POSTWAR GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE USA. PART II

The emergence of television began to alter the roles of print media and graphic design, while also creating new opportunities for designers to work on television commercials and on-air graphics. “Motion graphics” are kinetic graphic designs for film titles and television that occur in the fourth dimension—time. A variety of animated film techniques were applied to motion-picture titling in the 1950s by Saul Bass and, in Canada, by Norman McLaren of the Canadian National Film Board. For example, Bass's titles for Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder reduce a prone figure to disjointed parts, which move onto the screen in carefully orchestrated sequences that conclude with their positioning to form the figure; the lettering of the film's title appears as part of the sequence.

Vernacular imagery and popular culture inspired a generation of American designer/illustrators who began their careers after World War II, including the 1954 founders of the Push Pin Studio in New York. Their work combined a fascination with the graphic simplicity and directness of comic books with a sophisticated understanding of modern art, especially of Surrealism and Cubism. The Push Pin artists' unabashedly eclectic interest in art and design history led them to incorporate influences ranging from Persian rugs to children's art and decorative Victorian typefaces. In their work, a graphic vibrancy supported a strong conceptual approach to the visual message.

Several major directions emerged in American graphic design in the 1960s. Political and social upheavals of the decade were accompanied by a resurgence of poster art addressing the civil rights movement, the women's movement, environmentalism, and the Vietnam War. Placing ads on radio and television was beyond the economic means of most private citizens, independent art groups, and social-activist organizations; however, they could afford to print and distribute flyers and posters, and they could even sell their posters to public sympathizers to raise money for their causes.

As popular music became increasingly culturally significant, graphics for the recording industry emerged as a locus of design creativity. One Push Pin Studio founder, Milton Glaser, captured the imagination of a generation with his stylized curvilinear drawing, bold flat colour, and original concepts. Glaser's poster (1967) for folk-rock musician Bob Dylan is one of many music graphics from the 1960s that achieved an iconic presence not unlike that of Flagg's I Want You poster from World War I. Over the course of the second half of the century, Glaser steadily expanded his interests to include magazine design, restaurant and retail store interiors, and visual identity systems.

The 1960s also saw the rapid decline of hand- and machine-set metal type as they were replaced by display-and-keyboard phototype systems. Since it is very inexpensive to produce new typefaces for photographic typesetting, the widespread use of phototype systems set off a spate of new designs and reissues of long-unavailable typefaces, such as decorative Victorian wood types. American Herb Lubalin is notable among the designers who embraced the new flexibility phototype made possible for designers. Type could be set in any size, the spaces between letters and lines could be compressed, and letters could be expanded, condensed, touched, overlapped, or slanted. Lubalin's ability to make powerful visual communications solely with type is seen in a 1968 announcement for an antiwar poster contest sponsored by Avant Garde magazine. The magazine's logo, placed in the dot of the exclamation point, uses ligatures (two or more letters combined into one form) and alternate characters to form a tightly compressed image. This logo was developed into a typeface named Avant Garde, one of the most successful and widely used fonts of the phototype period.

A creative revolution in advertising writing and design also occurred during this period. Advertising agencies approached marketing objectives through the use of witty headlines, simple layouts, and clever visual images. Copywriters and art directors, working as collaborative creative teams, sought a synergy between word and image. The Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency played an influential role in the history of graphic design by creating advertisements that spoke intelligently to consumers and avoided the hyperbole of the typical “hard sell.”

One of the many advertising designers who launched his career at Doyle Dane Bernbach was George Lois, whose works were engagingly simple and direct. Lois went on to design over 90 covers for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. He used powerful photographs and photomontages, usually by Carl Fischer, to make succinct editorial statements about the United States. These designs acted as independent visual/verbal statements about such topics as assassinations and civil rights.

UNIT XVII

POSTMODERN GRAPHIC DESIGN

By the late 1970s, many international architectural, product, and graphic designers working in the Modernist tradition thought that the movement had become academic and lost its capacity for innovation. Younger designers challenged and rejected the tenets of Modernism and questioned the “form-follows-function” philosophy that came to be associated with the diluted, corporate version of Modernism that derived from the International Typographic Style. Designers began to establish and then violate grid patterns; to invert expected forms; to explore historical and decorative elements; and to inject subjective—even eccentric—concepts into design. This reaction to Modernist developments is called postmodernism, and it took design in many new directions.

During the late 1970s, April Greiman was acclaimed for her postmodernist experimentation. (In the 1970s and '80s, increasing numbers of women entered the graphic-design field and achieved prominence.) Her dynamic typographic innovations and colourful montages were often made in collaboration with photographer Jayme Odgers. A cover for WET magazine, for example, evokes the vibrant cultural scene in southern California. In this work from 1979, a colour photocopy of singer Rick Nelson, collaged images from magazines, Japanese papers, and airbrushed blends of colour are combined into a cohesive design. Greiman also explored the application of video imagery to print graphics.

The dynamic spatial arrangement and decorative geometric patterns that enliven many postmodern designs are seen in a 1983 poster designed by William Longhauser. The letters forming the last name of postmodern architect Michael Graves become fanciful edifices, which echo the patterns and textures found in Graves's buildings. As with much postmodern design, the result is strikingly original.

Such a disruption of expected forms and grids was also apparent in the work of Japanese designer Igarashi Takenobu. After studying design fundamentals in Los Angeles, Igarashi began his independent design practice in Tokyo and used basic design elements—point, line, plane, grids, and isometric perspectives—as the building blocks of his work. This design vocabulary enabled him to invent imaginative solutions. His poster proposal (1982) for Expo '85, an international exposition of the dwelling and construction industry, turns the letters into structural forms pulled apart to reveal their inner structures. In this way, his experimentation with form fulfilled both an aesthetic and a commercial purpose: the deconstructed forms clearly make reference to his client, the construction industry.

UNIT XVIII