Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  That same year, 1964, Dugald Stermer was hired as art director for Ramparts. Founded in 1962, Ramparts was published by Edward Keating, a lawyer who had sunk a private fortune into a magazine that he described as having an anticlerical, liberal Catholic bias. Those early issues of Ramparts, which Stermer says was named for the “Ramparts We Watched,” looked like a college literary magazine, with its unrelated typefaces, amateurish illustrations, and unsophisticated layouts. Ramparts was not a threat to the body politic. Keating was not an America basher, but rather a concerned citizen who saw aspects of America turning sour.

  Ramparts was the “soft wing” of the left. This began to change in 1964 when Warren Hinckle III, then Ramparts’s brash promotion director, and Howard Gossage, a veteran San Francisco advertising man (who was also on the Ramparts advisory board), gradually took control away from Keating. Hinckle was named editor and Bob Scheer, a budding young investigative journalist, was hired as foreign editor. The former, who was not allied with any political movement or ideology, was a muckraker in the Hearst tradition and viewed sacred cows as moving targets; the latter, who maintained a healthy skepticism of all “isms,” uncovered and sourced the earliest stories about CIA involvement in the Vietnam War and on American college campuses just prior to the emergence of a national antiwar movement. With Hinckle’s taste for muck and Scheer’s remarkable news instinct, Ramparts began to publish hot national stories ignored by most national media. One of Ramparts’s most inflammatory stories was the confessions of a Green Beret who quit over the secret war in Vietnam. In fact, Ramparts drew stories from other disaffected government and military personnel whose consciences were bothering them, but who at that time—a few years before the Pentagon Papers story broke in the New York Times—could not sell their stories to the newspapers. The mainstream press was skeptical of such antigovernment attacks and more or less followed an “America Right or Wrong” stance. Stermer recalls that the goal of Ramparts was to “just raise hell.”

  Evergreen and Ramparts were two sides of the same coin. They were competitors only in that they appealed to the same audience, but enjoyed a rather a large crossover of readers and subscribers. Both magazines were sold on newsstands in the largest metropolitan areas, and given such visibility there was a mandate to look inviting.

  Ramparts’s design was based on classical, central axis book design. Stermer used Times Roman, with dingbats and Oxford rules to accent pages. At the time using book design for a magazine format was unique, and subsequently influenced the formats of Rolling Stone (which in fact copied Stermer’s grid for its first issues) and New York magazine. Being an illustrator, Stermer had a healthy respect for conceptual illustration and commissioned quality work by known artists despite the magazine’s pauper-like fees. He lured Edward Sorel into Ramparts by offering him a monthly visual column—Sorel’s Bestiary, where the likenesses of famous people were portrayed as satiric animals in acute attacks on sacred cows. He commissioned Push Pin Studios, including founders Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser. Robert Grossman did one of his best Johnson caricatures for Ramparts. Paul Davis did a number of covers, including one of South Vietnamese doyenne Madame Nhu as a cheerleader for Michigan State, where it was asserted in a Ramparts investigative report that the CIA was recruiting operatives for clandestine work in Vietnam. Stermer also hired Ben Shahn out of virtual retirement to do a portrait of the early antiwar senator William Fulbright. In the 1960s Shahn was under attack by the art establishment for being a propagandist. Stermer also commissioned Norman Rockwell to paint a portrait of Bertrand Russell. As art director Stermer also had a say in the editorial direction, which allowed him leeway in developing stories and features, including a memorable photo essay on the American town that endured the most Vietnam casualties.

  Likewise, Ken Deardorf (b. 1935), Evergreen’s art director of longest duration from 1967 to 1972, designed an airy, economical format that relied on art and photography to define the magazine’s visual personality. Deardorf did not have the same editorial power as did Stermer to assign articles and graphic features, but given a commodious working relationship with his editors, he was master of Evergreen’s visual persona. While it did not overtly resemble Ramparts, Deardorf admits he owes a debt to Ramparts’s elegance and simplicity.

  In the 1960s the new bohemians began to push the boundaries of propriety through sexual and cultural expression in two magazines.

  Deardorf was not an illustrator, but like Stermer, he had a healthy respect for conceptual illustration. Evergreen used many of the same artists, including Robert Grossman, Edward Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and Paul Davis, who created one of the most highly charged visual icons of the 1960s—the Che Guevara cover. Deardorf had a policy of trying out at least one new artist per issue. One such newcomer was Brad Holland who did some of his earliest editorial work for Evergreen, including an illustration for the premiere publication of “Viva Vargas” by Woody Allen, the story on which the film Bananas was based.

  Ramparts’s investigative stance required strong political covers, such as the John Heartfield-like photomontages by Carl Fischer, who at the same time was collaborating with George Lois on Esquire covers. Evergreen did more erotic than political covers. Rossett, the sole arbiter of covers, was convinced that the cover, not the content, sold the magazine. Given that much of Rossett’s groundbreaking legal precedents were through the publication and litigation of sexually sensitive material, and that he believed that sex was a key political issue, it is logical that much of the visual material in Evergreen was indeed sexual. Fred Jordan added that the left in the mid-to late-1960s was not yet in tune with the nascent women’s movement or above sexual exploitation. It wasn’t until the end of the 1960s that the feminist movement began to exercise some control over left-wing publishing. At Evergreen Jordan cited the resignation in the late 1960s of two important male contributors over sexploitation; and Stermer admitted, even though Ramparts was not overtly exploitive and ran some stories about the feminist movement, they had a blind spot, too. “The feminists had no reason to trust us,” he admitted.

  Rossett was no stranger to government censorship and litigation, and Evergreen was enjoined and seized, more than once, owing to its sexual content. One case involved the Nassau County district attorney’s injunction against a 1964 issue citing pornographic content. According to the complaint, a confidential informant employed at the bindery “observed black and white photographs in the magazine which showed the nude human form, possibly male and female, but reputed by fellow workers to be two females; and that the forms portrayed various poses and positions indicating sexual relations. My informant further stated having read portions of the printed material … [that it consisted] of four-lettered obscene language.” In fact, the pictures were shot through a can of Vaseline and were barely visible to the reader much less the informant, who was a part-time employee of the bindery and whose husband was a retired police officer.

  Ramparts was no stranger to legal hassles, either. The most threatening was the time Dugald Stermer arranged a 1967 cover shoot with Carl Fischer that showed his and three other Ramparts staffers’ hands holding their burning draft cards—a symbolic gesture of nonviolent resistance against the war that broke at least two federal laws. The statute that was broken was known as the Disrespect Law, referred also to the burning of money or the flag. Since the disrespect was towards the symbol itself, Stermer determined that it didn’t matter whether the cards were real or facsimiles, and so decided to burn the real thing. Not surprisingly an act of such defiance, commonly perpetrated in street demonstrations and now codified on the cover of a national magazine, forced the government to impanel a federal grand jury to investigate a possible indictment. While Stermer and Scheer initially wanted to fight the case as a freedom of the press issue, their counsel, Washington lawyer and football team owner

  Edward Bennett Williams refused to let his clients risk imprisonment and persuaded them to plead not guilty should an indictment be handed down.
In the end, however, Williams pulled strings with his friend Lyndon Johnson, one of the bitterest of Ramparts’s enemies, to squash the investigation. In the end, the cover was a powerful emblem of Vietnam protest.

  Ramparts and Evergreen have not published for almost three decades, but to look back at them now is not an exercise in nostalgia. They should not be seen merely as documents of the 1960s, but as monuments of activist publishing, where the writing, art, and design were brought together to make a revolution.

  East Village Other

  Robert Hughes once described the weekly pasteup night at the East Village Other (EVO) as “a dada experience.” The year was 1970, and none of those who were toiling into the wee hours of the morning at one of America’s first 1960s-era underground papers (founded in 1965) knew what he was talking about. “Dada was the German anti-art, political-art movement of the 1920s,” he explained in a nasal Australian accent. “And this is the closest thing I’ve come to seeing it recreated today.”

  Hughes, the new art critic for Time magazine, was as welcome as any other weekly observer. Pasteup night at EVO was open to anybody who came up to the dimly lit second floor loft above Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, a former Loews Theater on Second Avenue and Sixth Street just next door to Ratner’s famous dairy restaurant. In the 1920s and 1930s the Lower East Side neighborhood was the heart of New York’s Yiddish Theater. Since 1967 (the Summer of Love) it was referred to in the press as the “East Village,” the hippie capital of the East Coast.

  Starting at 8:00 p.m. and lasting until dawn, the volunteer layout staff, under the watchful eye of EVO’s seventeen-year-old, self-appointed art director Stephen Cohen took the jumble of counterculture journalism and antiestablishment diatribe that was the paper’s editorial meat and threw it helter-skelter onto layouts that bore a curious resemblance to the digital typography done in Ray Gun during the 1990s. Anyone could join in whether they had graphic design experience or not, yet many of the gadfly layout artists were usually too stoned to finish. Corrections for their pages were often waxed at the office and cut-in during the long subway ride to the printer in Brooklyn.

  The pasteup night was a 1960s tribal ritual. The plentiful joints and acid tabs were advance payments for a good night’s work. The art director routinely emerged from the editor’s office around 8:30 p.m. with a shoebox full of the stuff, as well as with the night’s layout assignments, which included at least three pages of “intimate” classifieds. The layout crew would help themselves to the grass and manuscripts, find their tables, select their decorative ruling tapes, benday and transfer-type sheets, and settle down to design pages.

  The East Village Other premiered in 1965 and quickly evolved from a neo-beat community organ into an alternative culture clarion. It was among the first to publish the masters of underground comix, including R. Crumb, Spain, Kim Deitch, and others. Intentionally or not, it borrowed graphic techniques from dada and surrealism. The cover of one early issue was a photomontage (in the manner of German satirist John Heartfield) of a serpent emerging from the battle fatigues of America’s commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. For irrepressible irreverence, for dogged antiestablishmentarianism nothing could match the East Village Other. As a testament, it was declared contraband by the United States armed forces.

  As for its graphic design, EVO was resolutely formless. While it had an anchored editorial page, the features and regular columns were unfettered by aesthetic or functional rules. The layout staff of between five and ten people on any given Thursday were all erstwhile amateurs without a clue how to create consistent design even if they wanted to. This had been true since its inception, but occasionally a professional would wander in, someone who knew the ways of the grid and central axis composition, who would attempt to insert a “correct” page into the anarchic mélange. But rather than bring order to the chaos, in the end, all approaches were thrown into the stew that was EVO.

  In the final years of EVO during the early 1970s, the biggest influence on the layout sessions was the work of a veteran animator, Fred Mogubgub who drew obsessively intricate designs for the covers (including the masthead) and some inside pages. He usually indicated that they be printed as a split fountain (the gradual mixing of two colors from top and bottom of the page) going from unreadable yellow to garish orange to bright red. Mogubgub’s quirky, detailed, comic style for Seven-Up and Bit-O-Honey television spots had changed the look of animated commercials in the early 1960s, but he left Madison Avenue to pursue an unrealized film career. Along the way he had altered the style of EVO.

  The layout staff of between five and ten people on any given Thursday were all erstwhile amateurs without a clue how to create consistent design even if they wanted to.

  By 1972 the East Village Other’s circulation, which in its heyday hovered around seventy-five thousand, had plummeted to five or six thousand. It was kept afloat only by the sex advertisements and classifieds. Indeed this was consistent with the general demise of the underground press. The issues of EVO printed on cheap newsprint are difficult to find these days—they were either discarded or have turned to dust. The few that remain, however, represent a remarkable period of counterculture publishing, naïve design, and youthful exuberance that marked a truly democratic period (prefiguring zines and the World Wide Web) when cheap communications were available to many.

  Zap Comix

  Back in 1968, underground comix attacked the peremptory values of a conservative society that less than a decade earlier had imposed strict rules of conduct on its youth. During the early to mid-1950s, at the height of the social and political purges known as McCarthyism, Congress was engaged in an investigative frenzy to root out Communists in government and adverse influences on the culture at large. They believed that American kids—the offspring of a victorious postwar nation—were susceptible to forces of evil filtered into the collective unconscious through such inflammatory media as comic books. Threatened with government regulations and fearing diminished profits, the comics industry agreed to police itself through the Comics Code Authority, which, like the film industry’s Hays Office, applied strict watchdog standards to any and all content prior to bestowing its seal of approval. Any deviation from its list of standards (which prohibited gratuitous violence, sex, and disrespect toward authority) was met with swift punitive measures, notably banning distribution to all stores in which the majority of comic books were sold.

  Pressure on the creators, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of comic books resulted in products that upheld prescribed American values. Neutering comics did not hinder sales; instead, restrictions fomented rebellion over time. After almost a decade of a predictable Superman, puerile Archie, and tiresome Sgt. Rock, a generation of American kids became teenagers, with pent-up inhibitions that demanded venting. During the late 1960s, the busting of strictures emerged in youth movements that were expressed through political radicalism, civil disobedience, hallucinogenic experimentation, free love, and raucous rock and roll. Virtually overnight (after fermenting for a decade), American culture was transformed by a youth culture that reclaimed art, writing, music, and, ultimately, comic books from the guardians of propriety. Thirty years ago, Zap #1 was the spearhead of the comic book revolution. The 1998 release of Zap #15 marked the comic’s extraordinary longevity; it is still published, once every two years. Before Zap, early underground comics appeared in such underground newspapers as New York’s East Village Other and its sister publication, the Gothic Blimp Works, where R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, and Spain Rodriguez launched assaults on convention. To describe the effect of this work as inspirational would understate the incredible power of such fervent taboo busting on a generation weary of trite comic superheroes and superboobs. While these undergrounds looked like comics and read like comics, in fact they were “com-mix,” a combination of a conventional visual language (that is, the panel and balloon motif that dates back to the late nineteenth century) and scabrous story-and
gag-lines heretofore banned from mainstream comic books.

  Zap began as a co-mix of artists bound together by their collective contempt for conventional mores, yet their various individual perspectives allowed them to showcase a number of themes through different forms and distinct characters. Among Zap’s earliest contributors, founder R. Crumb was known in the counterculture for his string of bizarre, ribald, and racy characters, including Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade, Dirty Dog, and Schuman the Human; Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin were progenitors of the vibrating, psychedelic rock-concert posters that took San Francisco and the world by storm; and S. Clay Wilson was known for living out his perverse fantasies through dark comic figures.

  Zap #1 featured Crumb’s work exclusively as a vehicle for the artist to pay homage to pre-code comics and to communicate his admittedly deranged view of conventional life. Under the caustic advisory “Fair Warning: For Adult Intellectuals Only,” Crumb introduced a selection of tales that had spiritual roots in MAD magazine’s irreverent satire. But while MAD eschewed sex and politics, Crumb reveled in it. Among his earliest stories, we find “Whiteman,” a tale of “civilization in crisis;” “Mr. Natural Encounters Flakey Foont,” a jab at spirituality; “Ultra Super Modernistic Comics,” a tweak at high art; and his now classic “Keep on Truckin’,” an absurdly funny slapstick. In retrospect, these comics seem tame when compared to later underground raunchiness. But, at the time, even comical gibes at frontal nudity, recreational drug use, and racial stereotyping (for example, Angelfood McSpade, a bug-eyed African cannibal, sold a product called “Pure Nigger Hearts”) tested the tolerance of accepted standards.