Edward Rondthaler (1905–2009), who had been instrumental in perfecting the Rutherford Photolettering Machine, which sets type by exposing film negatives of type characters onto photopaper. Although phototypography had the potential to replace the rigid quality of metal type with a dynamic new flexibility, for over two decades it was used only as an alternative method of setting type, with some production advantages and some disadvantages. A major advantage of phototype was a radical reduction in the cost of introducing new typestyles. New designs and reissues of old designs accompanied the large-scale expansion of phototype during the 1960s. A specimen book (Fig. 19–48) designed by John Alcorn (1935–92) introduced Morgan Press nineteenth-century typefaces as phototype from Headliners Process Lettering. This was one of many phototype collections making Victorian faces widely available. Graphic designers rethought the value of supposedly outmoded forms and incorporated them in their work.
Someone was needed to define the aesthetic potential of phototypography by understanding its new flexibility and exploring its possibilities for graphic expression. Herb Lubalin (1918–81), a graduate of Cooper Union in New York and a generalist whose achievements include advertising and editorial design, trademark and typeface design, posters, and packaging, was hailed as the typographic genius of his time. Major thrusts of American graphic design—including the visual/verbal concept orientation of Doyle Dane Bernbach and the trends toward figurative and more structured typography—came together in Lubalin’s work. Space and surface became his primary visual considerations. He abandoned traditional typographic rules and practice and looked at alphabet characters as both visual form and message communication.
Discontented with the rigid limitations of metal type in the 1950s, Lubalin would cut apart his type proofs with a razor blade and reassemble them. In his hands, type was compressed until letters joined into ligatures, and enlarged to unexpected sizes; letterforms were joined, overlapped, and enlarged; capital Os became receptacles for images. Words and letters could become images; an image could become a word or a letter. This typographic play engages the reader and requires participation. Lubalin practiced design not as an art form or a craft created in a vacuum, but as a means of giving visual form to a concept or a message. In his most innovative work, concept and visual form are yoked into a oneness called a typogram, meaning a brief, visual typographic poem. Lubalin’s wit and strong message orientation enabled him to transform words into ideographic typograms about the subject (Figs. 19–49 and 19–50).
In 1960, most display typography was the hand-set, metal type of Gutenberg’s day, but this five-hundred-year-old craft was being rendered obsolete by phototype. By the end of the decade, metal type was virtually a thing of the past. More than any other graphic designer, Lubalin explored the creative potential of phototypography to see how the fixed relationships of letterforms marching on square blocks of metal could be exploded by phototype’s dynamic and elastic qualities. In phototype systems, letterspacing could be compressed to extinction and forms could overlap. A greater range of type sizes was available; type could be set to any size required by the layout or enlarged to huge sizes without losing sharpness. Special lenses could be used to expand, condense, italicize, backslant, or outline letterforms. Lubalin incorporated these possibilities into his work not just as technical or design ends in themselves but as potent means of intensifying the printed image and expressing content.
During the metal-type era, hundreds of thousands of dollars had to be invested in the deployment of a single new typeface. Matrixes had to be manufactured for every size of hand-set and hot-metal keyboard type, then each typesetting firm had to purchase a large stock of metal type in each size and variation of roman, bold, italic, and so on to meet client requests. Phototypography reduced this process to the relatively inexpensive creation of simple film fonts, and a proliferation of typeface designs to rival the Victorian era began. Visual Graphics Corporation, the manufacturer of the Phototypositor display typesetting machine, which enabled design studios and printing firms around the world to set excellent photo display type, sponsored the National Typeface Design Competition in 1965. Lubalin’s posters demonstrating the dozen winning designs spurred the awareness of phototypography and its design potential (Fig. 19–51). When his detractors said his typography suffered from a decline in legibility due to tight spacing and overlapping forms, Lubalin responded, “Sometimes you have to compromise legibility to achieve impact.” Lubalin’s attentiveness to detail and typographic experimentation raised other designers’ typographic sensitivities, inspiring them to try new things.
Lubalin also made significant contributions to editorial design during the 1960s. A host of editorial redesigns, including two for the ill-fated Saturday Evening Post, accompanied his collaboration with publisher Ralph Ginzburg (1929–2006) on a series of magazines. A hardbound quarterly journal called Eros, launched in 1962 with a massive direct-mail campaign, was billed as the magazine of love. Its ninety-six-page advertisement-free format allowed Lubalin to explore scale, white space, and visual flow. In a photographic essay about President John F. Kennedy (Fig. 19–52), scale changes establish a lively pace. Ginzburg also took the daring step of publishing nude photographs of actress Marilyn Monroe (Figs. 19–53 and 19–54). After pondering over photographic contact sheets, Lubalin designed layouts of remarkable vitality. Believing that typeface selection should express content and be governed by the visual configuration of the words, Lubalin used a variety of display types in Eros, including giant condensed sans serifs, novelty faces, and delicate Old Style romans. Although the visual and written content of Eros was tame in comparison to the explicit material permitted a decade later, Ginzburg was convicted of sending obscene material through the mail and after exhausting all appeals was imprisoned for eight months in 1972.
In 1967 Ginzburg launched Fact magazine, which featured editorial exposés of hallowed institutions and sacred cows. Lubalin’s graphic treatment on a frugal production budget presaged the restrained economics of inflationary 1970s publishing. Lacking funds to hire ten different illustrators or photographers for each issue, Lubalin commissioned one illustrator to illustrate every article in an issue for a flat fee. Design economy was achieved by a standardized format using Times Roman Bold titles and Times New Roman subtitles (Fig. 19–55).
Ginzburg and Lubalin closed out the decade with the square-format Avant Garde, a lavishly visual and controversial periodical that published visual essays, fiction, and reportage. Born amidst the social upheavals of the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, and antiwar protests (Fig. 19–56), this magazine became one of Lubalin’s most innovative achievements. Although his layouts have a strong underlying geometric structure, this is not the classical geometry of the Basel and Zurich designers. Instead, it is the exuberant and optimistic order of the expansive American character, unencumbered by a sense of tradition or any thought of limitations that cannot be overcome. The logotype for Avant Garde, with tightly integrated capital ligatures, was developed by Lubalin and Tom Carnase (b. 1939) into a family of geometric sans-serif typefaces also called Avant Garde (Figs. 19–57 and 19–58). By 1970 typeface design began to occupy more of Lubalin’s time. He saw the designer’s task as projecting a message from a surface using three interdependent means of expression: photography, illustration, and letterforms.
As phototype facilitated production of new typefaces, design piracy became a pressing issue. Original typeface designs requiring hundreds of hours of work could now be photocopied by unscrupulous operators who produced instant film fonts but did not compensate the designers. To enable designers to be adequately compensated for their work while licensing and producing master fonts available to all manufacturers, Lubalin, phototypography pioneer Rondthaler, and typographer Aaron Burns (1922–91) established the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1970. Thirty-four fully developed type families and about sixty additional display faces were developed and licensed during ITC’s first decade. Following the examples of Univers and Helvetica, ITC fonts had large x-heights and short ascenders and descenders; these became the prevailing characteristics of fonts designed during the 1970s and the early 1980s. With Lubalin as design director, ITC began a journal, U&lc (Upper and lower case), to publicize and demonstrate its typefaces. The complex, dynamic style of this tabloid-size publication and the popularity of ITC typefaces had a major impact on typographic design of the 1970s (Fig. 19–59).
From the time that Lubalin left his position as vice president and creative director of the Sudler and Hennessey advertising agency in 1964, he formed partnerships and associations with a number of associates, including graphic designers Ernie Smith and Alan Peckolick (b. 1940) and lettering artists Tony DiSpigna (b. 1943) and Tom Carnase. Their works share visual similarities with Lubalin’s oeuvre while achieving original solutions to a diverse range of problems.
George Lois
Among the young art directors and copywriters who passed through Doyle Dane Bernbach during the late 1950s, George Lois (b. 1931) became the enfant terrible of American mass communications. Lois’s energetic efforts to sell his work, including such legendary tactics as climbing out on the third-floor ledge of the A. Goodman & Company president’s office demanding that his poster proposal be approved, combined with a tendency to push concepts to the very limit of propriety, earned him this reputation. Lois adopted the Bernbach philosophy that fully integrated visual/verbal concepts were vital to successful message conveyance. He wrote that an art director must treat words “with the same reverence that he accords graphics, because the verbal and visual elements of modern communication are as indivisible as words and music in a song.” His designs are deceptively simple and direct (Figs. 19–60 and 19–61). Backgrounds are usually removed to enable the content-bearing verbal and pictorial images to interact unhampered, a technique he learned at Bernbach, his third agency. At age twenty-eight Lois left Bernbach to cofound Papert, Koenig and Lois, which grew to forty million dollars per year in billing in seven short years. On several subsequent occasions, Lois left an agency partnership to form yet another advertising agency.
In 1962 Esquire magazine was in serious trouble. If any two consecutive issues lost money on newsstand sales, it would have to fold. After being the men’s magazine in America, Esquire was losing its younger audience to Playboy, founded by former Esquire staff member Hugh Hefner (b. 1926) in 1960. Esquire editor Harold Hayes (1926–89) asked Lois to develop effective cover designs for the literate but nearly bankrupt magazine. Lois believed design—a harmony of elements—had no place on a magazine cover. Instead, he opted for the cover as a statement capable of capturing the reader with a spirited comment on a major article. An ability to stay closely in touch with one’s times is a vital requirement for someone in visual communications, and many of Lois’s most innovative concepts grew from his ability to understand and respond to the people and events of his era. Over the next decade, Lois designed more than ninety-two Esquire covers in collaboration with photographer Carl Fischer (b. 1924). These covers helped recapture the magazine’s audience, and by 1967 Esquire was turning a three-million-dollar profit.
Lois thought Fischer was one of the few photographers who understood his ideas. Their collaborative efforts created covers that challenged, shocked, and often provoked their audience. Unexpected combinations of images and photographic montage techniques served to intensify an event or make a satirical statement.
Lois’s skill in persuading people to participate in photographs resulted in powerful images. He persuaded boxer Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his world heavyweight championship title because as a conscientious objector he refused military service, to pose as Saint Sebastian, a religious martyr (Fig. 19–62). As Richard Nixon mounted his second presidential campaign in 1968, Lois combined a stock photograph of the candidate with Fischer’s photograph of four hands applying makeup (Fig. 19–63). This concept grew out of Lois’s recollection of the 1960 presidential campaign, when Nixon lost the race to John F. Kennedy partly because Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow made him look evil.” After the cover ran, Lois received a call from one of Nixon’s staffers, who berated Lois because the lipstick attacked Nixon’s masculinity. For the May 1969 cover of Esquire, “the final decline and total collapse of the American avant-garde” is implied by showing Andy Warhol drowning in one of his best-known images: a can of Campbell’s soup (Fig. 19–64).
The New York school was born from an excitement about European modernism and fueled by economic and technological expansion; it became a dominant force in graphic design from the 1940s until the 1970s. Many of its practitioners, young revolutionaries who altered the course of American visual communications in the 1940s and 1950s, continued to design into the 1990s.