Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  The Split Fountain

  Before digital printing, four-color process was too expensive for such low budget printing jobs as county fair or dancehall posters. So to approximate a robust chromatic experience, commercial job printers employed a color printing method known as the split fountain or rainbow roll. A pressman would pour two different colored inks, one each into both ends of an ink well or fountain, which then, as the rollers revolved, spread the colors in the middle to create a third hue along with mixed gradients of the two original colors. Since black is frequently the base color (although any color is a possible base), the result ostensibly produces four or more colors, though not quite. This technique was well suited for letterpress, offset, and silkscreen printing—and more or less cost the same as two-color printing.

  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the split fountain was the cheapest way to produce colorful advertising posters and other quotidian signs and bills. The rainbow signaled entertainment—fun and games. Owing to the quality of paper and inks, some outcomes were more elaborate than others, yet the split fountain was such a commonplace technique that using it was not such a big deal. That changed in 1954 when French book designer, Massin, used split fountain to juice-up his design for the cover for L’Or, by Blaise Cendrars. Combined with bold nineteenth-century, slab-serif typography, he sought to pay homage to past techniques and produce a startling impression through the color’s luminosity.

  By the early 1960s split fountain, like other nineteenth century FX was deemed so old fashioned that it was ripe for reappreciation by both Pop artists and eclectic designers. A resurgence happened during the late sixties, when designers of underground newspapers and psychedelic rock music posters, responding to a lack of production monies, experimented with different ways of using single and multiple split fountains to turn on some good vibrations and reasonable costs.

  It was the San Francisco Oracle, the pioneer psychedelic underground newspaper, where the split fountain reached its highest state of art and commerce. By bathing complex linear illustrations in gradients of vibrating colors, the Oracle defined the drug-addled carnival look of the Aquarian Age. Split fountain was a crude method, but immediately became a “cheap chic” graphic trend identified with the alternative culture and ultimately co-opted youth culture profiteers. In an ironic twist, some mass-produced youth culture products employed four-color process to achieve the split fountain look.

  Digital production has made four-color process cheap, rendering the split-fountain technique obsolete, because there is no longer a budgetary issue. Letterpress printers are still stalwarts, but most designers who enjoy split fountain’s prismatic luminosity, now create their own rainbow rolls on their computer in Photoshop.

  Red

  When anger turns to fury, do you see red?

  Probably not.

  “Seeing red” is merely a metaphor. It vividly describes rage, but unless you are predisposed to Rosacea, a skin condition where the blood vessels dilate, ocular chromatic changes are not triggered even by as intense a human emotion as anger. “Seeing red” is just clever wordplay that colors the way we think of anger.

  Red is a powerful modifier.

  Is it possible to be caught literally red-handed? Maybe, if you were stealing from farmer McGregor’s strawberry patch, but otherwise guilt does not physically alter hand color. Nonetheless, this literal figure of speech refers back to a time when being discovered with blood on one’s hands after committing a violent criminal act was a sure sign of guilt. Few colors can be more vivid than blood red.

  Red has more literal references than any other color and greater symbolic power—good and bad—than any other hue, including black. Just consider some of the most common associations—blood, death, revolution, love, sex, envy, heat, and fire. “Red hot” is the most intense of heats. “Redneck” is the lowest of social classes. “Red Flag” is the anticipation of trouble. Rudolf the “Red Nose” Reindeer is first among reindeers. Then there is the Red Light District, Woman in Red, Little Red Riding Hood, Red Devil, and Red State. A Red Line suggests racial profiling and discrimination while a Red Cross is symbolic of emergency medical service. The Red Shield of the Salvation Army represents “the blood which was shed by Jesus for our sins.” Red signs are the most visible and powerful on road or street. Red pencil means deletion, while Red Letter Day is derived from medieval times when church calendars announced holy days in red, and today is a special occasion. My son went to the “Little Red Schoolhouse” for lower and middle school—red schools came into parlance after log buildings were phased out and sawed weatherboard siding was painted red for protection from the elements.

  Red is a volatile color. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who famously fought for Italian independence from Napoleonic rule in the nineteenth century, had all his fighters dress in the camicia rossa. They were called “Redshirts”—the living signs of rebellion and unification. On a more sinister note: “We chose red for our posters, since it is vivid and was the color that most aroused our opponents. It forced them to notice and remember us,” Adolf Hitler wrote in his memoir Mein Kampf. He borrowed the color from the Soviet Flag or “red banner,” which paid homage to the red flag of the 1871 Paris Commune. The communist Red flag represents the blood shed in the war for emancipation from the Russian Czar. Red has long been a positive Russian color, with the Russian word for red, “krasny” related to the word for beautiful, “krasivyy.” In China red symbolizes good fortune and joy and is found on banners and posters galore. George Washington is thought to have taken red for the American flag, from the British colors (Red Coats), but the white stripes signified the secession from the home country.

  Red is a joyful color. “I love red so much that I almost want to paint everything red,” Alexander Calder said. Frank Lloyd Wright used red as the color of the square signature tile that was placed on his houses during the 1930s. “Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don’t know,” Henri Matisse once remarked about his beautiful painting, The Red Studio. “I find that all these things … only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red.” Pablo Picasso, however, famously said, “If I don’t have red, I use blue.”

  Red is a dominant color. Most artists and designers are not as cavalier about red as Picasso was. The primary Bauhaus colors were red, yellow, and blue, but red was the most iconic—along with black. ReD (Revue Devetsilu, 1927 to 1931) was the title of the Czech avant-garde magazine edited by Karel Tiege, which often used red ink for its mnemonics and visibility. And El Lissitzky famously “Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge.”

  Red is a dangerous color. Think Red Alert or Code Red. It is a cautionary color warning against threatened danger. The universal STOP sign need not have any type on it as long as red fills its octagonal shape. The bold letters of a “Wrong Way” dropped out of red are as powerful a message as a sign can telegraph. But not all red signs have safety as their goal. The red and black of neo-Nazi banners harkens back to the Fascist era when red and evil were synonymous. But red is not owned by one group alone. Thailand’s 2010 anti-military junta protesters belonging to the National United Front of Democracy Against Dictatorship were issued red shirts (and called Red Shirts too) as a sign of solidarity.

  Not all red is created equal. Josef Albers noted, “If one says ‘red’ and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” There are many different kinds: Imperial Red, Ruby Red, Rusty Red, Fire Engine Red, Barn Red, or Crimson. Lipstick Red comes in even more alluring shades. Was The Scarlet Letter any of these, or its own shade of persecution? Incidentally, red hair is really orange. Red wine is made from dark colored grapes.

  Every color has applied significance invented by man but given mystical and psychological significance. The package design website “empower-yourself-with-color-psychology” interprets red this way:

  “Red means energy, actio
n, passion, excitement and strength.

  “Dark reds are perceived as professional and luxurious, while bright reds are more exciting and energetic and generally of lower perceived value than dark reds.

  “Blue-reds are more attractive to the upper class market, while orange reds are attractive to the working class—orange reds have a lower perceived price and value.

  “But adding black decoration to your red packaging can add sexual or adult connotations.”

  And that about says it all, red-wise.

  Best of Jazz

  PAULA SCHER

  With the Best of Jazz poster, Paula Scher (b. 1948) introduced young American designers to forgotten design languages and inadvertently unlocked the floodgates for unknowing designers to pilfer historical artifacts as decontextualized scrap. With the Reagan presidency in 1980 national sentiment turned toward nostalgic and old-fashioned feel-good graphics that fed a longing for past innocence. This provided, consciously or not, a fertile environment for a new wave of historical derivation in design, which ultimately became known as “retro.” For a generation of designers and consumers disconnected from their visual past, the Best of Jazz poster appeared fresh and unprecedented.

  Early in her career, Scher was inspired by Push Pin Studios’ reprise of passé styles such as Victoriana, art nouveau, and art deco. She turned to type from illustration shortly after coming to New York, citing a self-assessed inability to draw well. As an art director at CBS Records from 1975 to 1982, Scher commissioned conceptual illustrators and combined their surrealist styles with eclectic and often historic typography that echoed the illustration. The effect was a holistic integration of type and image in the manner of nineteenth-century posters.

  In the late 1970s, the record industry hit the skids economically—sales slumped, costs soared, and inflation took its usurious bite. “I could no longer put all of our money into imagery,” Scher stated in an interview in Mixing Messages (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), “so the type came forward.” About that same time Russian constructivism was being revisited in books and exhibitions. Scher, who had long collected and admired old graphic styles, quickly assimilated the revolutionary language.

  Scher may have begun the Best of Jazz poster with an anthropological dig through the Russian avant-gardists’ visual vocabulary, but she ended up with a distinctive tapestry woven of personal affinities, problem-solving pragmatism, and New York derring-do. The letterforms are not Cyrillic, but, oddly enough, nineteenth-century sans-serif woodtypes borrowed from old Victorian type catalogs. The Russian artists had located their constructions in the weightlessness of white space even as they concretized that same space as a formal element. Scher, conversely, confines this poster within a border then packs it with a feverish riff of letterforms that energize the surface plane and metaphorically mimic the improvisational nature of jazz itself.

  Scher borrowed the constructivist’s strong geometric composition, thrusting diagonals, and signature colors: red and black. High contrast is apparent between the bold, black capitals that spell out BEST and the smaller, busier typography. Overlapping colors, surprints, and knockouts make the most of the limited color palette. These elements may explain why the poster was popularly perceived as constructivist, but there was also an unmistakable resemblance to Victoriana in the tightly packed, nearly cluttered arrangement of type, the woodtype typography itself, and the slant toward ornamentation. Although it was a hybrid of two historical forms, the result was fresh-faced, decidedly contemporary, and, yet, eerily familiar, much like a child whose genetic code descends from but ultimately transcends that of its parents.

  Effectively reinterpreting historical style is harder than it looks. To create unique graphic imagery inspired from the past involves juggling a number of currents: the inspiration and historical context of the original work; the resonance of the source material in its original time frame and the interpretations it might be given when restaged in a contemporary setting; and the designer’s own personal style and taste. But where are the boundaries when designers treat past aesthetic vocabularies as a storehouse of motifs to be used willy-nilly for their gratuitous impact on contemporary audiences? Far from any universal agreement, historical appropriation ranges from the clearly ethical—inspiration, influence, homage, reinterpretation, quotation, and parody—to the blatantly unethical—mimicry, copying, imitation, and plagiarism.

  Some of Scher’s historically inspired inventions have veered perilously close to copying an original, as with the 1986 Swatch advertising parody of Herbert Matter’s 1938 poster for the Swiss Tourist Bureau. With tongue in cheek, Scher assembled most of the same visual elements as Matter did, with the notable addition of a hand and wrist wearing two Swatch watches, which are, not incidentally, made in Switzerland. The capricious nature of the product dramatized in the monumental style of Matter’s poster created a humorous juxtaposition and sense of absurdity that appealed to Scher’s wit. It was a chance to play with the 1950s this-will-change-your-life type of advertising. In an interview with Dick Coyne of Communication Arts (May/June 1986), Scher explained, “Whether or not people get the joke or understand the basis of it—I hope they do—that’s the fun for us [Scher and then-partner Terry Koppel], and one reason why we both love to design.” They acknowledged Matter in a credit line at the bottom of the ad.

  Historical reprise has been a mixed blessing. At once it serves to educate designers about history, making them more open to learn about past eras and epochs, but also sanctions easy formal solutions devoid of originality. While some critics argue that overt borrowing from the past tends to trivialize both past and present by promoting rote design, others argue that the introduction of these reprises serves to enliven the field by offering more creative options. Where history is intelligently absorbed the results are invisible. Where history is used effectively as a model, a sense of appropriateness is usually apparent. But where history is just a cut-and-paste procedure, the result is almost always a cliché.

  The Bald Soprano

  ROBERT MASSIN

  If Robert Massin (b. 1925) had not done anything else during his extended career as typographer, art director, and editor, the frantically kinetic book he designed in 1964 for Eugene Ionesco’s absurd “anti-play” La Cantatrice Chauve, which is known in its American edition as The Bald Soprano (1965) and in the English edition as The Bald Prima Donna (1966), ensures his place in the pantheon. He pioneered a kind of expressive typography that just two decades later would be common and easy to achieve with the aid of computer programs, but in 1964 Massin only had the digits on his two hands to work with. Influenced by the metaphoric and kinetic parole in liberta endemic to futurism, dada, and constructivism, The Bald Soprano was Massin’s attempt to capture what Laetitia Wolff, curator of “Massin in Continuo,” a retrospective exhibition at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Cooper Union, New York (Winter 2002), calls, “the dynamism of the theatre within the static confines of the book.”

  Massin loved live performance and saw this play over twenty times. So, what he wanted was to project in print all the nuances, inflections, and ticks that the actors experienced on stage. He assigned to each character a specific typeface that represented a personal voice, and the type was combined with photos of the actors that were taken using high-contrast film. Through this process they were literally transformed into black-and-white symbols that replaced their typewritten names in the original script. The layout of the book is akin to a large storyboard used to block out a film, but rather than typing the dialogue neatly underneath the images—as was the custom—the text was integrated throughout. In this sense there is also a faint resemblance to a comic strip without speech balloons. Stage directions were replaced by the actual gestures and movements of the actor/icons as the type spewed from their respective personages across the pages in varying sizes and configurations. The dueling dialogue became increasingly chaotic as more actors appeared on the stage/page.

  What he wanted was to project i
n print all the nuances, inflections, and ticks that the actors experienced on stage.

  Massin’s graphic interpretation was conceptually in sync with Ionesco’s existential satire of language and logic, but technically speaking it was a big mess. Every element was not only arduously composed and pasted up (remember the days of glue and photomechanicals?), but it was also produced in three different versions for the French, English, and American editions. Even more extraordinary was the way in which Massin distorted the type to distinguish soft and loud conversation. He stretched the text (which today is a simple keyboard operation) by transferring the type onto soft rubber—using three dozen condoms, to be exact—which he pulled and tugged to bend and warp, then photographed the result as line art. It was hard enough doing this for the original French edition, but he also had to do iterations for two separate English translations. The end result, however, was a tour de force of interpretative typography.

  At the time it was published and for almost a decade thereafter, The Bald Soprano was a veritable textbook that influenced many designers, especially those working with minimal budgets. In fact, I am well aware of one such influence on mid-to late-1960s American “underground” newspapers. Under the constraints of working with primitive materials, high-contrast (or Kodalith) film eliminated the need for costly halftones because veloxes (or paper prints) could be directly pasted upon the mechanical, reducing the expense of negative stripping. As evidence of Massin’s impact, my very own tattered copy of The Bald Soprano, which remains on my bookshelf, was “borrowed” from the chief art director of one of these papers. Stylistically speaking, Massin’s method further introduced both a noir aesthetic to eclectic underground design and a kinetic dynamism found in the purposeful, if messy, clash of type and image on a single page.