Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  Ferro’s work is not always immediately identifiable, although he has reprised his signature style from Dr. Strangelove a few times since 1964. Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert film (1984), The Addams Family: Family Values (1993), and Men in Black (1997) all employ his distinctive hand lettering. But Ferro is less concerned with establishing a personal identity than he is with creating titles that support the movie they frame. Ferro defines each problem according to the ethos of the specific film; hence, titles for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), with its quick cuts and innovative multiple-screen technique, or Midnight Cowboy (1969), with its lyrical narrative sequencing, are individual works born of the same vision and purpose—to introduce another artist’s work.

  Restaurant Florent

  M&CO.

  In 1986 a chef named Florent Morlet opened an inexpensive French restaurant in New York City’s unsavory meatpacking district. Without any investors and little capital, he rented a funky old luncheonette that had recently gone out of business. His intent was to remain unpretentious (and still appeal to an exclusive clientele), yet Restaurant Florent did require the basic promotional materials, such as menus, business cards, and a sign. For these graphics he hired M&Co., a New York firm known for experimental commercial art. Tibor Kalman (1949–1999), M&Co.’s creative director, suggested that Florent keep all the fixtures, furniture, utensils, and the sign that the previous greasy spoon had left behind. “Let the restaurant design itself,” said Kalman.

  The menu designed itself too. Kalman decided that to be consistent with the restaurant’s overall ambiance the menu should look like a printer had thrown it together. He would have gone to a place where they print typical Greek coffee shop menus, “but we felt that the result wouldn’t be quite as effective as what a job printer might do, because those other printers are imitating designed things,” he explained. Instead the menu looks as though it had been pieced together in a few hours using random type from a letterpress type case. Nevertheless, it took two months to design. “If we weren’t trained designers it would have taken less time,” said Kalman. “The difference between something really wonderful and really horrible is very close.”

  M&Co. designed Florent’s first announcement using a mundane exterior photograph of the restaurant (the kind used for common diner postcards). For the second they made an original design and printed it on a coarse chipboard paper stock. Kalman decided to illustrate the idea of a restaurant through little pictographs lifted straight from the Manhattan Yellow Pages. The result was a kind of rebus with a chair representing the restaurant, a truck representing the address, a gun representing New York City, and an old Bell Telephone Company logo representing, well you know. “Our vocabulary was based on dumb, really obvious, generic images used for most commercial advertising,” explained Kalman. But the goal was not nostalgia. In fact, Kalman insisted that the difference between nostalgia (or kitsch) and appropriation is ultimately how the finished product is filtered through the designer. Nuance is the key.

  Early versions of advertisements for Florent employed quirky iconography, too. One showed a raw steak, another a simple salt shaker (both had the restaurant’s name but no address or phone number). As Restaurant Florent’s popularity increased additional funds were available for larger ads. M&Co. created a different ad every week, all orchestrated to create a distinct mythology. Inexpensive stock photos and studio shots of found objects conveyed a variety of ideas, the most emblematic of which was a common three-dimensional menu board left over from the greasy spoon days, complete with misspellings of the day’s specials. Others showed arrows pointing to the shirt of a customer, humorously indicating what specials had been spilled that day, a parody of an ecological chart. The most fashionably design-conscious ad used words in the manner of dadaist typography of the 1920s to illustrate Florent’s food and drink menu.

  Inexpensive stock photos and studio shots of found objects conveyed a variety of ideas, the most emblematic of which was a common three-dimensional menu board left over from the greasy spoon days.

  Many restaurants and businesses have consistent identity campaigns, but Restaurant Florent stands out for two reasons: it was a pioneering effort in vernacularization (the return to commonplace elements of commercial art), and it was a successful performance of various talents brought together as a repertory producing the equivalent of scripted and improvisational graphic design.

  The Public Theater Posters

  PAUL DAVIS

  The revolution was already in full swing when, in the late 1950s, Paul Davis (b. 1938) entered the fray. Some renegade illustrators and art directors had already begun to revolt against the saccharine realism and sentimental concepts in most American magazines and advertising. Although Davis was not among this first wave, he was swept up by it. By the early 1960s he had developed a distinct visual style—a unique confluence of primitive and folk arts—that brought a fresh, American look to illustration. In a relatively short time he was among the most prolific of the new illustrators, and his style had a staggering impact on the field.

  Davis developed an interest in American primitive painting and folk art as well as in the hand-lettered wooden signs that defined eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American commerce. “An artist of the caliber of [the nineteenth-century Pennsylvania primitive] Horace Pippin, whom I still think is one of the most undervalued American painters, was making honest observations of American life,” he said about the search for a native culture. “The 1950s were a particularly nationalistic time, especially in the arts. People were talking about what is American. Europe was still the acknowledged leader in the arts, and many people did not believe that Americans even had a culture.” In 1959 Jasper Johns showed his flag paintings for the first time. They were unmistakably American. Davis remembered going to the Whitney Museum biennial exhibitions where Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg were shocking people with their new American visions.

  One of Davis’s many stylistic evolutions occurred between the late 1960s and early 1970s with a cover for the left-wing arts and politics journal Evergreen. He rendered a religious depiction of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose exploits in South America had become mythologized by the American New Left. In this image Davis eschewed the Early American conceit for a synthesis of Italian religious art and socialist realism. “I was trying to make the image of a martyr,” said Davis about this artifact of the era. “I didn’t realize the potency of the symbol at the time. But when the cover and later the poster appeared, Evergreen’s offices were firebombed [by Cuban émigrés].”

  With this image he began a formal shift from the stiffness and motionlessness of his primitives to a more photographic sensibility. “I tried to erase the traces of American primitive art because it was becoming a trap,” he admitted. “I wanted to rid my work of all the elements that referred to other styles. And within a year or two after this, I had eliminated a lot of self-consciousness from my work.” Soon Davis began to “depend more on the beauty of objects,” and depicted scenes rather than ideas.

  Davis’s most significant contribution to American graphic design is his theater posters. His rendition of Hamlet and subsequent posters for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival done during the mid-1970s challenged the conventions of contemporary theater advertising. First, they were not encumbered by the usual bank of “ego” copy. “Those early posters didn’t say anything: No Joe Papp; No Shakespeare Festival; No actors. I didn’t even sign them at first (and only self-consciously used my initials when I first began to do so). The only lettering was the title of the play and the name of the theater, though we realized later that it wouldn’t hurt to mention that this was, in fact, a Shakespeare Festival production and began to include a logo.” Second, without mimicking style, Davis’s posters referred to the late nineteenth-century European tradition of poster art, which was ignored by contemporary posterists.

  His posters for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival challenged the co
nventions of contemporary theater advertising.

  His Public Theater posters were stark, employing a central image with simple type either stenciled or silkscreened directly on the artwork (as he did on Hamlet in collaboration with art director Reinhold Schwenk) or seamlessly integrated into the composition (as with the Three Penny Opera). “The history of the Shakespeare Festival posters says a lot about the way the posters are used,” he said. “I have often made comments in the posters about the way posters look on walls and in the environment in which they are hung. Many of my posters for the festival have had that self-conscious quality about being a poster.” One example, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, showed the main figure with the title lettering scrawled on a tiled subway wall where, in fact, the poster was intended to be hung. The third, and final challenge to conventional theater posters was his basic methodology. Davis read the play, went to the rehearsals or readings, and talked to the actors and directors. “They seemed to think,” he said, “that I was doing this revolutionary thing by actually reading the scripts.”

  The Public Theater

  PAULA SCHER

  Paula Scher (b. 1948) is not a native New Yorker, but she has acquired the self-assured, sarcastic, and abrupt elocutions of one. Scher believes that the best way to communicate to New Yorkers is to shout. “What better way to get a message across than for someone to yell something like ‘I’m pregnant!’ down a corridor; it’s better than the Internet,” she said. And this is exactly how she designs for The Public Theater. She shouts with type—boldly and unmistakably.

  Scher’s posters for The Public’s 1995 season, only a component of a larger shouting campaign, have been included in virtually all the design annuals and shows, but one has to be a New Yorker (or at least from the environs) to truly appreciate the impact of The Public’s language on the public. This is not the typically benign illustration sandwiched between layers of billing and flowery hyperbole. Rather, Scher’s cacophony of disparate woodtypes, silhouetted photos, and bright, flat colors is more akin to the two-color rag bond or oak tag bills produced by job printers or run off at Kinko’s to advertise circuses, county fairs, prize fights, and dance bands—the kind that are stapled and wheat pasted every time the New York sanitation authority’s back is turned. Scher’s scheme, inspired by today’s street graphics and yesterday’s Victorian playbills, was purposefully designed to appeal to a broad audience, from the inner city to the outer boroughs, especially those who have not been attracted to the theater before and for whom the typical “Broadway style” of advertising says exclusion.

  Scher’s street-based campaign supported the vision of The Public’s creative director, George C. Wolfe, the director of such plays as The Colored Museum, Angels in America, and Jelly’s Last Jam. After taking over in 1993, three years following the death of impresario Joseph Papp, The Public’s director for more than twenty years, Wolfe has completely reshaped the institution—its season, staff, lobby, advertising, and mission—to be more inclusive of those persons and communities for whom theatergoing has not been an option. “I want to have the kind of plays in The Public where the whole building becomes a giant snapshot of where America is,” he said in his rapid, syncopated cadence. Although Papp, who coined the name The Public Theater, welcomed the public during his significant tenure, and introduced a diversity of plays and playwrights, such as David Rabe, Caryl Churchill, Miguel Pinero, Ntozake Shange, David Mamet, and George C. Wolfe, the theater’s traditional audience was still essentially what one critic described as “uptown white.” Wolfe, on the other hand, wanted total inclusivity. “I want to take populist culture and elevate it, and bring elitist culture to a populist level,” he stated with missionary zeal. So to change both the perception and the reality, as an adjunct to producing plays that addressed the experiences and lore of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and gays, Wolfe dramatically changed The Public Theater’s distinctive visual persona, which for twenty years had been based on Paul Davis’s iconic painterly posters. “I was looking for someone who could give The Public an in-your-face unity,” he continued. “I wanted something combustible and dynamic.”

  Scher’s debut was somewhat of an improvisation. The day she learned that she and her Pentagram/New York team had been selected, she was also informed that Wolfe immediately needed to begin advertising The New York Shakespeare Festival, The Public’s long-running, free summer performances of Shakespeare in Central Park. With little time, Scher had to create a coherent scheme that not only advertised the plays, but also signaled both the beginning of Wolfe’s era and the Shakespeare Festival’s relationship to the whole Public institution, comprising Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, five separate theaters in The Public’s headquarters in the old Jacob Astor Library, its Broadway productions, and additional public events, which, Wolfe explained, “were originally tied together by Papp’s personality,” but now required an organized system. Rather than ponder the virtues of one design scheme over another, Scher was forced to create what would become The Public’s visual identity based on one of its many component parts. Nevertheless, she turned a necessity into a blessing. The idea to focus solely on typography as the organizing principle was a response to Wolfe’s mandate to “cleanse the visual palate” and thereby eschew illustration entirely. Wolfe liked Scher’s earlier Victorian-and constructivist-inspired compositions done in more or less appropriate contexts, but nothing could have been a better fit than this assignment; for here she could revive her favorite Victorian woodtypes—the ones that can be seen from a block or more away—on real playbills, posters, and billboards, not as mere pastiche, but as functional design elements.

  The Shakespeare Festival graphics were based on a simple format. Key words like free and live were greatly enlarged, satisfying Wolfe’s desire to address the public in a direct, no-nonsense manner, like sale signs in supermarket windows. Likewise, enlarged fragments of the titles of plays set in bold gothics, like the words wives for The Merry Wives of Windsor and gents for Two Gentlemen of Verona, drew attention to a linguistic mystery and provided a distinct contemporary identity that Evan Shapiro, director of marketing for The Public, said was like giving a news report rather than an ad spiel. “The approach is not complacent,” he added, “it says we’re here, come see us, or we’re coming to get you.” The typographic posters were placed on telephone stalls around New York, hung in commuter railroad stations in the environs, and on a few select billboards. They were intended to draw passersby into a visual game of deciphering the meaning of the words. If they missed on the first try, the ads were positioned close enough that on second glance the message was revealed. Flyers and handbills with this ersatz call-to-arms typography were also sniped around town in a blitz of paper promotion that is typically New York.

  Language by its very nature is a communal thing, and Wolfe and Scher, who have their own personal shorthand, believed that the syncopated sounds formed by the truncated titles and phrases communicated through bold type, dark rules, and bright colors would develop into a conversation between the people of New York and The Public Theater.

  The cornerstone of The Public persona was its logo, a combination of Scher’s visual/linguistic elements that shouted the word public, which was spelled out in a sampling of black woodtype letters in weights ranging from heavy to light set against a white field; the words The and Theater are there, but subordinate to the dominant word/idea. In addition to the main logo, Scher designed round logos, or what Wolfe called “tokens” (The Public is built over the Astor Place subway station) for individual theaters. The next level in the hierarchy of communication were accordion-folded flyers that when completely unfolded (to a length of around two feet) revealed the entire season’s programs in a typographic array reminiscent of Victorian theater bills, a sharp contrast to the usually quiet treatments of most mainstream theatrical subscription materials.

  Wolfe and Scher believed that syncopated sounds formed by the truncated titles and phra
ses communicated through bold type, dark rules and bright colors would develop into a conversation between the people of New York and The Public Theater.

  An exception to the pure typography rule were the posters for the individual plays, many of which included photographs—such as the emblematic silhouette of tapmaster Savion Glover on the poster for that tongue-twisting titled musical, Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, which sandwiched him between a jumble of letterforms, somewhat akin to a wall of graffiti.

  Wolfe wanted his posters to be like old LP album covers, and Scher, who designed albums for CBS Records in the 1970s, has certainly obliged by making them very graphic. But while most of her posters owe a spiritual debt to street graphics, they do not look like anything else on the street. One needs only to look at construction hoardings where sniped posters for Blade to the Heart and The Diva Is Dismissed were hung; both had the allure of untutored street graphics, but stood noticeably apart. The Blade poster, for example, featured an enlarged process-color photo of a boxer in a typical fighting stance with the large dots of the color plates knocked out of register in a pun on the punch drunk nature of the play’s protagonist. The Diva poster showed the huge face of Jennifer Lewis, whose one-person show this was, with a kinetic propeller of type coming from her open mouth. The forms were somewhat vernacular, and therefore beckoned, but it was the subtle wit that gave them resonance and fostered memorability.