Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  When the poster arrived in AIGA members’ mailboxes, it caused the stir that Sagmeister had hoped for. Some recipients were enraged that the AIGA, long the keeper of America’s modernist design tradition, condoned such abhorrent, anarchic work. National headquarters in New York received a few letters of protest, and even a membership was canceled. But positive sentiments far exceeded the dissent. Viewed as an enticement for prospective conferees to register for an event that promised to broaden the design discourse, the poster served its purpose well. It effectively promoted AIGA’s Mardi Gras and signaled that the event was not just a staid congress of self-important old-timers. But mostly the “headless chicken poster,” as it has come to be known, proved that when designing for designers nothing is worse than resorting to clichés.

  STYLE

  Mise en Page

  During the nascent years of modernism in the early twenties and thirties, certain eminent designers in Europe and the United States delighted in telling other designers how, and what, to design. These self-appointed prophets were so convinced they had discovered graphic design’s holy grail—rightness of form—they wanted everyone in eye-and earshot to revel in their revelations. To spread the Word (and image), they frequently issued sermons from the mount in the form of verbose manifestos and detailed manuals. Most proved inconsequential; a few, such as W. A. Dwiggins’ Layout in Advertising and Jan Tschichold’s die Neue Typografie (The New Typography), both published in 1928, endured. The former laid out rigid rules of contemporary advertising design, while the latter foretold progressive mannerisms and styles that did, in fact, take hold.

  But it was another, more commercially-oriented book, appearing a few years later, that defined the new mainstream aesthetic of the period and became, arguably, the design bible of all design bibles. Alfred Tolmer’s Mise en Page: The Theory and Practice of Layout, published in 1932 in separate English and French editions (Dwiggins’ and Tschichold’s books at that time were only published in English in the United States and in German in Germany, respectively), codified the most widely practiced of all the early twentieth century design styles. Advertised in the leading design journals, and sought after by European and American advertising artists, Mise en Page (the French term for layout) was a lavishly printed primer of that strain of design then called moderne, and subsequently dubbed art deco.

  Tolmer’s tome was an ambitious and alluring treatise on contemporary style. His goal was to position Deco in history and provide formal guidelines, while at the same time encouraging opportunities for inventive design options, thus luring some business to his firm. With slipsheets, tip-ons, embossed and debossed pages, and foldouts, the book itself was a model of eclectic mastery, a template for all designers who wanted to be on the crest of a stylish wave.

  Tolmer co-opted fundamental aspects of apolitical modernism for commercial application.

  In Mise en Page, Tolmer co-opted fundamental aspects of apolitical modernism for commercial application. Photomontage, then considered the foremost progressive design conceit (Moholy-Nagy called it “mechanical art for a mechanical age”), is given considerable attention in Tolmer’s hierarchy. “Photography gives concrete form to the subtlest thoughts,” he wrote. “It has the gift of imparting the dullest, most mechanical and impersonal things the sensitiveness and poetry which admits them into our dreams.” These words may be more flowery than those found in the typical modernist manifesto, but they are no less committed to a cause. And they exemplify how Tolmer fervently and singlehandedly smoothed the edges off orthodox modernism, making once-radical design concepts palatable for business and the masses.

  Tolmer, who died in 1957, is not as well known today as Dwiggins or Tschichold, but he played a significant role in the French printing and advertising industries. He was the third generation of the prestigious Parisian printing house Maison Tolmer, which produced some of the most stylish graphics in France for luxe publications and packaging, fashioning a diverse array of exquisitely conceived printed commercial products, from elegant boxes to advertising posters and publicity brochures. In addition to overseeing the output of his family’s firm, Tolmer edited art books and catalogs, and illustrated covers for magazines and children’s books: a true design auteur.

  While his writing was a bit strained (maybe a result of bad French-to-English translation), he did his utmost to present solid intellectual arguments for why modern/moderne design was the perfect form for the age. Tolmer began by posing the idea that writing and design were one and the same. “The art of lay-out,” he wrote, “is born at the moment when man feels the urge to arrange in an orderly fashion the expression of his thoughts. The first writing is a decorative setting in itself, a symbolic décor closely connected with the décor that is purely ornamental.”

  This vivid presentation of moderne design appeared at exactly the right moment. The visual genre was introduced to the world in Paris at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industrieles Modernes in 1925, and the new, ornamental sensibility quickly became the vogue for all the applied arts throughout the industrialized and commercialized world. A style of affluence at the outset, deco trickled down to the bourgeoisie, skirting the ideological overlays of its mingled modernist traits. Cubist, Futurist, Constructivist, De Stijl, even Bauhaus elements were absorbed by moderne; rectilinear geometries and sans-serif typefaces combined with stark ornamental patterns such as sunrays, lightning bolts, motion lines and other symbols of Machine-Age progress.

  Between the world wars, design entrepreneurs like Tolmer understood that given the ebbs and flows in European and American consumption brought about by the financial rollercoaster of the world markets, this kind of high style was needed to position goods. Styling was touted by marketing and advertising experts as a tool of allure that encouraged sales in everything consumable.

  For all its popularity, Mise en Page was not always easy to obtain. The book earned a reputation that far exceeded its initial French edition printing of 1,500 copies and comparable English language-editions simultaneously published by prestigious London design publisher Studio Books and New York-based William Rudge (the publisher of the original PRINT). Each edition reportedly sold out within three months of release, but designers who never laid their hands on the original were given some access to it through excerpts in leading trade magazines like the German Gebrauchsgraphik and French Arts et Métiers Graphiques.

  Mise en Page astute sampling of modernistic methodologies convinced contemporary designers they were essential: with Tolmer’s boost, deco lasted more or less until the outbreak of World War II, when an austerity binge hit Europe. Elements of Deco were incorporated into subsequent styles, but for the most part simplicity ruled design. In 1966, following a retrospective exhibition, “Les Années ‘25’, held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs” in Paris, the allure of Deco artifacts triggered a rash of pastiche. Today the original artifacts are treasured as mid-century gems in exhibitions (like one in 2003 at the Victoria & Albert Museum that traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2004) and updated versions of this stunning decorative mannerism are routinely injected into contemporary design.

  The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel

  W. A. DWIGGINS

  An admirer said of William Addison Dwiggins (1880–1956): “There are few American designers whose work can be revisited after decades with more pleasure and instruction.” Dwiggins was a renaissance man: typographer, type designer, illustrator, author, puppeteer, marionette designer, book jacket and book designer. He was the missing link between the aesthetic movement and commercial art, an auteur in that he developed an unmistakably distinctive graphic style that informed the practice of his epoch, from the 1920s to the 1950s. To give further buoyancy to his reputation, on August 29, 1922, in an article in the Boston Evening Transcript, Dwiggins was the first to use the term graphic design to describe his broad design practice.

  Dwiggins’s passion for design pervaded everything he touched (and wrote). His work was an e
xtension of his self. “One stood quietly apart waiting for him to look up,” recalled Dorothy Abbe, his long-time colleague, about his intensity, passion, and humanity. “Presently he swung from his stool. With a final glance at the piece that absorbed him, he reached for tobacco and, filling his pipe, slowly turned toward you, smiling his welcome. This was ever his way—the smile, the slow unhurried steps, emphasized by the simplicity of his dress, always in white. Not only did he move slowly, but he worked slowly in the sense that the first effort was usually discarded, to be written, or drawn, or carved, again and again. And yet in this quiet, patient manner he brought into being more than most people even dream of.”

  Among the countless projects completed during his long career, the shelf backs (or spines), title pages, and illuminations for a five-volume boxed set of Rabelais’s The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel (1936) reveals his virtuosity. In this book Dwiggins wed respect for tradition with passion for the new. In Dwiggins’s work, the classics served as foils for a contemporary decorative vocabulary that synthesized medieval, oriental, and Mayan visual forms. Although his motifs are described as art moderne (art deco), they were only remotely related to this machine age international style. Actually, Dwiggins developed a distinctive manner that was later adopted by other purveyors of commercial style. Dwiggins did not conform to the times, rather the times conformed to him.

  Separately each spine had its own integrity, but together they became a frieze of the book’s leading characters.

  The Limited Editions Club publication of The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel is certainly one of the finest on Dwiggins’s own shelf. Even when compared to the unique spines he designed for numerous other classics, these exuded a certain magic through their composition. Every aspect of the books’ conception, production, and manufacture from the deep green color of the cloth bindings and slipcase to the conceptual acuity of the lighthearted illustrations to the composition of neo-baroque ornament to the curvaceous hand lettering on the title and chapter breaks made this a readable confection. Over time it has become a kind of fetishistic design artifact.

  George Macy, the irascible publisher of the Limited Editions Club, commissioned a three-volume set; Dwiggins urged him to divide the text into five separate volumes (The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel was written as five books under one cover). This number gave Dwiggins the opportunity to create a virtual stage on which the characters in the books could play. Dwiggins tied the five volumes together through the spine illustrations. Separately each spine had its own integrity, but together they became a frieze of the book’s leading characters. Dwiggins further created individual title pages, which he precisely hand lettered in pen and ink in actual-size layouts, often in more than one version, as if titles for a play or film. Title page design was a time-honored part of bookmaking, and Dwiggins respectfully played with the medium by busting through the rigid constraints. Inside the books he designed vignettes that illuminated the text, but not in the conventional mimicry of a passage or line. Personally inscribed on the flyleaf of Dorothy Abbe’s copy Dwiggins wrote: “Although the … vignettes might be considered gothic I tried to avoid a gothic overtone in this book.” He succeeded in designing a book that, though set in another time, was not merely relevant, but vital.

  In Hingham, Massachusetts, far from the capitals of commercial art and design, Dwiggins remained an iconoclast for his entire life. But few mavericks were ultimately as influential. He inspired imitators, yet none were able to recreate his panache. Dwiggins was the quintessential designer and experimenter of his time. “Modernism is not a system of design—it is a state of mind … a natural and wholesome reaction against an overdose of traditionalism,” he wrote. “The graphic results of this state of mind are extraordinary, often highly stimulating, sometimes deplorable.” Dwiggins pushed the boundaries when necessary, while standing for tradition. He once wrote that he lived for a single purpose: “the game is worth the risk.”

  Vanity Fair and Fortune Covers

  PAOLO GARRETTO

  Paolo Garretto (1903–1983) was a prolific cartoonist, caricaturist, and poster artist who worked for magazines from the mid-1920s to the late 1940s. During his peak in the mid-1930s, every week at least one major periodical or poster hoarding featured an image that he produced. For Vanity Fair, just one of his primary outlets, he designed more than fifty covers and was known as one of Vanity Fair’s graphics triumvirate, which also included Miguel Covarrubias and William Cotton.

  Although he was friends with Vanity Fair’s legendary art director M. F. Agha (1896–1978), Garretto was originally commissioned in 1930 by one of the magazine’s editors, Claire Booth Brokaw (later Claire Booth Luce). His caricatures for Vanity Fair were uniquely styled and defined the times when they were made. Overtly influenced by cubism and futurism, his style grew more out of a naïve instinct than premeditated borrowing. Which came first, a dominant style or a personal one? Garretto was a leader not a follower. His covers for Fortune, the legendary finance magazine that pioneered posterlike covers, veered from caricature/design to pure design in an illustrative mode. These were grand visual statements.

  Garretto’s graphic approach was based on simplification of primary graphic forms into iconic depictions and loose but poignant likenesses. Vibrant, airbrushed color was his trademark, and he also experimented with different media to create exciting new forms, including experiments with collage and modeling clay that proved fruitful. Without his superb draftsmanship, what is now pigeonholed as deco styling would surely have been a superficial conceit, but his conceptual work was so acute, and his decorative work was so well crafted that he eschewed these pigeonholes. Writing in a 1946 issue of Graphis, Orio Vergani described Garretto’s ingenuity this way: “Once the constructive theme of his images is discovered Garretto proceeds to the invention of the media necessary for executing them. I believe he has painted, or rather, constructed his images with everything: scraps of cloth, threads of rayon, with the bristles of his shaving brush, with straw, strips of metal and mill board, with iron filings and sulfur, tufts of fur and wings of butterflies. His colors are born of a strange alchemy of opposed materials in the light of an artificial sun, he seeks for the squaring of shade as others have sought for the squaring of the circle.”

  Garretto was born in Naples, Italy, in 1903 but had a peripatetic childhood because of his father, a scholar and teacher who traveled extensively. When he was twelve years old his family moved to Philadelphia where, before he mastered English, he would communicate with his teachers through drawings. At the outbreak of World War I he returned to Italy and moved to Florence because his father was a reserve officer in the army. After the war, and amid the throes of great social upheaval, the family moved to Rome—a hotbed of cultural activity and political revolution. In Rome, Garretto would go nightly to the Caffe Aragno where the intelligentsia assembled; there he would sketch portraits on the marble table tops. One portrait of F. T. Marinetti, the founder of futurism, and another of the thespian Pirandello served to get him a job doing cartoons for a local newspaper.

  The postwar years were marred by struggles between communists and fascists. Garretto hated the bolsheviks, he said, somewhat romantically, for the murder of the Czar and particularly his little son Prince Alexei. But, closer to home, the bolsheviks had attacked his father at a veterans rally, beaten him, and stole his medals. Although his father “turned the other cheek and forgave his enemies,” Garretto was not so forgiving. At the age of eighteen he joined the Vanguardists, the fascist youth organization. In those days fascism was an antiestablishment movement and an alternative to communism. Although he has since renounced those years as childish folly, at the time he was committed to the cause. He even designed the fascist uniform (because he said that he disliked the disheveled look of the fascist partisans). And when Mussolini saw him and a few of his friends in a formation dressed in their spiffing splendor, Il Duce appointed Garretto one of his personal bodyguards. And a great honor it was too until he learned
that the position was for life. The elder Garretto, who was adamantly opposed to Paolo’s involvement with the fascists, eventually helped obtain a permanent discharge, allowing him to go back to school, earn his architectural degree, and ultimately travel to England, where he became a sought-after caricaturist.

  At age twenty-two Garretto received steady work from Dorland, Europe’s largest advertising agency. His work was published regularly in the eight major British pictorial magazines, including the Tattler and Illustrated News, and frequently appeared in the major German weeklies. In Paris, where he had married, opened a studio in his apartment, and eventually sired a son, he was commissioned to do numerous advertising projects. One such was the result of a meeting with Alexey Brodovitch, who was art director for the department store Trois Quartiers. He was also asked to become a member of Alliance Graphique, a loosely knit advertising cooperative that included poster artists A. M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, and Charles Loupot, for whom Garretto did an Air France campaign.