Graphic Design Reader

THE GRAPHIC DESIGN READER

THE GRAPHIC DESIGN READER

BY

STEVEN HELLER

© 2002 Steven Heller

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Allworth Press

An imprint of Allworth Communications

10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010

Book design by Christoph Neimann

Page composition/typography by SR Desktop Services, Ridge, NY

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heller, Steven.

The graphic design reader / by Steven Heller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-58115-214-0

1. Graphic arts—United States. 2. Commercial art—United States.

3. Popular culture—United States. I. Title.

NC998.5.A1 H438 2002

741.6’0973—dc21

2001006464

Printed in Canada

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

READ ME

Introduction

CRITIQUES

The Me Too Generation

History Lite

The Underground Mainstream

This is Not a Library

You’ve Got Spam

Cheapskate Design

Hate Thy Enemy

G. I. Fritz

COMMERCIAL ARTS

Ice Cream and Hot Issues

Hard Cover Sex

Presidential Caricature: Ritual Mutilation

More Than Wham! Bang! Boom!: The Art and Design of Comics Lettering

Shock of the Vile

Look Away, Dixieland

The Inner City Mother Goose

The Teen Magazine Fame Machine

For 100,000 Good Men

A Man’s Home is His Magazine

The Regressive Progressive

Trust Fund Fashion Mag Flaunts Design

Pokémon: A Dialogue

Sho-CardWritin’

The Calendar Girls of Colonial Hong Kong

That Pesky Television Test Pattern

Julian Allen’s Pictorial Legacy

PEOPLE

Boris Artzybasheff’s Clear Complexity

The Interior Lustig

Randism

Sutnar & Lönderg-Holm: The Gilbert and Sullivan of Design

The Art [Paul] of Playboy

Masters of a Lesser Art: David Levine and Edward Sorel

Barbara Kruger, Graphic Designer?

Gary Panter: On the Margins Looking Out

Number Seventeen: Quick-Cut Culture

Sara Fanelli’sWild Things

INTROSPECTIVES

Swastika Guilt

Hospital Blues

The Times They Are a-Movin’

School Tie

MEMOIRS

Growing Up Underground

I was a Seventeen-Year-Old Pornographer

The Sopranos and Me

My Mentor

Index

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the people

who have given meaning to my life.

Nicolas Heller, son

Louise Fili, wife

Seymour Chwast, best friend, East Coast

Dugald Stermer, best friend, West Coast

Brad Holland, mentor

Lita Talarico, collaborator

Paula Scher, confidant

Tom Bodkin, boss

Art Spiegelman, good friend

Marian Rand, good friend

Martin Fox, good friend

Rick Poynor, good friend

Tad Crawford, good publisher

Milton Heller, dad

Bernice Heller, mom

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to all the editors at the magazines who edited and published some of these articles and essays:

Julie Lasky, Interiors

Joyce Rutter Kaye, Print

Nancy Bernard, Critique

Marty Neumier, Critique

Martin Pedersen, Metropolis

John Walters, Eye

Hans Dieter Reichert, Baseline

Tom Zeller, the New York Times

Andrea Codrington, Trace, AIGA Journal

Also thanks to friends and colleagues who have given me

support and succor:

Silas Rhodes

David Rhodes

Marshall Arisman

Art Chantry

Mirko Ilic

Barbara Kruger

James Victore

RichardWilde

Thanks again to the crew at Allworth:

Bob Porter, associate publisher

Nicole Potter, editor

Jamie Kijowski, production editor

Liz Van Hoose, associate editor

Kate Lothman, associate editor

And finally, but not least, thanks to

Christoph Neimann, for his witty design.

READ ME

INTRODUCTION

The author (middle) looking for a job.

INTRODUCTION

I never wanted to be a plumber. Although I have a healthy respect for good plumbers, the idea of performing a task where I follow rote procedures is definitely not for me, and I am sure I would fail at it anyway. So, by singling out plumbers I mean no disrespect.

Plumbing is akin to graphic design because, in a sense, a graphic designer plumbs communications problems using a finite number of tried and true solutions. The difference between the two professions is that to be a proficient plumber demands years of apprenticeship, but to be a great graphic designer requires innate talent. This certainly does not diminish the proficiency a designer garners over time, nor minimize the talent of a plumber, but it introduces the distinction between service provider and commercial artist. It implies that, given talent, a graphic designer potentially contributes to culture— which is not to say that the plumber does not benefit society. But, although they intersect, society and culture are not the same thing.

Culture is the product of a society’s collective and individual actions manifest in art, literature, music, sports, and politics. The plumber’s job is to maintain society’s infrastructure. Graphic designers, serving as both primary and supporting creators, help build cultural objects.

This book is a paean to their achievements, large and small, good and bad. It is also a reflection of my varied, obsessive interests in popular culture. Frankly, I cannot think of anything I would rather be doing than working every day as an art director, except maybe writing about the influence of visual culture. That is, unless a really easy plumbing job came along.

—Steven Heller

CRITIQUES

SECTION I

Detail of a 1999 specimen sheet for contorted and distressed typefaces from Plazm Fonts.

THE ME TOO GENERATION

Thank god it’s over, said Milton Glaser, responding to my question, How do you feel about the self-indulgent, designer-as-artist-above-all-else era of graphic design that we just passed through? What else could he say? I miss it already? or Too bad sobriety has returned? But despite the loaded question, the fact is, during the past decade there has been a fervent desire among many young designers to be considered independently hip. Exhibit one: the many showcase design books with the words hot, cool, and killer in the titles, mostly about type, typography, and Web sites, that reinforce by reward the notion that novelty and slavish idiosyncrasy is somehow a virtue.

What constitutes hot-cool-killer design? I would characterize it as a clash of new technologies and old styles with novel conceits and faddish fashions. Timely labels for these—like Grunge, New Wave, Techno, Post-Punk, New Minimalism, and even Neo-Modernism— have added to the era’s edgy cachet. But perhaps Me Too Design is a better catch phrase. For this was an era when popular acceptance (or at least acknowledgment) of graphic design by the mass media (e.g., the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, etc.) encouraged designers to become relentlessly expressive. Many graphic designers, however, found their means of expression in the same basic sources: supermarket signage, twentieth-century Modern art, futuristic fantasies, computer programming quirks, and even a little of that old-time corporate Modernism. The end product (or byproduct) was a pre-proto-neo-post stew, tasty but hard to digest.

Nineties graphic design began to evolve in the early eighties, when a rebellion against sterile corporate Modernism and slick opulent professionalism erupted. Designers attacked the Swiss style that ordered and clarified information and replaced it with type and image that literally collided on a single page. Once sacrosanct rules of form and function were expunged through the use of distressed or distorted letterforms that resulted in dissonant compositions. So-called post-Modern graphic designers from progressive design schools in Holland, Switzerland, England, and the United States borrowed the language of poststructuralism from highbrow French literary critics. This allowed them to talk about themselves, expose their own mechanics, and hold a dialog or discourse about their own constructs, explains Katherine McCoy, the former co-chair of Cranbrook Academy of Art, once the wellspring of graphic design’s deconstruction movement.

Deconstruction theorists at Cranbrook and elsewhere proposed to transform graphic design from a mere commercial tool to a rich cultural language. They believed that a participatory audience interpreted information in an individual way. Therefore, everyday messages were not to be taken at face value simply because they were set in official typefaces and printed on fine papers. Deconstruction questioned the authority and morality of all kinds of propaganda—a worthwhile goal, although somewhat detached from design problems for common businesses, like annual reports, ketchup labels, or mail order catalogs.

Deconstruction would probably have remained behind the academy’s walls if not for the almost simultaneous introduction of the designers’ best friend, the Macintosh, in the mid-eighties, which caused the most profound stylistic and attitudinal changes since the 1920s, when European Modernists put forth the notion of design universality and formal purity. In fact, digitization was the first major revolution in graphic arts, particularly in how graphic design is produced and distributed if not conceived, since old man Guttenberg moved his earliest type slugs around in fifteenth-century Mainz. Even the shift from hot metal to cold type during the 1960s did not give individual graphic designers the same opportunity to directly control the setting and printing of content while dabbling with form. Faceless technology, paradoxically, made personal expressionism possible for everyone.

A few intrepid designers quickly experimented in the early 1990s, realizing that the opportunity for unfettered exploration would disappear once marketing geniuses caught on to their discoveries. In the print arena, Emigre magazine, the clarion of digital typography, lead a charge that inspired the likes of Beach Culture, Ray Gun, Bikini, Blur, Speak, and scores of other outlets of new design, where digital type jockeys galloped over the status quo. Similarly, Fuse, founded by Neville Brody and John Wozencroft, was a petri dish of type culture— a digital magazine and an international conference that encouraged conceptual type-play around such themes as politics, sexism, and pornography. Fuse’s conceptual, digital alphabets expressed burning social and cultural issues, rather than simply addressing the functional demands of type—that is, easy reading. Type became difficult to decipher and a metaphor for whatever issue required metaphors.

Emigre’s Rudy VanderLans and Zusana Licko created unprecedented typefaces and layouts that pushed the limits of traditional design into that netherworld between art and functionality. They intuitively understood the potential power of the new tools—and they were not afraid to take risks that annoyed orthodox Modernists like Massimo Vignelli, one of their more vocal critics. But their influence was on other designers rather than on the mass market. Following close on their heels, however, David Carson, art director of Ray Gun, introduced typographic antics that evolved into the more widespread code of 1990s youth culture. He exploited the computer’s mistakes to make design that looked more like abstract canvas than readable pages. Computer programming glitches provided an endless supply of graphic tricks that challenged legibility. It was not entirely new—having been done decades earlier under the banners of Dada, Merz, and Surrealism—but when revived in the digital age, it became symbolic of the new rebellion.

Rebellion against what, you might ask? Against the status quo, naturally—and, of course, against everything that could never be done prior to the computer. Digital freedom was Carson’s license to be me, and for so many acolytes it was an invitation to be me too.

Having so much power on the desktop ushered in a wave of narcissism and self-indulgence. The idea that a designer was an artiste first and a communicator second (or third) was quaint at the outset, but offered diminished returns over the long term. Although individual personality routinely plays a key role in visual communication, it must be the result, not the goal, of solving design problems. Confusion ensues when the desire to express that singular me overpowers the client’s message. When everyone is conducting experiments, no one is really experimenting—everyone’s just following fashion. Design itself should not be the sole message, although in the me too era it was often mistaken as such.

Experimentation became a fashionable style. Carson’s work, as idiosyncratic as it was, fostered The End of Print Style. In fact, the desire to be me evolved, consciously or not, into the need for others to be like me too. Cranbrook’s grads spawned a style of layered typography, and even VanderLans’s efforts resulted in an Emigre Style. It was unavoidably predictable.

Emigre was, however, the first to question its own role in this vortex of style, and by the mid-1990s VanderLans had admitted that its methods were being mimicked (perhaps even abused) by lemming-like acolytes. He refined his work by shifting over to a more uncluttered manner built around Emigre’s signature typefaces, proving that behind all his experimentation was a skillful designer. Nonetheless, the controlled chaos that had been unleashed was now tried, true, and stylish, too. The herd of me-too-ers could be seen in design competitions and showcase books. Anything with smashed, blurred, or contorted type was a shoe-in.

In the 1990s, graphic design emerged as a look-at-me profession. Neville Brody, David Carson, and others were celebrated in the style sections of mainstream newspapers and magazines, and graphic design earned a lofty cultural status. Yet with status came commodification. Commercial entrepreneurs (and their art directors) appropriated the scourge-of-Western-civilization methods and mannerisms— dumbed down, of course. Me design became an identity—a hook— for products like soft drinks, jeans, and tampons aimed at tweens, teens, and Gen X-, Y-, and Z-ers. Yet, as Glaser said, It’s over, and graphic designers today seem to be in a reactive mode, less expressionistic, more objective, somewhat detached (even bland corporate Modernism and Helvetica type are making a comeback). The idea that graphic design should be responsive to society’s needs also appears to be on the rise. Perhaps this could be the dawning of the age of You Too Design?

Poster for an AIGA competition by Michael Mabry influenced by Russian Constructivism.

HISTORY LITE

When American type designer Frederic Goudy declared back in the early 1900s that those old guys stole some of our best ideas, he had no clue that many decades later this ironic phrase would be quoted as one reason for the ambivalence among young designers toward the serious study of graphic design history. But, the fact is, young designers always prefer to find their own pathways, even if in the end they return to inventions of the past. And I’m not talking about the distant past, either.

History is rarely esteemed by youth because it is construed as something that occurred way-back-when (say, before the advent of DVDs), regardless of how few or how many years have actually passed. Even the term, that’s history, implies uncool, passé, and boring. Only with a modicum of maturity (say, by the mid- to late-twenties) can one really begin to appreciate the past (old movies, old books, and old graphic design) as a cultural resource rather than burdensome tradition. However, another theory suggests that reverence for the past usually skips a generation. Invariably, a current generation rejects the previous one while admiring the one immediately before it. Of course, in graphic design terms, generations are measured not by long decades, but rather by a few short years. Hence, I have observed that the current generation of design students (of the late 1990s) has little interest in (and indeed a modicum of derision for) David Carson’s early 1990s End of Print style of cacophonous layering, but is fascinated by Neville Brody’s late 1980s dyptho-Modern post-Face style. I’ve also found that this interest is manifest in a kind of hybridization of forms, resulting in a growing number of student and young professional works invoking or sampling Modernist simplicity with a contemporary edge in layout and type selection, such as in Wallpaper magazine.

It is axiomatic that when one dominant mannerism transcends its usefulness, an alternative method emerges—which is why, currently, designers are leaning toward more Modernlike elementary values, rejecting grunge typefaces and Photoshop pyrotechnics in favor of white space and grid-inspired formats, among other attributes. The question becomes this: Are these values drawn from philosophical traditions with deep-rooted histories, or are they just knee-jerk reactions to shifting trends? Has the study and practice of graphic design history played a significant or incidental role in our evolutionary progression?

Over the past two decades, graphic design history has definitely been more consequential in design education. There have been an increased number of history courses and more books, articles, and conferences attempting to integrate history into practice. In addition, more original historical research has been encouraged, which uncovers unknown facets of individual designers and new relationships between design and the broader culture. Just a decade ago, few trade publishers were willing to invest in historical and critical biographies, anthologies, and analyses of graphic design culture, whereas today they are modestly competing for this material and for the limited pool of accomplished writer-researchers who engage in it, suggesting that design history has an audience.

But what is the essence of this audience? I propose that over the past decade, design history has gone in and out of being cool as a stylistic resource and that the audience is less interested in the issues raised by historical pursuit than the material artifacts it offers for widespread sampling. In other words, rather than validating its own design continuum, what might be termed history chic validates today’s fashions and fads.

In the late 1970s, however, I argued that retro design was a means of introducing historical precedent to those designers who were unschooled in formal design history. I also reasoned that with the paucity of legitimate history courses at that time, history used as style was like a trigger-point injection that stimulated further discovery. And I believe today that despite some stylistic monstrosities developed under the retro banner, young designers were nonetheless introduced to the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Futurism, and other Modern design movements through work that was borrowed from these sources. Copying historical forms was similar to those lessons learned from redrawing great-master paintings. But, ultimately, history as style offers diminishing returns, because style exists for ephemeral purposes only. Using Bauhaus style today and Swiss International tomorrow only serves to trivialize the value of history.

During the late 1980s and the early 1990s, hothouse institutions, like Cranbrook Academy, used history as a linchpin in the development of a theoretical approach to design. Students were introduced to a variety of historical figures and movements in order to provide context for their own revolutionary deconstructivism, which resulted in a uniquely contemporary palette of design methods. Now, in a post-deconstruction era, the reactions to these phenomena have forced certain designers to take refuge in another kind of retro that references 1950s’ late Modern methods as practiced by Paul Rand, Ladislav Sutnar, and Alvin Lustig, among others.

However, in a recent seminar where I talked with graduate students about the intricacies of graphic design history, very few of them had ever heard of Sutnar or Lustig. Rand was an exception because at least one of his books was required reading during their schooling. Although both Sutnar and Lustig are featured in Roger Remington and Barbara Hodik’s Nine Pioneers in American Design¹ when asked about their references, a few of these students did recall having seen reproductions of Sutnar’s and Lustig’s works but could not put proper names to them. One student said that her particular project was influenced by Sutnar’s graphical information design in his 1950 book, Catalog Design Progress, but at the time she was unaware of who the designer was. "I saw a bunch of these pages reproduced somewhere, maybe in EYE," she admitted. And I liked the way they looked, so I copied them for my own project.

In the mid-1980s, during the AIGA’s first national conference in Boston, author and critic Tom Wolfe referred to graphic designers in a post-Modern sense as deriving inspiration from the Big Closet of history. At that time he was commenting on retro pastiche, and implied that many graphic designers (as well as architects) are prone to appropriate the past without understanding its context or larger ramifications. His words had resonance for many, and after his talk it seemed that the stock in serious design history went up a notch. Among the pioneers, so to speak, Keith Goddard and Warren Lehrer lectured and addressed conferences; Philip Meggs wrote the first edition of A History of Graphic Design (now in its third edition);² and other serious historians, including Roger Remington, Victor Margolin, Lorraine Wild, Katherine McCoy, and myself, were beginning to publish articles on history. Soon after, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller began working on historical exhibitions and catalogs at the Herb Lubalin Center in New York. History itself became a subject for critical analysis, as practitioners discovered new perspectives—feminist, Marxist, connoisseur, etc.—and delved into uncharted realms of design history, both pro- and anti-cannon. Thus began serious historical pursuit, in the United States at least, which momentarily put graphic design history on the front burner—so I thought.

Presumably, the flurry of activity in the early 1990s begot a well-functioning design history discipline with various young historians (from deep within and outside the field), numerous educative programs at art schools and colleges, and increased awareness (and interest) among students and young professionals. Indeed, there are more resources and references today than over a decade ago (including Internet sites), but after this initial surge there has been a marked tapering off of activity. And this curious decline in progress seems related to the very real fact that history is an adjunct to design practice—an elective, not a prescriptive.

Despite interest by some (if not most) schools in having design history courses, there are no courses devoted to training graphic design history teachers in theory, criticism, or research. I recently was asked by a prestigious institution to recommend a history teacher for a tenure track position and could not think of one person with the necessary qualifications (who was not already ensconced). To be frank, there are no real incentives: No viable monetary reward awaits those who want to dedicate themselves to research, writing, and teaching design history; the book industry pays little in relation to the amount of work that is involved in serious historical research; full-time teaching positions are rare; and grant money is paltry yet requires considerable effort for one to obtain it. In short, design historians must at best be part-timers in order to survive. Hence, most schools rely on ad hoc courses. They are lucky to have a strong teacher; otherwise such courses are history-lite: a potpourri of anecdote, canonical history, guest speakers, quirky facts, and so on. Even with the best intentions, history is ultimately not taken as seriously as studio, lab, or portfolio courses that produce quantifiable professional results. So when students are exposed to historical materials, these materials are often in the form of object lessons (i.e., copying historical styles), which invariably encourage decontextualization and appropriation.

There is no immediate solution to this problem. Graphic design history is just too low down in the priorities of undergraduate and graduate educational institutions, especially as the parameters of the profession are changing to include new media and multiple disciplines. But I do believe that graphic design history is too important to be shunted off either to the realm of theoretical arcana or copycat portfolio classes. While a mature history curriculum can integrate theory and practice, for the most part design education has not succeeded in doing this well enough to see qualitative results.

For history to be more than just a stylistic touchstone, students should not be encouraged to make their own Bauhaus or Dada designs. The technology has so radically changed since the original forms were introduced that this mimicry serves no useful purpose, anyway. Instead, students should be told stories (which is the essence of history) that inspire and excite. Design is only one part surface. The other parts are the stories and contexts that derive from the cultures that produced the designs and the designers. Design history is ultimately a collection of stories embodied in artifacts and individuals. Furthermore, graphic design history is a process of unearthing lost objects and ideas for the purpose of building a cultural and professional legacy. So for history to be more than style,