By the 1930s his friendship with publisher Condé Nast was so close that this corporate chauvinist allowed Garretto to work for the competition. In the meantime the war broke out and Garretto wanted to return to Paris to be with his wife and child. Being Italian he was not allowed to cross the border, and after various attempts at entry he returned to New York. In 1941 Garretto was interned in the United States with other German, Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens. He was eventually deported, having agreed to an FBI proviso that he not make any anti-American artwork for the duration of the war. This was certainly a little far-fetched and unenforceable, but he did refuse to do caricatures for the Nazis with whom he had no sympathy. Moreover, his stylized but critical caricatures of Mussolini and Hitler did not make him very popular among party officials. In 1944 he was assigned to Budapest to develop a literacy project so that “defeated and conquered peoples” could learn the Italian language through pictures. But when Italy capitulated to the Allies later that year, he was interned as an enemy alien in Hungary for the duration of the war.
After the war he continued to make political and social caricature; he also did fine art in the same style. Paul Rand, who called Garretto a master of illustration, hired him to render the Dubonnet man. He continued to do caricatures well into the 1970s, but he stopped working for American magazines in the 1940s because after the war, he said, the art directors who knew him had changed or died and his kind of design was eclipsed by photography. In 1982 Lloyd Ziff, then design director for the newly revived Vanity Fair, located Garretto at his home in Monte Carlo and asked him to do some covers. He did a few, but they were rejected by the editors in favor of a contemporary caricaturist whose drawing was influenced by Garretto’s style. Although he was active until his death at the age of eighty-six, Garretto never altered the style that defined his time.
Artone
SEYMOUR CHWAST
The curvilinear style known as art nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany was revived by Push Pin Studios during the early 1960s and prefigured the postmodern reappraisal of passé forms by well over a decade. Push Pin, founded in 1955 by Seymour Chwast (b. 1931), Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel, and Reynold Ruffins, was a pioneer of stylistic sampling, known for combining traits of Victorian, arts and crafts, art nouveau, and art deco approaches with contemporary typography and illustration that underscored the influential “Push Pin style.” This approach was a model for other American designers interested in decorative form and, as a byproduct, fostered a return of drawing to the design process. The prevailing modern ethos rejected historicism as quaint and unresponsive to contemporary business needs. But Push Pin’s eclecticism was based on the idea that historical form could be revitalized and given currency with certain mass media, including book and record covers, advertising, magazines, and package design. There is probably no better example of the appropriateness of this method of historical quotation than Seymour Chwast’s 1964 design of the Artone Studio India ink package, the logo of which was the basis for his display typeface called Artone, released that same year by Photolettering Inc.
In 1963 Push Pin Studios was commissioned to repackage the Artone ink carton by the new owner of the art supply company, a Wall Street businessman named Louis Strick. Since his company was small, Strick rejected costly market research and customer profiles. Rather, he left the problem entirely in the hands of Chwast and Glaser (then the two remaining principals of Push Pin). As was often their procedure, each made sketches independently and only later came together for reaction and critique. “We’d talk about it, do our own ideas, and then talk about it again,” Chwast recalled. Glaser’s proposals are lost and his ideas forgotten, but Chwast recalled doing a few variants on his best sketch showing a large a, which, though not directly copied from an existing alphabet, echoed the fluid art nouveau/Jugendstil lettering he had seen in vintage issues of Jugend, the turn-of-the-century German art and satire magazine. In fact, the letterform was based more on the idea that “marks had to be simple and straightforward,” than on replicating art nouveau conceits.
The curvilinear a was contrasted by a delicate, lightline banknote script used to communicate the other pertinent information. Unlike typical art nouveau/Jugendstil packages known for a preponderance of florid decoration, Chwast favored an unencumbered box. The only decoration was three rows of nine smaller a’s—designed with a Zen-like simplicity—on the box top. Chwast insisted that using the a by itself was not a radical idea since making a simple, identifiable mark on a package was a proven way of establishing the identity for a product. “I knew it had to be something with graphic impact,” he said. “In contrast to Winsor-Newton [a competing brand], which took a different approach by having full color paintings on their packages.”
Printed on a white background, the a was the most identifiable element. In addition to being the first letter in the alphabet, and therefore memorable in its own right, its curved form was at the same time reminiscent of the Artone ink bottle and a drop of ink. Chwast, however, had acted entirely on blind intuition since he admitted that he did not even realize the strong symbolic relationship until another member of the studio pointed it out to him before the client ever saw it. “Somebody said ‘it’s sort of like an ink drop,’ and I thought that was a pretty good way to sell the idea to the client.”
The prevailing modern ethos rejected historicism as quaint and unresponsive to contemporary business needs.
Chwast used an existing script as the secondary typeface but realized it would be useful for future advertising and promotional purposes to have a complete alphabet and a set of numerals. So he sketched out the capitals, lower case, and numerals over the course of one week and had a designer in the studio render the finished drawings. Chwast said the a was easy, while the idiosyncratic nature of some of the other letters made them more difficult to work out. After the design was resolved, it was offered to Photolettering Inc. as a display face and was immediately accepted. Yet a potential problem having to do with fashion arose in Chwast’s mind. “The art nouveau thing had reached its peak [by 1964],” Chwast recalled, “and I thought it might be too late to put this alphabet on the market.” He was wrong. Artone became very popular, if not overused. It was so popular that at least two pirated versions were issued by other phototype houses. And the pioneer psychedelic poster artist Victor Moscoso credits Artone specifically, and Chwast generally, as influencing his own distinctive style of design.
Chwast used the upper-and lowercase alphabet on the Artone counter display box and eventually applied it to other projects, including posters and book covers. Strick was not troubled that his logo was being reused as a commercial alphabet because it furthered his product’s identity. By the 1970s the popularity of the Artone alphabet was on the wane, but it continues to be emblematic of an era of graphic design when eclecticism was at its peak.
The Lover
LOUISE FILI
According to marketing wisdom, the book jacket designed by Louise Fili (b. 1951) for The Lover by Marguerite Duras could never propel the book to the bestseller list. The vignetted portrait of a young woman set against a soft-hued background and titled with delicate typography that casts a gentle shadow was bound to fail the rule that a jacket must strike the viewer’s eye from a bookshelf ten feet away.
But The Lover, Duras’s memoir of being a fifteen-year-old French schoolgirl who becomes the lover of a Chinese financier in prewar Indochina, did become a bestseller. Tales of forbidden sexuality may be commercially appealing, but Duras’s story, like its jacket, is subtle and more complicated than it appears. It is filled with contradictions. She recalls the past with knowledge of the future, creating a tableau of memories superimposed one on another like double-exposed film. The prose is spare and unerotic, yet the words trigger imaginative pictures of this girl-woman who at fifteen struggles with sexual awakening amid cultural and familial taboos.
For the jacket, Fili chose a deceptively simple composition that characterized the writer’s
mix of the intangible and the real. The photograph was of the author at precisely her age in the memoir. Although the head-on pose is direct and engages the viewer, Duras’s half-smile is enigmatic and elusive. The jacket’s muted tones and feathered background added emotional subjectivity to the photograph’s apparent objectivity. The thin-stroke typography complemented the sparseness of the composition, but its shadow suggested weight and presence. Published by Pantheon in 1985, The Lover’s success was a vindication of Fili’s artful style, which marketing people often criticized as too low key to be commercially viable. Readable or not at ten feet, it stood out because of its understated countenance, not in spite of it.
Since the 1960s, consolidations and takeovers in the book publishing industry have increased competition for shelf space and put greater emphasis on the marketing and promotion of books. Book jacket and cover design in the 1960s was typified by Paul Bacon’s jackets that featured large type for titles and author’s names and small, illustrated scenes intended to summarize the book.
In the mid to late 1970s Fili—then art director at Pantheon—and others departed from modernist aesthetics and approached their designs as miniposters with integrated type and image in the spirit of the late nineteenth-century advertising posters. They researched typographic styles of the past and drew inspiration from movements like futurism, Jugendstil, and constructivism, incorporating them into contemporary work. This style, called “retro,” was similar to postmodernism in its eclecticism and reliance on past motifs; postmodernism, however, drew more from Greek, Roman, and Renaissance sources. Fili’s work was distinguished by a conceptual underpinning and an ability to set a mood appropriate for literature that superseded postmodernism’s tendency toward a cut-and-paste pastiche of passé forms.
At Pantheon, a trade division of Random House that published fiction and popular nonfiction titles that leaned toward the academic, Fili was given a comparatively small list of books, which allowed her to design most of the covers herself. Initially little attention was paid to her covers, just like those of the other designers before her. She soon realized what great opportunity for change lay in this environment where no one had high expectations. Fili recalled a comment made to her by an art director colleague, “You’re lucky. My editors have bad taste; yours have no taste.”
How did she create an environment conducive to innovation and inspired design? “Slowly, very slowly.” Fili recalled. “I set out to educate them, albeit very slowly and continuously, with incremental changes and innovations: matte laminations, unusual paper stocks, different types of photography and illustration, and, of course, experimentation with type.” She broke new ground graphically but always spent less than any of her colleagues, so no one complained.
By 1985, when The Lover was published, Fili had used hundreds of typefaces devised from reinventions or interpretations of existing typefaces that were either outdated, overlooked, or from a different era. In Fili’s hands they came alive. Her long-time love of letterforms found a home at Pantheon, where for Fili the best part of designing jackets was that “every day I could use a different typeface.” Since college she had frequently traveled to Europe to collect all types of printed ephemera, to photograph signage, and to study poster and type design. She clipped faces from old printing manuals and saved even just a few letters from old books or posters if they caught her eye.
When it came time to design, Fili drew tissue after tissue until just the right letterforms evolved to capture the particular mood or emotional tone of the book. Then, she hunted for a typesetter who carried the typeface. “Usually no one did, so I had to start from scratch and rebuild it, letter by letter, for my needs,” Fili told illustrator Dugald Stermer in an article in Communication Arts magazine (September/October 1986). With the typeface reconstructed or redesigned, she then hired a professional to render the new letterforms (this was before Fontographer). Occasionally, as was the case with The Lover, the title and author’s name were rendered exactly as they would appear on the jacket, complete with any special effects like the shadow. She has altered the stress, weight, slant, or width of typefaces to achieve an unusual effect. Her combinations of letterforms and juxtapositions of type styles within a single composition were rarely safe, but the unexpected combinations resulted in work that while respectful of a book’s content nevertheless projected a highly intuitive, expressive style.
Considered tame by today’s standards, which, thanks to the computer, present custom typography and unexpected visual juxtapositions as the norm, Fili’s jackets and covers nevertheless opened the door for further innovation. In the late 1980s art director Carol Carson and designers Barbara de Wilde and Chip Kidd for Alfred A. Knopf, and, later, Michael Ian Kaye for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in particular have expanded the ways books present themselves in the marketplace. Unusual materials and textures have transformed books into intimate objects. Imagery made of visual fragments, quirky typography, and aggressive compositions have pushed the limits of conceptual interpretation, occasionally providing only tangential clues to the content of the book. Over the eleven years she was at Pantheon, Fili’s precisionist covers, with their typographic sensitivity and conceptual illustration, moved beyond mimicking content.
The Cult of the Squiggly
Vines and tendrils are strangling designed surfaces, the result of a decoration deficiency in the design diet or a natural tendency for ornamentation. The cult of the squiggly has developed over the past decade with a few innovative form-givers seeding scores of exponents, ultimately spreading squiggly ornament that is alternately appropriate and nonsensical.
Yet this is not the first time ornament has been so invasive.
An ornamental epidemic in the late nineteenth century prompted Austrian architect Adolf Loos to write a 1908 essay titled “Ornament and Crime.” After the 1896 introduction of Art Nouveau and its offshoots, Jugendstil, Vienna Secession, Stile Liberty, Modernista, floriated madness attacked everything from posters and typography to furniture and buildings. Loos wrote, “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” His preference for “smooth and precious surfaces” derived from a belief that functional objects swathed in ornament were guaranteed to become obsolete. He, moreover, believed that superfluous design was both a waste of time—and immoral too.
Yet barely twenty years later, just prior to the Great Depression, the strategy known as “forced obsolescence,” what the American adman and design critic Earnest Elmo Calkins referred to as “styling the goods” was celebrated for having helped bring the United States economy back from material stagnation to consumerist vibrancy—in large part by adding ornament, like some sort of magic swaddling, to products and advertisements.
When done well it can be surrealistically beautiful and comically engaging, but when done poorly it is best as kindling.
Visual austerity was viewed as puritanical. And who could argue that an ornamental Persian miniature, with its complex graphic layering, or The Book of Kells, with the interlocking and serpentine filigree that fill its pages, are not among the most beautiful of graphic artifacts? How could Baroque or Rococo motifs in print be indicted as crimes against the eye?
William Morris, the late nineteenth century English designer, printer, author, social critic, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, exalted in ornamentation. His design for Kelmscott Chaucer, from its sumptuous ornamental borders to its decorative initial letters, proved to be the pinnacle of his career as a “graphic designer.” But The Kelmscott Chaucer was more than simply a revival. It was the realization of Morris’s belief that arts and crafts would counteract the corrosive impact of industrial pollution. Ornament was not a veil to hide ugly industrial wares—it was an antidote to the perceived poisons spewing from factory chimneys.
Ornament is not inherently evil, even in excessive doses. Nonetheless, passions are often inflamed when even the hint of ornamentation is injected into matters of Modern design. The Bauhaus rejected or
namentation as symptomatic of a bourgeois aesthetic disorder. Followers of orthodox Modernism, even to this day, maintained that minimalism enables clear communication—purity is transcendent. They rail against what in the twenties and thirties was sometimes known as frou-frou and they repeat the “less is more” mantra as the eleventh commandment. Yet there has, nonetheless, long been a compulsion to inject graphic complexity and even planned superfluity into certain kinds of design—and particularly print design.
Ornament’s comeback in the late 1990s is even more widespread today. Decorative patterning, an offshoot of the current ornamental trend, is largely born of street-culture excessiveness in various media—from textiles to clothing to web to print. Illustrated letterforms are among new decorative tendencies. Lettering in variegated forms—from stitching, scrawling, scraping, carving, and more—have added a more profound ornamental overlay to design of the twenty-first century. During the early 2000s, well over a decade after the computer became the primary design tool, squiggly serpentine, floral ornamentation was resurrected with a vengeance. Rebellion against the blandness of template-driven, computer-generated design has been one motivation. Another is the fact that once difficult complex drafting is now much simpler with computer programs, spawning a new appreciation for ornament.
During the mid-to late-1990s, digital type foundries produced scores of novelty faces made from non-traditional type materials, including such naturalistic ones as twigs, flowers, leaves, stamens, and pistils. In some instances, the plant is a perfect foil for modernist austerity. Lettering made from branches and bark has a long history used both as a sign system for rustic homes and campsites, as well as for graphically illustrated lettering. One of the most popular nineteenth century novelty faces was Figgins’ “Rustic” or “Log Cabin,” made from logs. Current usage is possibly more ironic, but not always. When done well it can be surrealistically beautiful and comically engaging, but when done poorly it is best as kindling.
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