Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  The Fair was also the most crassly merchandised event the world had ever known. Among the thousands of souvenirs were toys and games, ranging from kazoos to paint sets, all emblazoned or molded in the shape of the Trylon and Perisphere. Despite the predominance of cheaply manufactured trifles, the fair committee insisted in their press releases that the quality of these articles was guaranteed by the “artistic prominence and skill of their designers.”

  The efforts of the World’s Fair’s planners should not be dismissed as merely a vain effort to predict the future. Despite its failures, the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair was not an empty metaphor, but rather a colorful, though temporary, beacon of hope. The Trylon and Perisphere symbolized the real world of tomorrow for a nation about to enter a storm of conflict and gave its visitors the stuff of memories that neither war nor time could erase.

  Shooting Targets

  One need not be a marksman to appreciate the simple beauty of shooting targets. For function and utility they are among the most perfectly designed graphic forms; nothing could be more economical than the black concentric circles surrounding a bull’s-eye. If the archetypal target did not date back to antiquity it would epitomize the modern marriage of form and function—as designed by a Bauhaus master perhaps. The fact is, no form is more modern than geometric form. A circle is a circle, an oval is an oval whenever it is produced.

  The target was a visually eyecatching device used in Russian constructivist ads and posters during the 1920s. In the 1930s Western advertising-arts magazines referred to “scoring a bull’s-eye” with stark, modern graphics. Such mainstream products as Odol, Tide, and Lucky Strike use targets on their packages. And the vivid geometric form continues to be used in contemporary design and illustration. However, the standard shooting target was not originally, nor has it been subsequently, designed by any individual designer. Its formal attributes were born of necessity. In ancient times the targe, as it was called, was a light circular shield protecting the foot soldier from arrows. The shooting target, which simulated that shield, was made from a bundle of wood formed into and painted with circles and hung from a tree or easel.

  Jasper Johns transformed the target into pop art in 1960, and today antique dealers sell shooting gallery targets as naïf art. Yet targets have primarily served a utilitarian function. Wade Jackson who oversees the firearms training program at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, said, “the target is a tool that helps perfect the fundamentals of marksmanship.”

  In the 1930s and 1940s the classic FBI target was a cartoon version of the stereotypical criminal; a pug-faced, Caucasian male of undetermined ethnic origin aiming his pistol at point-blank range. The central shooting area of this target, from the chin to the diaphragm, was lightly shaded to guide the shooter’s aim to that part of the body where he could effect what law enforcement terms a “cessation of voluntary activity.” In the 1980s the “FBI Silhouette,” an outline of a male torso that stands upright either at attention or with one hand on hip, replaced the caricature and has been more or less officially adopted by most American law enforcement organizations. Scoring numerals are positioned along contoured rings, akin to a topographic map, indicating the various hit zones resulting in “rapid incapacitation.”

  “The numbers on the targets,” explained Agent Jackson, “are worked out in ballistic workshops where scoring agenda take the arbitrary nature out of the process.” But it is not necessary for a target to be a human figure. “The fundamentals of marksmanship,” Jackson asserted, “will get you where you want regardless of the target itself.” Actually, in the 1980s the FBI switched to the FBI-Q, or the so-called “Coke bottle,” a simple rendering of a thin neck and fat body that eschewed human resemblance but provided a proper hit zone. Jackson speculated that since there is no FBI design department dedicated to target research, the redesign of the FBI-Q and Federal Firearms QIT (Quick Incapacitation Target) was probably the work of “one persuasive guy in the organization.”

  Targets are designed to be ripped, torn, and shot apart. In this sense even the basic circular target evokes an eerie quality that is difficult to detach from its graphic grace and elegance. Yet it is this very tension between the target’s form and function that makes it so intriguing, indeed hypnotic. In the hands of a marksman it is an efficient tool, but in the eyes of the designer a target is harmony and balance.

  Darkie Toothpaste

  Darkie was the bestselling toothpaste throughout Asia. Manufactured in Hong Kong and Taiwan by Hawley & Hazel, part-owned by the Colgate-Palmolive Company, its leadership was challenged in 1990 not by a new and improved competitor, but by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which argued that the trademark of a grinning black minstrel promoted racial stereotyping. Spokespersons for Colgate-Palmolive initially insisted that the product name and design were not offensive to Asian people. However, the company ultimately gave in to mounting protest from the West and ordered Hawley & Hazel to change the image. The redesign featured a young, well-dressed black man in a top hat and a new name, Darlie.

  An American visiting a Far Eastern metropolis might well be shocked by the sight of billboards showing the original smiling, bug-eyed minstrel advertising Darkie toothpaste. Since the mid-1960s Americans have become sensitive to derogatory stereotypes. Yet these deep-seated images have been difficult to extinguish even here. Racial and ethnic stereotypes have no higher purpose than to simplify, dehumanize, and degrade people, yet many such stereotypes have been used for mass market product identification, advertising, and as trade character mascots. Although the Darkie controversy occurred continents away, it recalled a period in American history when stereotypical images of Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, and African and Native Americans were exploited by manufacturers and merchants to sell products.

  From the cigar-store Indian to the Gold Dust Twins (two comical African pygmies who were trademarks for a leading detergent), stereotypes have pervaded popular art. The practice has all but ceased, but vestiges of benign racist trade characters remain, including Aunt Jemima, the former plantation mammy who over the years has been transformed into a housewife, and the Cleveland Indians logo, the comic heathen with the foolish grin.

  Vestiges of benign racist trade characters remain, including Aunt Jemima, the former plantation mammy who over the years has transformed into a housewife.

  In the early twentieth century, ethnic and racial trade characters were accepted symbols of national brand campaigns. A 1915 issue of the trade journal the Poster reported that among American housewives, the most popular, indeed friendly, brand identifiers were the Armour Meat Company and Cream of Wheat chefs, both black men, and Aunt Jemima, precisely because of the customer’s identification with them as warm character trademarks. Today Aunt Jemima is so positively engrained in the popular subconscious that rather than retire her entirely, her handlers have taken the bandanna off and given her a mainstream persona.

  Stereotyping was common from the end of the Civil War through the 1890s, when the population expanded in urban areas and more goods and services were required to feed and clothe them. Enterprise and competition grew at a fast pace; numerous advertising techniques were employed to make a large consumer base aware of mercantile options. The earliest forms were typographic space ads, bills, and broadsides composed by job printers. Then, as printing technology improved and color printing became economically feasible, more specialized commercial artists took responsibility for the design of advertising, including trade cards, posters, and collateral ephemera. Racial and ethnic caricature was one of the most commonly practiced graphic leitmotifs. Comic physiognomic distortion was used with impunity for both political and social satire, and as entertainment in forms such as Currier and Ives print series Darktown, Judge’s Blackville, Puck’s mildly Jewish humor book Pezneez (a transliteration of business in a Yiddish dialect), to name a few. Comic artists, including Thomas Worth, F. W. Opper, R. F. Outcault, F. M. Homrath, A. B. Frost, and E. W. Kemble, also developed
character trademarks to sell soaps, patent medicines, writing inks, and washing machines. Racial stereotyping in the service of commerce was a benign graphic convention not intended to deride, or so the artists may have believed. It was a right-of-passage, a tax levied upon all entrants to the melting pot.

  The process might be called democratic. Every major immigrant group was indiscriminately pilloried by caricaturists—a curious badge of distinction. Ultimately, however, most immigrant groups were allowed to enter the mainstream, stereotype in tow. Often the groups themselves used similar self-caricatures in their own media. But not so for African and Native Americans. Stereotypes of the Native American “heathen” or “noble savage” continued unabated, while African Americans were saddled with various slave images (Uncle Tom, Mammy, etc.). The black minstrel image, the birth of black face, was so popular that white performers would put on burnt cork to entertain in theaters that otherwise restricted black people.

  The grain of truth on which stereotypes were developed made racial and ethnic caricature both dangerously insipid and useful to merchants. Blacks, for example, were used to identify certain food staples because on the plantation they were either cooks or picked similar crops in the field. Playing off skin color, they were also used to advertise soap products, like the Pears Soap ad showing a black child being scrubbed so thoroughly that he turned white. Images of the “noble savage” adorned patent medicines and tobaccos, the former because they were hyped as Indian remedies and the latter because Indians grew the weed. Although the noble savage was not as denigrating as other racial caricatures, it was, nevertheless, a false stereotype that oversimplified the plurality of Native American tribes and nations. While caricatured Jews, Italians, and Irish were not as gainfully employed as trademarks, they appeared often on “soft-sell” trade cards that showed generic vignettes on the front side with more specific advertising copy on the back, and were given away with merchandise. Usually in these often comical scenes, hooked-nosed Jews were shown with pawnshop balls, Italians were organ grinders, and Irish had simian characteristics.

  Some historians argue that racial and ethnic stereotypes represent early indigenous American humor. With the different waves of immigration each new group threatened the previous one, making hostility inevitable. Humor was a means of letting off steam. By extension, product identification was an even more widespread means of assimilation. Yet over a long period of use graphic symbols come to represent certain truths. Such is the case with racial and ethnic stereotypes. Artists who simplify, distort, and exaggerate physical or behavioral characteristics have significantly influenced popular perception. Early American myths of race and ethnicity developed, in part, from the popular arts. While contemporary graphic artists and designers are more inclined to understand the ramifications of their work, the lessons of the not-so-distant past underscore the potential power of graphic design. The Darkie controversy proved that the strength of stereotypes must not be underestimated.

  Jambalaya

  STEFAN SAGMEISTER

  Design organizations are the short-order cooks of printed ephemera, and the posters and flyers that they produce announcing myriad events—from competitions to conferences—are the graphic designers’ equivalent of two eggs, bacon, and side of whiskey down. Served up at such a prodigious pace, design for designers could constitute its own industry within an industry. Since members of these organizations are asked to donate their talents, their payback is a license to experiment. But despite the latitudes in designing for designers, one requisite is absolute: the need to visually represent design itself. Can anything be more mundane?

  Unfortunately, unique solutions to this problem have diminished as clichés have risen. And the most common of these are the tried-and- true, including light bulbs, pencils, T squares, drawing tables, loupes, and computer monitors—as well as combinations thereof, such as pencils with light bulbs as erasers, or computer monitors with light bulbs on the screen, or light bulbs with pencils for filament. Add to this a lexicon of somewhat more abstract symbols—like babies (birth of ideas), rainbows (variety of ideas), sunbursts (the dawn of ideas), and picture frames (framing ideas)—and it is reasonable to conclude that design creativity is difficult to represent creatively.

  As Mies van der Rohe once said, being original is not as important as being good. But to be good under these circumstances a designer must find alternative ways to express the nature of design without resorting to hackneyed concepts. This, of course, is the very essence of creativity: creating something unexpected. However, surprise is not always a virtue. Sometimes it can be as cloying as a cliché and as annoying as any distraction. Effective surprise—the kind that does not merely shock but influences perception and understanding—is not as simple as shouting Boo! in a dark room.

  Surprise is not always a virtue. Sometimes it can be as cloying as a cliché and as annoying as any distraction.

  Stefan Sagmeister (b. 1962), a native of Austria with a New York design studio, encountered this problem when he was commissioned to design a mail-poster announcing Jambalaya, the 1997 AIGA National Conference in New Orleans. Although designers covet such assignments for the visibility and prestige afforded them within the design community, the requirement to pack both an iconic image and an enormous amount of information onto the front and back of the missive creates challenges that often limit license. Information architects may be stimulated by the problem of clarifying layers of names, times, and places, but often the results, though well ordered, are too reductive to be stimulating. Finding a balance between clarity and the unexpected is difficult. And since this particular AIGA conference situated in the mecca of Mardi Gras was a veritable gumbo of speakers and events, the pressures to accommodate and innovate weighed heavy. Sagmeister’s art school training taught him discipline, but his instinct demanded raucousness.

  After starting his own New York studio in 1994, Sagmeister, who worked for two years at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Hong Kong and later for eight months at M&Co. in New York, earned attention for CD covers for the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Lou Reed, and others that were conceptually startling and eschewed stylistic consistency. STYLE = FART reads a banner over Sagmeister’s desk, which for him means that trendy surface alone is hot air. Instead of adhering to contemporary conceits, Sagmeister builds his design on ideas that, although quirky and contentious, are very logical, ultimately producing work that grabs the eye and disrupts the senses while satisfying his own atavistic need to agitate.

  When considering the metaphors for this AIGA poster, Sagmeister made lists of various design references and New Orleans clichés—everything, he notes, “from silly jambalaya recipes to stupid Mississippi steamboats. And I hated them.” But when the conference coordinator gave him a list of the eighty participants speaking in eight different auditoriums over three days, Sagmeister says, in his lilting Viennese cadence, “it sounded like one big happy chaos that had everybody running around like headless chickens.” This reference to domestic fowl was the egg that hatched into an idea. Indeed, a picture of a couple of headless chickens with its reference to voodoo ritual was just the perfect off-center illustration that Sagmeister needed as the focus for a wealth of information on a dense but dynamic poster.

  The probability that such an image would be offensive to some, including the client, did not really concern Sagmeister, who prostrates himself to avoid making things good, clean, and ordinary—or what he dismisses as “nice design.” “There is so much of this well-done, competently designed fluff around,” he observes, “that doesn’t bother anybody, doesn’t annoy anyone, and is rightfully ignored.” He refers to design in which form rather than concept prevails and ornamental layering triumphs—like slick paper-company promotions where designers are engaged in orgies of stylistic excess. “Tons of this stuff was given away by paper manufacturers in New Orleans,” he chides, “gorgeously produced beautiful fluff designed by people who have no opinions on nothing whatsoever.”

  Sagm
eister objects to experimental work that is really dysfunctional. While some may apply the word “experimental” to Sagmeister’s own work, he insists his design solutions are built on equal parts intuition, play, and the desire to rise above the mundane. For example, he once defiantly designed the logo, labels, and shopping bags for Blue, a chain of blue-jeans outlets in Austria, using only gold and black. Sagmeister maintains that he has no interest in hiding in a laboratory while his work is tested; rather, he is on a crusade to pump untried ideas into the real world. The Jambalaya poster was one way of announcing that he was an enemy of the safe and sanctioned.

  “I refused to do it in any of the ‘hot’ mannerisms, like Euro-techno, the new simplicity, or tiny type in boxes,” he explains. In fact, his real influence comes from a Swiss outsider artist named Adolf Wölfli, who in the 1920s covered his own imagery with bits and pieces of found detritus. Sagmeister acknowledges that at the time he was given the AIGA poster assignment, he was also working on album covers for the Rolling Stones and the Pat Metheny Group, which demanded very exacting effort. The Stones cover required months of tiresome research and the Metheny cover involved creating very intricate visual codes. As a respite, he says, “I was happily and mindlessly doodling.”

  In addition to the headless chickens, which were deliberately composed so that they would emerge as the poster was unfolded, the front and back of the piece is comprised of hundreds of small labels featuring the handwritten names (and self-portraits) of the conference speakers. Some were pasted ad hoc on top of the image on the front side, while the rest (along with all the registration information and sender’s reply coupon) were affixed willy-nilly on a board that was photographed and used as the back side. Sagmeister asked all the participants to sign their names in ballpoint pen or draw comic portraits. Naturally, scores of mistakes were made, which, after copyediting, were corrected in a rather unorthodox manner. “Some of the corrections were done directly on the poster while on the phone with the client,” Sagmeister says, explaining how he crossed out words and phrases and replaced them with his own handwriting. Rather than leave empty space, Sagmeister wrote additional text as much to enhance the chaotic nature of the poster as to offer conference lore. “I hid a lot of small inside jokes and stories all over the poster, and I actually talked to a number of people who read the whole thing start to end.” In fact, now it can be told: One of the small hidden images, Sagmeister confesses, “is a photograph of my testicles (I told the client that it was a picture of a monkey’s knee).”