Images Test 3

A. M. Cassandre's work is practically synonymous with 1920s and 1930s popular culture. His airbrush techniques produced a surface that seemed to be machined. His image of the ocean liner—monumental, architectonic, and massively formalized—is a graphic icon. The capacity to simplify while creating elegant form was one of Cassandre's signature traits. The design's effect is a halcyon image of a perfectly running world, smooth as the surface of the transatlantic cruise ship. Modernity is pictured as a powerful machine, ensuring ease and grandeur on untroubled waters, stable and unsinkable. Seamless imagery embodied a rhetoric of easy consumability Graphic designers in the 1920s and 1930s could count on new reproductive techniques to produce glossy images with smoothly toned surfaces. Seamless imagery embodied a visual rhetoric of easy consumability. The manipulation of images or type through photographic prepress processes introduced flexibility into a repertoire that had previously been circumscribed by the limits of hot metal type and an engraver's skill. Shaping, layering, highlighting, reversing, and otherwise altering artwork became readily possible. Photomontage, a provocative technique in avant-garde artistic circles, became an eye-catching staple of commercial design. The airbrush, initially used for retouching photographs, was more widely adopted in the 1920s as a way to lend graphic art a machine-like finish that proclaimed modernity. Images became products, well-made commodities in their own right that circulated as consumable forms. Four-color photographic separation and offset printing promised to stretch graphic capabilities beyond the limits of gravure and relief, bring costs down, and increase the volume of print runs. Relief printing would remain viable, in part, because of the capital investment in equipment made by many printers and publishers, but offset lithography was soon to become the industry standard (Fig. 10.22).

Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron Cassandre, Normandie poster, 1935 chapter 10

The graphic impact of Futurism and Dada Futurism and Dada were international movements. In 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti burst into the spotlight when his Futurist Manifesto was published on the front page of the popular French newspaper, Le Figaro. Marinetti called for a radical new aesthetic sensibility in all arts. The moment was ripe and the impact was explosive. Avant-garde activity erupted simultaneously all over Europe and in Russia and America in the 1910s. This internationalism was one of the distinctive features of modernism. Almost overnight, far-flung artists felt compelled to define their work by a dramatic rejection of all inherited aesthetic values. Marinetti claimed that a racing car was as beautiful as the Venus de Milo and celebrated the machines and industrial products of modern life. He exhorted artists to express the "wireless imagination" associated with the new medium of radio. His phrase "words in liberty" became a rallying cry to break the habits of poetic thought. His incitement to do away with conventional punctuation in favor of mathematical symbols and more direct and concrete means of relating textual elements was an assault on bourgeois propriety. He also called for graphic innovations that would banish the last of the late nineteenth-century stylistic sensibility that still cluttered pages with elaborate motifs and borders. Marinetti's attacks on the decorative typography of old-fashioned books were as rabid as his proclaimed hatred for the soppy first-person of lyrical poetry. Modern meant new and new meant machine-made or at least machine-like, and sometimes nihilistic and antihumanistic (Figs. 9.5a-c). 9.5b Filippo Marinetti, Mots en Liberté, 1919. Among the most famous typographic experiments of the avant-garde, this poem portrays the sounds of battle in an image that explodes off the page. The graphic effect is powerful and unprecedented. Tremendous visual imagination was required to conceive of such a work and to integrate its visual-verbal-tactile effects so thoroughly. It is a prime example of poetic synesthesia—an aesthetic carried over from Symbolism —in which one sense perception (e.g., sound, sight, smell) was expressed in terms of another. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Symbolist artists deplored direct expression and sought to create esoteric symbols for the richly cloaked presentation of ideal forms. In Marinetti's Futurist sensibility, the crashing violence of war is rendered by a visual equivalent. His language is direct, his methods abrupt, and his aesthetic represents an about-face from the mystical world of transcendence that occupied artists a generation earlier. The modern world in all of its immediacy is the target of Marinetti's aim.

Filippo Marinetti, Mots en Liberté, 1919 chapter 9

Images of luxury invoked worldliness and refinement. This often meant associations with European culture, finely made goods, and elite vacation spots populated by a privileged few. French designer A. M. Cassandre hit the right style note to translate the more esoteric features of modern art into a graphic vocabulary with wider appeal. An echo of Cubism and modern abstraction permeates the advertisement he designed for a sporting cap. The image appeals to a viewer who recognizes references to great modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and others, in its outline, color blocks, and shadings. Advertising brought modern art before the public, and, if it made modern images less challenging, it also made abstract style more popular. Cubism and modern art in general were frequently mocked in the popular press, but they introduced a touch of chic urbanity to marketing campaigns. Herbert Matter's design depends on innovative photographic imagery to achieve its impact. Photography is associated with realism, but here the use of a dramatic angle has a disruptive effect. The contrast between the close-up and background portions of this poster divides the image into distinct icons. The design promotes an idea of Switzerland as a winter tourist paradise by manipulating images as signs, rather than for their literal depiction of Swiss mountains. Matter's training at the Bauhaus provided him with a strong foundation for formal invention in the modern mode. In this new culture of consumer capitalism, ad campaigns equated style with currency and currency with success. To make spending glamorous, graphic designers developed an aesthetic that was moderne—cool, streamlined, sophisticated, and in tune with the jazz-age culture that thrived in the margins of a residual Victorianism and, in the United States, of Prohibition. Tourism and entertainment industries flourished, exploiting new degrees of mobility and leisure in a growing middle class and testing strategies for packaging experiences. As more aspects of everyday life were commodified, more products were sold by their association with a prestigious image. Style added value to a product, and graphic designers were actively involved in expanding the role that publicity played in affixing that value to brands. When the stock market crashed in New York in 1929, it triggered an economic depression that lasted in the United States and Europe until the beginning of World War II. But throughout the 1930s, graphic designers continued to shape the notion of a contemporary life of abundance in the popular imagination. The gap between reality and imagery was often striking (Figs. 10.3a and 10.3b).

Herbert Matter, Swiss Tourist poster, 1935

Herbert Bayer's World Geo-Graphic Atlas, privately printed for the Container Corporation of America, was a remarkable realization of the new cartographic possibilities offered by pictographic logic, statistical analysis, and such novel techniques as R. Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion projection. Exquisitely designed to compress enormous amounts of information into graphically elegant pages, Bayer's work communicates with maximum efficiency. The visual allure of his design complements the intellectual organization of its layouts and sequences. Bringing the world into a unified graphic space may have been an expression of political optimism, but the comprehensiveness of this publication also suggests a postwar interest in a global view of economic opportunities. Real living conditions do not enter the logic of such graphics. Local contexts, political and social realities, and cultural meanings are not computable as quantitative information, so they are not represented. In popular imagination and in concrete application, systems approaches to the presentation of data became pervasive metaphors. Rather than thinking in traditional terms about static display, graphic designers began to develop a schematic visual language suitable to depicting dynamic elements and activities in flux. Imagery of paths, movements, and transitions came from the burgeoning industry of electronic circuitry. Data processing became a part of daily business, as digital computers began to be adopted by government agencies, corporations, and financial institutions. The idea of data gained credibility, in part, because of the graphic forms through which it was represented. Human knowledge, translated into a mathematical system of binary code (the basis of digital computing), had its own claim on popular imagination. The cultural authority of statistics was boosted by the visual rhetoric of information graphics. The mathematical basis of data informed both the principles (ways of conceiving) of graphic design and its iconography (specific images and motifs) in the 1950s. Graphic designers drew heavily on this highly rational approach to ordering the visual presentation of information. But graphic order has its own effects on content. Complex issues become simplified as heterogeneity and anomalies disappear. Modular elements suggest a working whole in which each unit fits in a predetermined place. A unit of information, a module of humanity, or a bit of data is a notion whose graphic form reinforces the expectation that a well-functioning system can accommodate such elements gracefully and successfully (Fig. 11.19). Information analysis and design process The influence of informational analysis affected the way graphic design saw itself. Instead of being an approach to the display of objects and communication of messages, it was conceived as a system in which all elements operated as integral parts of a network of flows and exchanges. Metaphors of traffic and distribution became templates on which design approaches were shaped. For example, the analysis of information into content types, according to classifications that sorted and structured images, text, and their relationship within a publication, added a level of schematization to graphic presentation. Meta-design—ways of thinking about the design process and articulating its principles—extended earlier modern discussions of the language of form (Fig. 11.18).

Herbert Bayer, World Geo-Graphic Atlas, 1953 chap 11

Private industry contributed to the war effort by placing defense and combat needs above other production demands. Suppliers to the armed forces turned a profit, but they promoted their engagement as cooperation. Using images of this virile, brave GI to sell its packaging materials enhanced the company's public image. The atomic model, symbolizing scientific progress, unites photographs, drawings, and type in a complicated montage. But the iconography of its basic elements clearly emphasizes private industry's aid to the war effort. Wartime information During the war, official diagrams and charts delivered crucial information. The British Ministry of Information and the United States Office of War Information engaged designers of stature and skill, such as Herbert Matter and Leo Lionni, to develop signage and educational posters. The task of presenting dense amounts of information in an economical and well-organized form challenged such designers to adapt aesthetic means to highly pragmatic purposes: identifying insignia, warplanes, and bombs, and preparing for emergencies by familiarizing viewers with scenarios to be followed in response to circumstances or signals. Rapid visual recognition was critical to insignia design, whereas camouflage schemes sought to deceive and conceal (Figs. 11.14a-c).

Herbert Matter, advertisement for CCA, 1943 Part of "A Paperboard Goes to War" campaign

A German worker, with a Nazi flag, is putting the building blocks of a new society into place. His muscled body and striking good looks embody the fiction of a master race and offer a ready stereotype to be planted in the public mind. A concealing shadow is cast over the eyes of Ludwig Hohlwein's hard-featured masculine soldier. The backdrop may be "work" (arbeit) and "bread" (brot), but the dark figure's call for enlistment is made with a terrifying absence of humanity. Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms prints were issued as part of the effort to generate funds for the war, and their imagery delivers American ideology as clearly as Hohlwein's embodies Nazi myths. Rockwell's illustrations helped define an American idiom and sensibility. Lester Beall's posters were commissioned to inform Americans about the REA's program to bring electrical power to rural areas. The individuals he pictured were meant to represent a demographic group, part of the fabric of America. The poster's design integrates stripes and fence, flag and landscape, individual personality and generic image in such a way that they become inextricable. The deceptively simple message is that rural life and American values are indistinguishable. Iconography in the 1930s often propagated stereotypes. The naturalism of many illustrational styles fostered national cultural ideals through depiction of individuals enhanced by certain traits. The muscled, hard-bodied figures in German posters presented an image of invulnerability while promoting blond beauty as the highest aesthetic ideal. American folksy imagery, such as that chosen by Lester Beall in his posters for the Rural Electrification Administration, reinforced the notion of homespun hardiness and a pioneer spirit capable of triumphing over adversity. The work of Norman Rockwell and his imitators romanticized a particular version of Americana based in agrarian values and small-town traditionalism. National stereotypes emerged, in part, from designers' efforts to create imagery that reached its target audience through details of style and form as well as content. Some in the Nazi party promoted the use of blackletter, which they saw as carrying a strong association with ethnic roots and a connection with a mythic past. Folk imagery was invoked in national identity campaigns. Italian designers used updates of Trajan capitals to claim a modern incarnation of ancient glory, while in the United States, stenciled block letters seemed in keeping with the can-do attitude of the Depression era. This graphic rhetoric was as persuasive as any text and often served to reinforce the way individuals were judged along gender, race, and class lines. Moral assumptions were implicitly encoded in such graphic images. In many cases, similar persuasive methods were applied to promote strikingly different political values (Figs. 11.9a-d).

Lester Beall, poster for the Rural Electrification Administration, 1939 chapter 11

Most mass-produced books in the nineteenth century were of appalling quality, careless design, and poor workmanship. The challenge to cultivate new visual sensibilities and production values gave rise to the concept of "the book beautiful." r, Morris established the Kelmscott Press, his book and type designs set a standard of production that extended his influence for decades. The elaborate decorative elements that bordered his pages and his commitment to the revival of Venetian and Gothic typography laid the foundation for a range of styles. These included Arts and Crafts emulations and imitations throughout Europe and the United States, and elements of Art Nouveau. Even the reactions of later innovators who rejected Morris's overwrought motifs and relentless patterns were positioned by his influence. Morris thought very differently about design than his predecessors. Successive movements took up his challenge to approach graphic design as a social and cultural activity and a serious engagement with production—not just a set of formal principles. Morris had studied Medieval illuminated manuscripts in the 1850s during his undergraduate days at Oxford. Beginning in the 1860s, he produced studies and tests for deluxe books in the Medieval spirit. He collaborated with the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, creating page prototypes for several illustrated editions long before he established the Kelmscott Press. In his publications, Morris followed the guild model of collaborative production that he endorsed, engaging highly skilled artisans. He commissioned handmade paper as well-crafted and durable as sheets made in the fifteenth century. He also found sources for vellum and leather-binding materials. Every Kelmscott book was designed to suit its text. In this case, the work of the great Medieval author Geoffrey Chaucer is set in the adaptation of a Gothic typeface that bears his name. Morris's approach to book design was widely imitated in trade publishing, with mixed results. Arts and Crafts decoration became formulaic, and pseudo-medievalism was applied to all sorts of purposes. Morris's integration of elaborate production techniques enriched the unity and legibility that he structured into his pages.

8.5a William Morris, Canterbury Tales, Kelmscott Press, 1896.

As Arts-and-Crafts-influenced movements were formed in the late 1880s and 1890s by artists in Glasgow, Vienna, London, Paris, Berlin, and other European cultural centers, they diverged in attitudes and goals. Stylistic innovations moved away from historical sources, and two poles of abstraction—organic and geometric—came into vogue. Posters, publications, and publicity for major industrial exhibitions showcased the graphic styles of these groups, which often translated architectural approaches into visual motifs. An increasingly vital dialogue developed between industrial methods and fine art. Unlike the original Arts and Crafts impulse, which was firmly rooted in a romantic socialist agenda, late nineteenth-century movements often combined a mystical spiritualism with nationalist undertones. Scottish Arts and Crafts invoked Celtic roots that were as mythic as they were historical. These ethnic motifs resonated with themes of renewal and rebirth that were central to the Zeitgeist. Scottish Arts and Crafts practitioners shared their English counterparts' aesthetic concerns and progressive commitment to material integrity and honesty of production. The Glasgow style is attributed to the work of J. Herbert McNair, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Margaret MacDonald, and Frances MacDonald, known in their day as "The Four." Designed by McNair and the MacDonalds, this exhibition poster demonstrates a shift from the botanical organicism of English Arts and Crafts to a more geometric style. The elongated forms that lend this poster its elegance were characteristic of the Glasgow group and echo Mackintosh's architectural and interior designs. Medievalism and religious associations persist in the stylized costumes and beneficent postures of these figures. The design is organized according to linear patterns that divide the entire surface into carefully proportioned units. This graphic modularity and repetition reflect an abstract sensibility. The symmetry of positive and negative spaces within the composition gives figures and ground equal substance. Their shapes are harmoniously integrated into an overall design that continually shifts between abstraction and illustrational or decorative motifs. The hand-drawn lettering varies and enlivens the graphic space of the poster.

8.8a J. Herbert McNair, Margaret and Frances MacDonald, The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts poster, 1898.

Luxury imagery, whether in fine art or fashion photography, was a specialty of Edward Steichen. This ad for a cruise to Hawaii shows a glamorous woman, fully at ease in evening clothes, being seated for dinner. Her hair, curled in the marcelled waves of the day, delicate profile, and impeccable features suggest that her status and her beauty are perfectly matched, even naturally linked. Her fairness and face shape fulfill a stereotype, an image of aristocratic class that was coded to link ethnic identities and social values. Working-class women and people of color or distinct (non-Northern European) ethnic identity are rarely pictured in ads of this period. The Depression and its deprivations are also far from this scene, which represents a life secured against such difficulties rather than an escape from them. A certain graphic vocabulary became associated with modernity Consumer culture "Mass consumption," notes historian Daniel Boorstin, was considered "the great democratizing force in modern America." The advancement of an ideology of consumer capitalism in the early twentieth century was fueled by this equation. Graphic design was both an expression and an instrument of this ideology, and it was key to promoting consumption as an ideal, not simply a practicality. Advertising imagery sold goods by association with cultural values and class identities. In the 1920s, American advertising presented products as solutions to problems that might have emotional sources or social dimensions. Visual metaphors of the American dream invited identification with a vision of prosperity, even during the Depression. This collective fantasy of American opportunity may have seemed ironic, but it provided a powerful image (Figs. 10.10 and 10.11).

Edward Steichen, Matson Line cruise ad, 1934 chaper 10

El Lissitzky used abstract forms to symbolize conflict between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary factions in this famous poster. The red wedge represented the Communist armies organized against the conservative "white" forces of aristocratic landowners. The dynamic red triangle comes from the left and breaks into the white circle that symbolizes stability. Lissitzky was committed to the goals of the Russian Revolution, a civil war that had resulted in the abdication of the czar in 1917. In 1919, when Lissitzky composed this piece, power struggles among anarchists and other revolutionary forces were still ongoing. His attempt to communicate a political meaning in a new graphic language demonstrated his conviction that aesthetic direction could change the world by providing new forms for imagining society. Placed in public view outside a factory entrance where it would fall under the daily gaze of workers, the poster was meant to signal a new social order to those toiling to bring it about. It was not until the early twentieth century that designers purposely exploited and revealed new technical capabilities In spite of the profusion of nineteenth-century technical inventions, it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that designers purposefully exploited and revealed their capabilities. Such self-consciousness about media and materials was typical of the modern movement's desire to expose, present, or portray the devices of art and language. The artists who identified with the most adventurous visual experiments are known as the avant-garde. They did not have to make radical changes in technology (commercial uses of the printing industry had already prompted these), but they tried to find a visual language to translate the social meaning of these changes. In pursuit of this goal, they altered the look of graphic design for the rest of the twentieth century. They adopted a functionalist, antihistorical approach in which organic, hand-drawn, and ornamental forms were replaced by sans serif faces, geometric designs, and photographic imagery (Figs. 9.3a and 9.3b).

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919 chapter 9

Lissitzky's montage self-portrait pictures him as an engineer. His approach to design is revealed in the composition and production of this image, both of which were boldly unconventional for the period. The compass, a tool for making perfectly rational geometric forms, long associated with the work of architects and masons, is presented in a modern photographic rendering. Stencil letters and a gridded surface that suggest a mechanical drawing table reinforce the image of design as an industrial activity (rather than a fine art or an old craft), while Lissitzky's own closely cropped hair and turtleneck sweater are a far cry from the flowing locks and floppy ties of an earlier generation. It was not until the early twentieth century that designers purposely exploited and revealed new technical capabilities In spite of the profusion of nineteenth-century technical inventions, it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that designers purposefully exploited and revealed their capabilities. Such self-consciousness about media and materials was typical of the modern movement's desire to expose, present, or portray the devices of art and language. The artists who identified with the most adventurous visual experiments are known as the avant-garde. They did not have to make radical changes in technology (commercial uses of the printing industry had already prompted these), but they tried to find a visual language to translate the social meaning of these changes. In pursuit of this goal, they altered the look of graphic design for the rest of the twentieth century. They adopted a functionalist, antihistorical approach in which organic, hand-drawn, and ornamental forms were replaced by sans serif faces, geometric designs, and photographic imagery (Figs. 9.3a and 9.3b).

El Lissitzky, self-portrait, The Constructor, 1924 chapter 9

9.7b Hannah Höch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, collage, 1919-1920. One of the most original and striking graphic talents of the Dada movement, Hannah Höch introduced issues of gender and ethnicity into her collages. As her richly supplied composition suggests, photography had made the cultural shift from one-off darkroom prints to mass-produced, readily available, visual material. Höch's satiric edge combined with her uncanny eye to produce peculiar hybrid images. Although such work is commonplace today, at the time it was disturbing and controversial. Women were major figures and active innovators in the twentieth-century avant-garde, particularly in Germany and Russia. Höch's work aggressively attacked stereotypes of women, as well as the distinctions between Western and non-Western cultures. Her ethnographic interests turned inward toward German culture as well, and her recombined images of athletes, politicians, and other public figures contain a record of her nation and times, edited and illuminated by her searching eye. Marinetti's ideas spread rapidly, as the Futurist Manifesto was translated and published in newspapers throughout Europe. Artists had never used the media more effectively. Forms of Futurism appeared everywhere. In Russia, artists took up the term and applied it to any and all experimental work in poetry, art, or design that seemed to embody modern forms and utopian visions. These included indigenous sources and homegrown varieties of anti-academic work among poets and painters in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Russian artists conceived of books as tactical media to be circulated broadly. By making books themselves, they felt they could escape some of the controls of publishers who were more interested in money than original ideas. Using block cuts, hand lettering and drawing, primitive office duplicating machines, and any other ready means of production, Russian artists made books of an unprecedented boldness. Deliberately crude, with shocking titles like A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A Game in Hell, and World Backwards, these books contained poetry and imagery that was unsentimental, brash, and far from the preciousness of an earlier generation (Fig. 9.6).

Hannah Höch, Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-1920 Collage chapter 9

Jan Tschichold designed this striking poster for an exhibition of professional photographers in 1938. The negative does much of the communication in this design, suggesting an expert's experienced relation to production. The distribution of type is masterful, every element weighted and placed to strike a dynamic balance that echoes the structural division of the image. Type calls attention to the composition of the image without obvious reference, simply by arrangement and tonal value. Its shifts in scale and weight reinforce the vibrancy of the whole, while its sans serif clarity provides stability. This work would have been deemed decadent, even subversive, in Germany in the late 1930s: All of the signs of visual modernity that it displays were politically charged. Modern design's striving for universality through formal rules was, paradoxically, one of the grounds on which it met with the greatest cultural hostility. Tools and media for the basic tasks of graphic design in the 1930s included scissors, tape, gum, mass-produced textures such as Ben Day dot patterns, gouache, india ink, straightedges, pencils, brushes, and technical pens. Increasingly, they also included photographs, cut and pasted into mock-ups and layouts. More significantly, graphic designers began to make sophisticated use of photolithographic methods and to think in terms of color separations, spot colors, metallic inks, and varnishes (Figs. 10.21a and 10.21b). Coordinated typography indicated authority and oversight The profession In Europe, the Bauhaus provided an institutional framework for design instruction, while studios and firms founded by its faculty and students disseminated the spirit of modernism. By the time the Bauhaus was displaced from its original home in Weimar and relocated to Dessau in 1925, the foundation course and typography workshop had established a style as well as a set of formal and pedagogical principles. Focusing on the achievement of harmony, order, dynamism, stability, or excitement, these principles defined modern graphic design as attention to the striking arrangement of elements on a surface. When pivotal figures such as Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Georgy Kepes, and Herbert Bayer left the Bauhaus in the 1930s, they brought its curricular approach with them to the American and Swiss schools where they found positions. Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, an experiment that succeeded two years later as the School of Design. In the American context, the Bauhaus aim of teaching students to think beyond immediate pragmatic or conventional considerations was meant to counter narrow professionalism and Beaux Arts traditionalism. Courses modeled on the Bauhaus foundation became standard fixtures in art school curricula (Figs. 10.16 and 10.17).

Jan Tschichold, exhibtion poster for Der Berufsphotograph (The Professional Photographer), 1938 chapter 10

Jean Carlu's repetitive alignment of a defense industry worker and a combat soldier makes a strong visual connection between the realms they represent. The "barrels" of a pneumatic drill or riveting device and an automatic weapon are barely distinguishable at first glance, although the lighter tones and background placement of the worker lend the silhouette of the soldier solidity and force by contrast. Their alignment implies that the efforts of all are aimed in the same direction, essential to the same goals. Wartime propaganda As World War II broke out in Europe, posters were used to mobilize sentiment and action on all sides of the political conflict. Government agencies and programs in every country resorted to graphic strategies to drum up war support. This was true even in England, where conscription had replaced recruitment among the male population. Women were also aggressively encouraged to volunteer for military service and war work. The female defense industry worker was idealized in such tough but feminine images as those of Rosie the Riveter and Jenny on the Job. Visually striking designs warned citizens against the dangers of spreading sensitive information. Security issues were continually stressed, provoking patriotic responses by reinforcing distinctions between ally and enemy. Scarcity of food, rubber, gasoline, and metal made every choice to limit consumption into a patriotic act. Recycling efforts became a way for noncombatants of all ages to feel that they were contributing to the war effort. Rejection of an undermining black market was linked to good citizenship. The messages were unequivocal. The iconography through which enemies were depicted was deliberately reductive and powerful enough to leave indelible impressions. The disturbing effects of deeply racist stereotypes persisted long after World War II. Graphic approaches to propaganda were often pictorial, relying on familiar conventions of realistic illusion. But flat and bold imagery could just as forcefully function symbolically. Simple visuals accompanied by trenchant slogans were designed to communicate with immediacy and clarity. A sense of urgency was embodied in the designs themselves. By their directness they suggested that action was essential and could not be delayed (Figs. 11.13a-d).

Jean Carlu, Give'Em Both Barrels poster, 1941

Hand-drawn lettering tightly integrated into an overall design was a distinctive feature of the Viennese Secessionist style. Koloman Moser was one of the most artful designers of the movement, and his sense of pattern and timing in composition achieved its dynamic balance through attention to line weight and carefully calibrated color. Ver Sacrum was conceived as a laboratory for design experiment among the Secessionist artists. Flat patterns and an extremely elongated format echo shapes found throughout late nineteenth-century movements. Moser's design creates a delicate geometry that connects figure and ground, lettering and repetition. The division of space is almost as striking as the individual forms within it, and the inventive geometric treatment of the lettering is characteristic of Secessionist design. Viennese design The Vienna Secession was formed in 1898 to simplify, distill, and modernize design. The name Secession derives from the decision by the founding artists to exhibit their work outside the fine art academy. While other Arts-and-Crafts-inspired activities had been anti-industrialist in orientation, these artists' rejection of academic constraints represents another crucial realignment in early modern movements. Initiated by Gustav Klimt, the Vienna Secession attempted to forge fundamental links between fine and applied art, an approach that ran counter to prevailing distinctions between high art and the trades. Klimt was the intellectual leader and first president of the fledgling Secession. His poster designs helped establish the public profile of the group, which included Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller, and Josef Hoffmann. Their first exhibition garnered public acclaim and recognition, as well as support from the emperor who was keen to consolidate Austrian national identity in an increasingly shaky political context (Fig. 8.13).

Kolomon Moser, Ver Sacrum V Jahr (13th exhibition) poster, 1902 chromolithograph chapter 8

Published to accompany the first exhibition of Bauhaus work in 1923, this book features work from all of the Bauhaus workshops—metal, furniture, weaving, carpentry, stained glass, pottery, color, architecture, stage design, wall-painting, display design, and typography. The range of materials and approaches demonstrates the extent to which the idea of design that came out of Bauhaus foundation courses approached industry and craft in combination. The emphasis on form, harmony, functionality, and other "universal" values marks the distance of this approach from both Beaux Arts training (grounded in imitation of historical styles) and romantic sensibility (based in personal emotion, natural forms, and subjective experience). The book cover was designed by Bayer and the interior layout by Moholy-Nagy. Both embody the ordered functionality that distinguished Bauhaus design. Novel approaches to graphic design pedagogy were instituted The Bauhaus, first established in 1919 in the short-lived Weimar Republic of Germany, became the most legendary of the new institutions for graphic design research and pedagogy. Although not a revolutionary state, the Weimar government was progressive enough to support a proposal for a radical experiment in design education, a visionary project that was allowed to establish a firm base of operations. In the spirit of an avant-garde movement, the school was founded on a manifesto by architect Walter Gropius. But in Gropius this spirit went back to nineteenth-century sources. He had been an assistant to Peter Behrens and a member of the German Werkbund, and strains of the Arts and Crafts ideal of aesthetic integrity appeared in his program for the school. The manifesto's call for a return to craft and the integration of art and architecture might not seem, on the surface, to have ushered in modernism. But this call marked the beginning of a fourteen-year curricular evolution aimed at involving art in production and thus, in a sense, inaugurated design as we know it. From the Bauhaus Proclamation until the school's closure by Nazi policy makers in 1933, from an early emphasis on handwork to inspiration by industrial processes, the Bauhaus established a concept of design as a discipline that meaningfully closed the gap between formal ideas and material conditions. A spiritual tone permeated its early years, particularly in courses taught by Johannes Itten. But the hallmark of the school was its development of foundation courses in principles of composition, construction, and appreciation of materials. These were useful to designers working in textiles, architecture, furniture, and metalwork, as well as graphics. Design became a highly elastic term, extending to include everyday objects and their industrial production (Fig. 9.21).

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919-1923, catalog announcement, 1923 chapter 9

Iconography in the 1930s often propagated stereotypes. The naturalism of many illustrational styles fostered national cultural ideals through depiction of individuals enhanced by certain traits. The muscled, hard-bodied figures in German posters presented an image of invulnerability while promoting blond beauty as the highest aesthetic ideal. American folksy imagery, such as that chosen by Lester Beall in his posters for the Rural Electrification Administration, reinforced the notion of homespun hardiness and a pioneer spirit capable of triumphing over adversity. The work of Norman Rockwell and his imitators romanticized a particular version of Americana based in agrarian values and small-town traditionalism. National stereotypes emerged, in part, from designers' efforts to create imagery that reached its target audience through details of style and form as well as content. Some in the Nazi party promoted the use of blackletter, which they saw as carrying a strong association with ethnic roots and a connection with a mythic past. Folk imagery was invoked in national identity campaigns. Italian designers used updates of Trajan capitals to claim a modern incarnation of ancient glory, while in the United States, stenciled block letters seemed in keeping with the can-do attitude of the Depression era. This graphic rhetoric was as persuasive as any text and often served to reinforce the way individuals were judged along gender, race, and class lines. Moral assumptions were implicitly encoded in such graphic images. In many cases, similar persuasive methods were applied to promote strikingly different political values (Figs. 11.9a-d).

Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms, 1943 chapter 11

These figures, with symbols indicating "the five groups of men," are rendered by Gerd Arntz in Isotype. This fully developed system of icons was termed pictorial statistics by its inventor Otto Neurath. Other visual languages had been created for philosophical or practical purposes, but Neurath's system was firmly based in modern logic. He sought to design a set of symbols that could be easily read and remembered. His forms were legible, simple, and as unambiguous as possible. But they could not escape embodying cultural biases both in their individual shapes and in the system that governed them. ISOTYPE stood for the International System of Typographic Picture Education, and it inspired numerous symbol sets for presenting information in maps and signage. Neurath's desire for Isotype to function as a universal language, a visual Esperanto, was utopian. Such goals were poignant expressions of the period between the world wars, when Europeans sought to eliminate the possibility of future conflicts such as the one that had devastated an entire generation. Nonetheless, Neurath's iconographic principles were adapted for wartime use. Meanwhile, another form of graphic information was on the rise, as wartime engineers raced to develop machines capable of processing massive amounts of data for such purposes as high-level cryptography. The work of code analysis laid one of the foundations for modern computing, and a continuing fascination with codes, ciphers, and symbols that could be recognized without reference to specific languages led to the development of pictographic systems. Utopian dreams of a universal (or at least international) language of pictograms underlay these projects (Figs. 11.15a and 11.15b) Wartime information During the war, official diagrams and charts delivered crucial information. The British Ministry of Information and the United States Office of War Information engaged designers of stature and skill, such as Herbert Matter and Leo Lionni, to develop signage and educational posters. The task of presenting dense amounts of information in an economical and well-organized form challenged such designers to adapt aesthetic means to highly pragmatic purposes: identifying insignia, warplanes, and bombs, and preparing for emergencies by familiarizing viewers with scenarios to be followed in response to circumstances or signals. Rapid visual recognition was critical to insignia design, whereas camouflage schemes sought to deceive and conceal (Figs. 11.14a-c).

Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz, Isotype, 1936 chapter 11

One experiment in institutionalizing the integration of life and work, art and its applications, took place in Darmstadt, Germany, where a state-sponsored artists' colony was formed. One of the first people to be invited to join the colony by the Grand Duke who founded it was architect and designer Peter Behrens. When his talents were linked to the industrial giant, AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft or General Electric Company) in 1907, he was poised to become a new type of designer. Behrens's successful integration of the design of AEG's factories, products, packaging, and identity demonstrated that an aesthetic that incorporated industrial production could extend to any medium. In his designs, he made studied use of historical styles, which for him did not conflict with industrial realities but rather expressed a transcendent German identity, a national spirit in which he deeply believed. In the same year as his AEG commissions, he helped found the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), an association premised on the conviction that by improving the quality of German industrial design, the workshop could strengthen the nation as an economic power. The modern model of graphic design as an integral part of a systematic approach to the manufacture of products, values, and identities was being forged through a national partnership with industry (Figs. 8.22-8.24b). Behrens's designs for AEG embodied a new systematic approach, establishing an overarching image of the electric company through a series of logotypes and lettering designs that produced an impression of continuity. In this composition, electric light takes on a quality of stylish modernity by association with an innovative, geometric pattern. The use of a light paper ground as a source of illumination and the echo of the light's sparkling in the highly structured pattern of dots gives the overall image a sense of monumental stability. The bulb is not merely a thing; it is a resplendent icon. Circles, squares, and triangles have replaced the organic shapes that dominated graphic design for decades, and only Behrens's lively calligraphy betrays any trace of organic style.

Peter Behrens, AEG poster, ca. 1910 Behrens Antiqua chapter 8

An unmistakable air of luxury is inscribed in this advertisement for the spa resort of Vichy, France. Taking the waters and bathing in mineral springs had been part of nineteenth-century medicinal culture. But in the 1920s, resorts focused on golf, dancing, water sports, racing, and other fashionable pleasures. This world lies far from necessity or labor. Consumption, not production, is its sole justification—or so we are to believe. The elongated bodies of the figures in this poster convey a sleekness and ease that is remote from work or industry, although their clean lines are inspired by industrial designs. The organic world is gone, vanished under the sheen of flat, geometric shapes and angles. Even the landscape is completely transformed, processed into a stylized backdrop. In the United States, disposable income rose almost 10 percent between 1920 and 1929. But three-quarters of that rise was enjoyed by investors in the top 1 percent. This bubble of capital gains made "on paper" by a select few contributed to the economic instability that resulted in the Crash of 1929, yet images of opulence in films, advertising, and mass-circulation magazines made this life seem within reach. Graphic design became a recognized economic, political, and cultural force by the end of World War I. Having demonstrated its power to sway public opinion during the war, graphic design in the 1920s and 1930s became the source of stylish fantasies that were crucial to the growth of consumer culture. Borrowing the innovative approaches of the avant-garde to shape these fantasies, graphic designers effectively sold modernism itself in the process, packaging its ideas as a fashionable aesthetic rather than a social project. Meanwhile, the graphic design profession grew, spawning many institutional forms that continue to the present. Advertising was praised as a boon to progress and celebrated with missionary zeal. Ad agencies provided a range of increasingly specialized services. Art directors took conceptual and aesthetic responsibility for the design of whole publicity campaigns and mainstream publications. Graphic styles changed, as commercial applications brought new life to a sophisticated legacy of modern art. The idea of creating and selling an "image" came to replace the simple notion of promoting goods or services. Fabricating an intangible aura of desirability, far beyond any real necessity, graphic designers produced perpetual longing for an imagined life. Subtle advertisers channeled attention toward purchases that indicated status rather than satisfied needs. This image-driven attitude was described as conspicuous consumption, a term coined by American sociologist Thorstein Veblen at the turn of the century (Figs. 10.1a and 10.1b).

Roger Broders, Vichy ad, 1926 chapter 10

The eight years that separate these two images mark a shift from moderne style to the clubby realism of a new generation. The abstraction of Eduardo Benito's drawing proclaims style as a set of smoothly polished forms, while the realistic illustration on the Vanity Fair cover, under the art direction of M. F. Agha, is grounded in a new kind of contemporaneous look infused with a technicolor promise. The photographic quality of the image suggests that the scene is observed as much as imagined, and that reality can contain a fantasy, a dream can come true. The 1934 cover presents young sophisticates in flesh and blood, rather than an abstract symbol of worldliness, implying that theirs is a life to be lived, not merely an idea of modern culture. Agha's full-color covers became one of his trademarks. The notion that graphic design had a mission higher than mere presentation soon crept into the profession. Graphic designers were described as "product stylists" and "consumer engineers" whose task was to create an aura that had little to do with practical uses. The promotion of lifestyles as realms of self-realization and expression produced a curious side-effect—conformity. The mass production of fantasy channeled consumption into market-driven patterns. The industrial consumer was an engineered concept, a generic figure who followed trends with a personal interest (Figs. 10.14a and 10.14b). Logos and brand names had worked to distinguish products in competitive markets, but a taint of P. T. Barnum-esque exaggeration and snake-oil quackery lingered in the mottos and claims that promoted these names. Advertisers shifted from extolling the virtues of products to picturing them in fantastic contexts to which their purchase seemed to promise access. Brand image production operated through visual codes in packaging, ad copy formulas, rendering style, and typographic reference. A new professional—the market analyst—was born. Armed with statistical methods and survey techniques, market analysts produced serious studies, proving that white evoked hygiene, black was sophisticated, sleek shapes were modern, stolid ones were old-fashioned, and so forth. The trim figures of young women, uncorseted and alluring, meant opulence and easy pleasure. Designs of bodies and gestures, particularly those of women, also tapped into style codes and came to be perceived by the public as standards of desirable beauty (Fig. 10.13).

Vanity Fair cover, 1934 Photo by Anton Bruehl Mehemed Fehmy Agha, Art Director chapter 10

Will Burtin's work for the pharmaceutical company publication Scope often combined technology and human figures. Bodies were compared with machines, brains with computers. Technological intervention at a micro scale placed test-tube babies and miracle cures in the same world as polymers. All had properties unheard of before synthetic processing. Technological production of new, multipurpose materials laid the foundation for links across diverse industries of manufacturing, mining, petroleum, chemistry, medicine, and food production. Visualizing scientific processes was critical in the context of research where the ability to conceptualize a problem was often directly related to the model according to which it could be represented. The impact on popular imagination was equally significant, and Burtin's capacity to design scientific findings for broad public consumption accounted for the wide circulation of his imagery. Commercial and technical uses of information design In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the development of the first electronic computers changed the relationship between graphics and statistics. Grids, tabular forms, bar graphs, pie charts, and maps that served specialized interests were familiar ways of presenting statistical information. When computers were made commercially available in the postwar era, they were used to process huge amounts of data with unprecedented speed. Visible forms of presentation proved effective for making this information legible and comprehensible. Public and private sectors, from education to industry, from the media to the lab, sought graphic means to make information make visual sense. At the same time, they began to conceive of abstract constructs and phenomena as "information": Not only were concrete facts such as quantities, rates, or locations of people, goods, services, funds, and salaries turned into graphs, but also invisible processes (like heat transfer or money flows) were displayed as information. Graphic designers took on the intangible and lent it visible form (Fig. 11.16).

Will Burtin, Scope cover, 1941

Style codes function in vernacular imagery as well as through high art references. The Schweppes girl is clearly ready to have a good time. Her body language, dress, and facial expression are unambiguous. The softened modernism of her lines, the swirling pattern of her red shawl, and the blue vibrations that surround it underscore movement, but no distortion occurs in the image. The type is legible, the image is simple, and the bubbles in the glass suggest champagne as economically as the bobbed hair suggests a flapper. The persistence of such imagery into the Depression era had its own nostalgic attraction, offering the chance to recapture the roaring 20s in effervescent "table waters." Symbolic value, not literal description, sells the product through the pleasures of a consumable image. Logos and brand names had worked to distinguish products in competitive markets, but a taint of P. T. Barnum-esque exaggeration and snake-oil quackery lingered in the mottos and claims that promoted these names. Advertisers shifted from extolling the virtues of products to picturing them in fantastic contexts to which their purchase seemed to promise access. Brand image production operated through visual codes in packaging, ad copy formulas, rendering style, and typographic reference. A new professional—the market analyst—was born. Armed with statistical methods and survey techniques, market analysts produced serious studies, proving that white evoked hygiene, black was sophisticated, sleek shapes were modern, stolid ones were old-fashioned, and so forth. The trim figures of young women, uncorseted and alluring, meant opulence and easy pleasure. Designs of bodies and gestures, particularly those of women, also tapped into style codes and came to be perceived by the public as standards of desirable beauty (Fig. 10.13). In the 1920s and 1930s, most of this American imagery was still rendered by hand. Illustration, hand-drawn logotypes, and serif display faces persisted. To anyone with a view of both continents, the contrast between the literal, narrative, and thematic emphasis of American commercial art and the formalism of European graphic design must have been striking. Yet some design phenomena were more universal. Advertisers on both sides of the Atlantic sought their audience in the pages of nationally distributed magazines rather than along sidewalks. Radio was on the rise as an advertising medium, absorbing promotion budgets into a new and competing form of public space. Poster production declined, but billboards introduced a new scale of graphic design to be viewed from automobiles or across large urban spaces. These monumental messages often focused on luxury products, such as cigarettes, automobiles, and branded processed foods. The business of outdoor advertising grew into its own subfield of graphic design (Figs. 10.12a and 10.12b).

chapter 10 F. S. May, Schweppes Table Waters ad, 1931 Prohibition (ban on the sale and purchase of alcoholic beverages) existed in the US from 1920-1933

Modern editorial design came to the New York publishing industry under the direction of European émigrés. In Brodovitch's 1935 layouts for Harper's Bazaar, boldly shaped text blocks echo photographed forms, and overlapping images crop and fan the curve of a deeply shadowed body. The clothes are ultra-fashionable; their presentation is sculptural and formal. The design suggests that style is not about individual women or their narratives—but about shape. Objects and things, rather than people, command attention. This approach to design defines fashion as an abstract form and implies that bodies are to be subordinate to designed shape. Consumption is conformity, not only to a vogue or trend, but also to a body-type and a set of gestures that discipline the physical self. In 1925, when the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was held in Paris, the United States did not participate. Symptomatic of the difference in attitudes on either side of the Atlantic, a statement by American officials included suggestions that their countrymen did not consider modern design important. But the term Art Deco, with all of its stylistic implications, entered popular usage after that event, and moderne motifs quickly found favor with American consumers. While Art Deco got its name from a trade fair designed to boost France's reputation as a purveyor of fine design, modernism—in the sense of an embodied belief system—found its way across the Atlantic in the 1930s for quite different reasons. The rise of fascism and threat of war in Europe prompted many prominent graphic designers to emigrate. Some were escaping persecution on the grounds of ethnic identity, but modern design itself was also targeted for its political associations. Once in the United States, key figures such as Herbert Bayer, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, and Alexey Brodovitch were hired by publishers and ad executives eager to capture the sophistication of European style. Their work transformed Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and brought new ideas to leading agencies (Figs. 10.8a and 10.8b).

chapter 10 Alexey Brodovitch, Harper's Bazaar, 1935

The title of this publication, which gave Jugendstil its name, translates as "youth." The journal was first published in 1896 by Georg Hirth. Every cover and masthead for Jugend was different. All attempted to appear contemporary to a youthful culture whose values they helped define. As a result, Jugend became a forum for advancing the cutting edge of style and a showcase for designers eager to exhibit their unique approaches and new sensibility. Otto Eckmann was an artist who gave up painting in favor of design. His designs for Jugend magazine demonstrate the attention to letter and image relations that distinguished the style of the period. Jugend was published from 1896 to 1914, years of determined cultural optimism in the face of political struggles that led to the devastation of World War I. The popular and influential German movement Jugendstil took its name from a publication that portrayed and promoted a contemporary lifestyle. Its practitioners were artists whose embrace of industrial production included designs for type and mass-produced furniture, as well as posters for the industrial exhibitions that displayed such designs. Jugendstil and Art Nouveau, like Arts and Crafts before them, had specific sources. But they quickly became generic terms applied to a range of locations, artists, and works. All were characterized by expressions of sensual freedom, signaled by female forms, floral and organic motifs, and suggestions of primal eroticism as a liberating force from the bonds of convention. The stylistic grace cultivated by these movements was an asset to commercial interests staked on consumption rather than social reform (Figs. 8.12a and 8.12b). Art Nouveau was a general term applied to the work of many artists and designers in the 1890s and 1900s. It was originally the name of a Paris gallery established in 1895 by Siegfried Bing, a German importer of Asian objects. The term was soon applied to any work that seemed to reject historical reference in favor of a "new" sensibility. The commercial origin of Art Nouveau's name spotlights the basis of its phenomenal popular success as a style. Unlike the socialist theories and rarefied consumption that characterized many Arts and Crafts undertakings, Art Nouveau's goals were mainly anti-elitist. Most of its practitioners aimed at cultivating and gratifying bourgeois taste with comfortable expressions of contemporary affluence. Art Nouveau designs integrated novel shapes into the overall form of objects and structures. In its graphic versions, this style shaped book and type design and transformed the treatment of decorative elements in packaging, poster, and logo design. Art Nouveau designers drew conspicuously on Japanese techniques of asymmetrical composition and flowing spatial organization (Fig. 8.9).

chapter 8 Ludwig von Lumbusch, Jugend magazine cover, 1897 Magazine gave name to Jugendstil movement also by 8.12a Otto Eckmann

One of the most famous printmakers of the late nineteenth century, Chéret is often regarded as the originator of the artistic lithographic poster. His innovative crachis technique—spattering rather than painting a wax resist onto the lithographic stone—allowed him to create a shimmering effect with relatively few impressions. The new advertising and poster art of the 1890s often deployed women as enticing or allegorical figures. This exuberant image of the American dancer Loie Fuller captures the spirit of sensuality and excitement in the cabaret culture of fin-de-siècle Paris. Fuller was an important attraction at the 1900 Paris world's fair, embodying Art Nouveau with her innovative choreography and diaphanous silk costumes illuminated by multicolored electric lights.

chapter 8? Jules Chéret, lithographed poster of dancer Loïe Fuller, 1893