[Update – Feb 23, 2011: I recently blew out the discussion contained in this blog post and incorporated it into an article for Smashing Magazine about idea generation. Read the article here.]
Tag: design
Annals of less persistently being confused with more
Last week, we had a meeting with a client who predictably bleated ‘Less is more!’ at us while trying to explain his misgivings about the direction of the book we’re creating for him. I was tempted to point out to him that, actually, less isn’t more, it’s less and more is more, but decided to hold my tongue and nod, pseudo-enlightenedly.
I’ve blogged before on my feelings about this catch-phrase and my appreciation for Milton Glaser’s counter-proposal that ‘just enough is more’. The Polish Blues Brothers poster that Krafty blogged on is one piece of evidence in the case there is sometimes room for busyness in good design: it’s the jaunty details, the complexity, the sense of bustle and personality here that makes it such a winner. The same can certainly be said for this James Brown poster designed by Sergio Moctezuma at Tribal DDB that I discovered while researching type-only posters for an assignment I gave to my Prague College students. Like the Blues Brothers poster, there’s a visual generosity here that doesn’t often occur in the realm of high modernism. Of course, it also resembles the Blues Brothers poster in terms of its distinct blue cast and the evident love of hand-lettering.
Franco the Obscure
On the heels of yesterday’s long windbaggy post on The Zizkov Television Tower, it seems like a good time for a refreshingly short design post with lots of nice images and mercifully little text.
Today’s subject is Franco Grignani:
An Italian designer working in Milano, Grignani started experimenting in the early 1950s with radical black-and-white abstract compositions that paved the way for Op Art:
(Interestingly, this is a logo for a wool company (edit: reader MM reminds me that it wasn’t for a wool ‘company’– rather, it was the universal symbol to indicate clothing made from wool in Italy, like the cotton mark nowadays.))
He also did some more conventional advertising pieces that show a easy surety with color, style, fashion:
Historically, Grignani is an unaccountably murky figure. The internet has almost nothing to say about him. And it’s come a long way in recent years– at least one can find images of his work online these days. I remember researching Grignani as a student back in 2002 and I literally had to go the public library to find a single sample of his work.
Presumably, part of Grignani’s obscurity stems from his association with the second wave of Futurism and its off-putting associations with Fascism. Another reason might be the fact that, as far as I can tell, he seemed to be his own island, so to speak, producing works that had no close parallels and seemed to inspire no immediate legion of imitators. It’s a puzzling little cul-de-sac of graphic design history.
Politically incorrect design lectures
One thing I miss living in Prague is the design lectures I used to go to routinely in San Francisco. Two highlights:
1. Victor Moscoso
Moscoso was one of the main designers behind the Haight Ashbury psychedelic poster movement. He designed classic hippie-era band posters like this one:
He also revealed himself to be the designer of the Herbie Hancock Headhunters cover, which was a surprise to me, as this was one of my favorite album cover designs in college:
I saw him lecture to a packed auditorium in 2006. He is a fascinating lecturer, and also a pleasingly unrepentant, unreconstructed hippie. At one point, during his lecture he got sidetracked and went on a pro-legalization-of-marijuana tangent, which led to this spectacular exchange:
Moscoso: [ending with a rhetorical flourish] “I mean, when has marijuana ever really been shown to cause anybody harm?”
Audience: furious applause, cheering
Moscoso: [apparently emboldened by applause] “And LSD… when has LSD ever hurt someone?”
Audience: uncomfortable shifting in seats; nervous, scattered applause
I’d never before seen an audience exhibit a collective sense of being complicit in something uncomfortable and frankly hadn’t known it was possible.
2. Paula Scher
Paula Scher is arguably the most accomplished and well-known female designer alive at present. Her famous poster for a Broadway musical in the early 90s:
She also designed the Jon Stewart book America. When I saw her, it was a joint lecture between her and the producer of the Daily Show, and they talked about how the book got made, the collaborative process, etc etc. The producer even talked at length about Stewart’s infamous appearance on Crossfire when he savaged the hosts.
The best part, though, was when they discussed ideas and jokes that were ultimately deemed too offensive to leave in the book. One omitted joke included a plan to present a diagram of the political left and right sides of the brain with a small area on the far right occupied by Ann Coulter and named… The Cuntal Lobe. Genius.
Futurism and the Musee Mecanique
This year is the 100th anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto, when F.T. Marinetti (the self-proclaimed ‘most modern man in Europe’ at the time) introduced his cult of dynamism to the world through a combination of incendiary rhetoric, genius publicity stunts and Fascist agitating. The Futurists were fascinated by speed, technology, war, Moussellini, masculinity, action and loud noise; they were contemptuous of civility, history, culture, women, and everything else they associated with polite society and the existing status quo. The only avant-garde art movement I’m aware of with a strong right-wing orientation, Futurism remains weirdly alluring and seriously off-putting.
As Futurists were obsessed with the dynamics of the early machine age, I had the idea many years ago to illustrate their manifesto with photos taken from San Francisco’s Musee Mecanique, a highly-enjoyable collection of antique arcade machines. The common link is that both the Manifesto and the MM collection show the imaginative possibilities of the early machine age, and both produce results that are both appealing and monstrous. I printed a few copies of this as accordion-folds.
Front and back cover:
(Note how much the giant doll on the cover looks like Moussellini- a happy coincidence!)
Inside spreads:
Guns and books
Another interesting ‘micro-climate’ of poster design was in Cuba. As was the case in Poland, there was a strong national idiom and an elevated regard for the poster compared to more industrialized parts of the world. Unlike Poland, though, where poster art was nationalized and state-run, the Cuban posters were more of an agi-prop, do-it-yourself proposition.
Two interesting motifs that appear a lot: guns and books. Artists seems to find an inexhaustible supply of imaginative presentations for the former in particular. I would never have imagined that a poster featuring a sunset composed of receding rifles in romantic hues would fly, but there it is. Also, the gun-plus-book-together image is pretty striking in terms of how visually logical the partnership seems in retrospect. Finally, just for fun, here’s a poster likening the lot of the Cuban farm worker with her Vietnamese commie brethren– very striking contrast between black-and-white vs. color that, again, would seem difficult to pull off in concept but works very naturally here.
Top: Rene Mederos. Bottom, left to right: Arturo Alfonso Palomino, Fausino Perez, and Mederos again.
Images taken from ¡Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art by Lincoln Cushing– more images and ordering info here.
Polish movie posters
On the heels of Krafty’s Polish Blues Brothers poster acquisition, I thought I’d write a bit on the genre at large. Poland has had a really unique relationship with poster design. The country emerged so devastated from WWII that it took much longer for TV and other communication technologies to make serious inroads, so the poster maintained this weirdly elevated status through the 60s, 70s and 80s. Poland formalized poster design to unusual degree (poster designers were taught in rigorous university programs, then went on to work in unions and accept state-controlled flow of jobs) and embraced it as a kind of national idiom. Polish posters tended to go in for a cheery, folkloric look in the 60s but then developed into something entirely different in the 70s and 80s as a strange, melancholic introspective style evolved.
There’s a lot to like about Polish film posters. For one, simply the fact that artists were allowed to work in this idiosyncratic, gloomy style while promoting films and not railroaded into some kind of generically upbeat, promotional mode. Second, the highly personalized interpretations of film themes (sometimes, you wonder if the designer had even seen the film or was merely working from a synopsis). Mostly, the fact that technological limitations freed designers from having to maintain a slavish realism in their approach. The production means weren’t available to reproduce stills from the movie at high quality, so it was sort of taken for granted that the designer’s solution would involve a certain amount of creative latitude. Sometimes, the technical limitations were turned on their head and used for effect, as in the Zloto Alaski poster where the black-and-white halftone pattern is made so big that you see it as a weird deliberate texture. Finally, in a state-controlled industry, nobody needed to promote themselves, so you don’t have that requirement that every damn person involved in the movie has to be listed along the bottom of the poster in type so condensed that no one can read it anyway.
There are too many good examples of Polish poster work to just select a few, so I limited myself to posters of American westerns.
Top: Midnight Cowboy, Waldemar Swierzy
Bottom, clockwise: Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, Mieczcyslaw Wasilewski; North To Alaska, Jolanta Karczewska; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Waldemar Swierzy
The Blues Brothers
Somebody posted a link to this Polish poster of the Blues Brothers on Facebook yesterday. I think the post was meant as a joke — “Look at this weird Polish poster for this cheesy movie!” — but I immediately ordered a copy, which is now on its way to my house, I am assured via a personal email “with Kind Regards” from Krzysztof Marcinkiewicz.
The fact is, I love this movie, and when I tell people it is one of the greatest movies ever made, I’m only partly kidding. I honestly think it is as imitated as Star Wars, whether it is the themes (“Getting the band back together,” Carrie Fisher’s insane quest for revenge, the “mission from God” to save the orphanage that justified all of their middling crimes) or specific scenes (the jailhouse pickup to open the movie, the chase through the shopping mall, the over-the-top finale, etc.) And let’s not forget the incredible number of cameos: James Brown as the preacher (and Chakha Khan in the choir); Aretha Franklin; Cab Calloway; Carrie Fisher; Billy Crystal; Pee Wee Herman; Frank Oz; Ray Charles; John Candy; John Lee Hooker; etc. etc. For god’s sake, their backing band was comprised of the greatest soul session musicians of all time. And I haven’t even mentioned Belushi and Aykroyd, two comic geniuses at the height of their powers.
OK, I will admit that the timing of its release (I was seven, and it may have been the first R-rated movie I ever saw) had something to do with its oversized impact on me. And I’ll also admit that it hardly invented some of the tropes and themes that I’m still celebrating — but there is something about the way it melded all of that stuff together (along with the musical numbers) that seems totally innovative. And I’ll bet you that this, and not some older precursor, is the reference point for modern comedy directors when you see those themes/set pieces/tropes recur.
I wish I had something insightful to say about the Polish interpretation of it that will soon be adorning my office wall (I’m not even going to bother floating the idea of having it in the house to my wife), but perhaps my certified design instructor co-blogger can take care of that angle.
Just enough is more
I guess it’s telling that, in all the design-related posts I’ve done so far, I haven’t posted anything in the classic modernist tradition. The truth is that while there are many modernist works I love, the hegemony of modernism annoys me– I feel like it gets too much credit relative to other branches of design history that are more challenging to understand. I guess that in the end, I suspect that it’s fairly easy to develop an attitude towards modernism: one can latch on to a few easy catch-phrases – less is more, form follows function – and feel that there’s a basis of an opinion here, whereas the underlying assumptions of, say, Constructivism or Art Deco are harder to wrap one’s head around.
One of my very favorite statements on design comes from Milton Glaser (the creative partner, incidentally, of Seymour Chwast, whom I blogged on yesterday) in his essay Ten Things I Have Learned as he calls into question one of the blanket assumptions of modernism:
LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’
‘Just enough is more’ is one of the most instructive ideas I have learned about design. The Popova textile design I posted a few weeks ago is a great example of this, I think.
Image: Piet Zwart, whose layouts have a musicality and playfulness that cut between ‘too sparse’ and ‘too busy’.
End bad breath
Short-version post: This is funny, but it’s also a political statement.
Long-version post: There are so many things uttered along these lines every day in the news that it hardly makes sense to seize on any specific instance. But today, the odious Melanie Phillips opined about Barack Obama:
“What a disgrace that this man is leader of the free world; and at such a point in history. If he had put America stoutly behind the protesters and championed them against the regime, by now they might have toppled it,”
[In case you’ve missed it: the context is that Obama has prudently- according to every informed observer- avoided taking a high-profile stance on the disputed Iranian elections, realizing full well that any stance on his part will be manipulated by the Khameni to drum up support among fellow Islamic hard-liners. Yet, there’s still a contingent who somehow gets a fair amount of media time and can’t resist painting everything in binary terms, reducing complex geo-political situations to infantine constructs of ‘courage vs. cowardice’ and … ah, never mind.]
It’s situations like this where the application of graphic design as political commentary seems most underused and indispensable. It often feels as if one is unduly dignifying some nut-case argument if you bother to refute it on factual grounds. There’s something about a powerful graphic image that better sums up the sheerly malign psychology behind certain right-wing political attitudes. This Seymour Chwast agi-prop poster from 1967 is the strongest visualization I’ve seen to date, even though it’s over 40 years old and dates back to the Vietnam era.
Interestingly, my design students- most of whom hail from formerly Communist countries- don’t really get this one when I show it in my design history class. They tend to find it funny, and strain to get the political connotations. I imagine that there’s a political caricature that would hit them as clearly as this Chwast illustration hits me, but that the underlying psychological/visual language would be very different and speak more to the bureaucratic realities of 80’s East Bloc life.