What do I think of the current wave of squigglies? Deco-flora ornament is simply awful when misused. When well done, its exquisite, rhythmic complexity is pleasant to the eye. Yet this resurgence of floriated madness, which continues to engulf advertisements, magazine and book covers, textiles, tshirts, package designs, and more, is becoming a nonsensical and overgrown design conceit, impossible to control. Maybe now’s the time to prune. Or maybe just let it grow and see what happens.
French Paper
CHARLES SPENCER ANDERSON
Some call the current trend in revivalist design postmodern, vernacular, or retro; Charles Spencer Anderson (b. 1958) once called it bonehead, a word that conjures up goofy cartoon characters and self-mockingly describes a design mannerism that draws heavily on 1930s and 1940s stock commercial art. But Anderson’s design is anything but goofy. Sentimental? Maybe. Nostalgic? Possibly. Silly? At times. But ironic is more to the point. His is a highly polished graphic style that has evolved into a distinct dialect rooted in American vernacularism. Rather than a trendy trope intended to exploit a popular fashion for quaint pastiche, this is a consistent formal vocabulary, featuring a lexicon of repeatedly used images, typefaces, and dingbats, which signifies both an attitude in contemporary design and this designer’s particular obsession with pop visual culture. What began as parody is raised to the level of art, much in the same way that pop artists of the 1960s elevated the artifacts of commercial culture to icon status.
Anderson’s long-running campaign for the French Paper Company borrowed the iconography of early commercial printing and incorporated it into witty rebus-like compositions that critiqued the mindless ubiquity of these once anonymous materials by placing them in a comic light. If postmodernism is a reappreciation of passé forms as a critical commentary of modernism, then Anderson’s approach is the humorous arm of this graphic design movement. His quotation of common visual advertising clichés and sampling of gothic commercial typography uncovered a lost aesthetic that had been dismissed as artless by the masters of orthodox modern visual communications. By the 1960s the cartoony printer’s cuts and trade characters that would later form the corpus of Anderson’s work had sunk to the nadir of graphic achievement and were repudiated by modern formalists whose mission was to raise the level of visual beauty and literacy.
His spirit is equal parts irony, history, and the down and dirty visual effluvia of the twentieth century.
Although Anderson did not set out to be a counter-revolutionary, he discovered the graphic integrity woven into the crude innocence of timeworn vernacular images, appreciated them for their nonsensical qualities, and promulgated their use as design imagery. Here the various elements of the French Paper campaign, including paper specimens that were developed as toys, playing cards, and other graphic playthings, exploited the more camp characteristics for the purpose of engaging the viewer in a distinct visual world. Since Anderson was not of a generation that fought the war to make the world safe for universal design, he did not harbor the same aesthetic prejudices as these designers. For him, discovering artifacts in old printing catalogs, type manuals, and other industrial ephemera was like uncovering a Pharaoh’s tomb. Yet Anderson did not merely display his archaeological finds, he revived their components by distorting, reshaping, and otherwise transforming vintage iconography into a distinct style that was applied to a range of packages, brochures, books, posters, advertisements, and products.
Anderson’s bonehead style began in the mid-1980s when President Ronald Reagan made nostalgia into national policy. It was a time when, as critic Natalia Ilyin writes, “nostalgia twisted truth out of its socket” by forcing the public to accept the false simplification of a vague, mythic past. The earliest iterations of Anderson’s design were consistent with retro trends, but it was not the graphic design analog of, say, the nostalgic TV show Happy Days. Anderson’s was never a totally nostalgic conceit aimed at exploiting that momentary fad. On the contrary, much like the folklorist who discovers lost or forgotten stories that tell grand tales, Anderson’s images became the basis for multiple narratives. While the style was used to promote the wares of companies like French Paper, Urban Outfitters, and the Turner Network, among others, it simultaneously told a story of commercial design itself.
Anderson and his design staff position products, establish allure, and attract audiences through precisionist designs. It is noteworthy that such an identifiable design signature succeeded in a field where most graphic designers avoid a single specific stylistic mannerism. But Anderson does not practice monolithic design. Within a proscribed framework there is formal and conceptual range. Over the years much of the vintage advertising sampling has been replaced by original still-life photographs and conceptual illustration, which allows Anderson to communicate with various voices. Still, Anderson’s work is governed by an aesthetic that rules the color palette and conceptual thrust. His spirit is equal parts irony, history, and the down and dirty visual effluvia of the twentieth century.
Through the flagship CSA Archive Catalog of Stock Art, Anderson has both reintroduced and laid claim to many of the forgotten artifacts of American commercial printing, and in doing so he has made a ragtag collection of random forms into a regiment of disciplined artworks. Or put another way, he has made a variety of generic visual idioms into an accessible design lexicon. In popularizing these forms Anderson has also contributed to the continuum of design by building on what designer Art Chantry referred to as American commercial folk art—the anonymous artifacts of the commercial era. In the original forms that Anderson draws upon the customer was never aware of the human hand, the images just matter-of-factly materialized in newspapers, “shocards,” and flyers. In Anderson’s work, however, the presence of the artist/designer is always apparent, and it is this intervention that makes his appropriation (and ultimate invention) into a commentary of sorts on the state of design, past and present.
COMMERCE
Show Cards
The show card (or shocard) was the quintessential form of early commercial art. It embodied essential design attributes of balance, harmony, and proportion that enabled unsophisticated designers, primarily job printers, to produce effective advertising. But even such modern pioneers as El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, and Paul Rand adhered to the same design truth associated with the show card: Primary colors and sans serif typefaces resulted in eyecatching design.
Starting in the late nineteenth century, the show card was a piece of bristol board on which a letterer or artist would draw or paint a message or image. The quantities that were produced were invariably limited. Eventually show cards were printed on multilith presses, and stereotype plates were designed by art service agencies, which distributed to printing companies large and small. Standard show cards were produced by printers and sign makers, who inserted their own wood and metal types into the empty mortised sections on the printing plate.
Various styles filled sample books, but around 1920 the now classic format was initiated by Empire Litho, a printing firm in Massachusetts, and was quickly adopted by job printers throughout the nation. These predominantly type-based posters printed against one or two stark primary colors became the most ubiquitous medium of advertising for all kinds of regional events, including county fairs, vaudeville and movies, prize fights, square dances, and political campaigns.
Functional design was essential: gothic type, flat colors, and sometimes the split-fountain technique—where two colors at the top and bottom of the card mix in the middle to give a multichromatic effect. The occasional stock line cut or halftone might be used for decoration, and a variety of eyecatching borders were required. “The border demands full consideration in card design,” wrote F. A. Pearson in the 1925 edition of Ticket and Showcard Designing. “Its effect is that of a frame round a picture. It limits attention within its bounds.” In addition, bull’s-eyes, stripes, and other geometric patterns, not unlike Russian constructivist and Bauhaus compositions,
guided the viewer’s attention to the message.
The genre has been both parodied and used as inspiration for contemporary work. Paula Scher’s New York Public Theater posters, for example, with their bold gothics of varying sizes set against yellow or red backgrounds, are admittedly influenced by the show card. In its original form, it is still used for carnivals, circuses, auctions, and concerts. The classic show card has survived shifts in trend and fashion because it is the essence of good design.
Priester Match Poster
LUCIAN BERNHARD
The Priester Match poster is so startling that it grabs the viewer’s eye in an instant. Of course, the aim of all good advertising is to make the unmemorable memorable by mythologizing the commonplace products of daily life. However, before the Priester Match poster first appeared on the Berlin poster hoardings in 1906, most advertising was ornate and wordy. The persuasive simplicity of the Priester poster was rare indeed. Moreover, no one had yet heard the name of its eighteen-year-old creator, Lucian Bernhard (1883–1972), or the genre of advertising he invented, which became known as the Sachplakat, or object poster.
Bernhard’s early object posters are ubiquitous in poster anthologies. The most striking excel in terms of their graphic eloquence, simplicity, and strength. The method he defined, and the style that ultimately emerged, was predicated on an unadorned, bold-outlined, centered representation of the product being advertised, like a typewriter, spark plug, or piano, placed against a flat color background of forest green, bright purple, or deep orange. The lettering was reduced to a few words, usually the brand name alone. The object in the Sachplakat, rendered much like a woodcut, grabbed the attention of passersby as it aesthetically and unambiguously hawked its message. The virtue of this invention was that viewers didn’t have to navigate through tedious selling copy, confusing graphics, or other visual distractions. The image was clear, concise, and downright pleasing to the tired eye.
In the 1930s dramatic still life photography, responding to the call for a machine art for a machine age, heroicized the industrial product in much the same way that Bernhard celebrated mere matches.
Bernhard’s formative years coincided with the explosion of art nouveau in France and Jugendstil in Germany. Munich was the center of the “radical” German graphic arts, but he decided to settle in Berlin where the wonders of industrial production and commercialism were manifest. Like most turn-of-the-century industrial capitals, Berlin bustled with vehicular traffic, was bathed in electric lights and signs, and exalted in the progress of the industrial age. Berlin businesses routinely sponsored poster competitions as a means of identifying new talent for the expanding advertising industry. When Bernhard was around sixteen he decided to enter a competition sponsored by the Priester Match company and judged by some of the leading promoters of the burgeoning poster movement. Two hundred Marks (about $50) would be awarded to the winner, but more important, the winning entry would be printed and pasted around Berlin. Bernhard jumped at the opportunity, and, with little time to produce his entry, he reportedly made some crucial, instinctive design decisions.
Using paint and brush, he laid down a brown/maroon background—an unusual choice at that time; most posters used either black or bright primaries—on which he rendered an ashtray with a pair of wooden matches along the side. Seeing that the ashtray needed some additional graphic device to balance the composition, he drew in a cigar. Logically, from the cigar wafted smoke, and from the smoke, what else, but a few scantily clad Jugendstil dancing girls. The ashtray needed grounding, so he painted in a checkered tablecloth. At the top of the poster in block letters he rendered the word Priester. The original sketch does not exist, but what a mélange it must have been. Nevertheless, proud of his work, he showed it to his mentor at the time, a political caricaturist, who congratulated Bernhard on the wonderful cigar poster. Bernhard immediately realized his error and proceeded to remake the poster by painting out the cigar, then the smoke, then the ashtray, then the tablecloth, leaving only a pair of red matches with yellow tips and the brand name, Priester, in gothic lettering. He met the competition deadline without a moment to spare.
Upon seeing it for the first time, the judges, feeling it was too empty, threw it unceremoniously into the garbage can, where it would have remained had not the most important judge arrived late. Burly, bald, and jocular, Ernst Growald was the sales manager for the Hollerbaum and Schmidt lithography firm, which was widely admired as Berlin’s leading advertising poster printer—a kind of proto-advertising agency. Growald was a man of unique vision who understood the critical role that advertising could play in Germany’s expanding economy. He also had good taste, and, not seeing any other noteworthy entries on the judges table, turned his wayward eyes to the artwork in the trash. Removing it, he hung it on the wall, and was reported to have exclaimed: “This is my first prize. This is genius!” Bernhard won the contest. With Growald as agent and broker, Bernhard never again wanted for paying work.
The Priester poster was a great success for the company, too. In a highly competitive marketplace the message was so simple that it emblazoned the brand in everyone’s memory. By chance, Bernhard tapped into the power of simplicity and created a paradigm of modern functionality. Later Bauhaus inventions were hardly more reductive. He modeled much of his subsequent work on that poster, and though many of his designs were good, he never really surpassed Priester for ingenuity. And why should he? The Sachplakat was not merely a style, it was a tool for spreading the word. It would become dated over time, but only in the same way that one tool might be superseded by a better tool.
As the one who discovered Bernhard, Growald felt he had the right (and certainly he had Bernhard’s permission) to encourage others to work in this manner. He formed a loose-knit “school” of kindred artists known as the Berliner Plakat. Some members followed Bernhard to the letter; others veered off in their own directions, adding a touch of humor or a typographical flourish. As a charter member, indeed the school’s foremost innovator, Bernhard became involved with many of what was also known as the Plakatstil (poster style).
Bernhard’s Sachplakat might very well be credited with providing the model of objectivity that was ultimately adopted later by the progressive segments of the advertising industry. In the 1930s dramatic still life photography, responding to the call for a machine art for a machine age, heroicized the industrial product in much the same way that Bernhard celebrated mere matches, spark plugs, and gear shafts. Photographers took Bernhard’s notion a step beyond the sentimentality endemic to the drawn or painted image and were therefore even more modern in the formal sense. But Bernhard also prefigured pop art in his popularization of the object. The success of the Priester Match poster rested on figuratively rubbing two sticks together that ignited a new methodology. Without Bernhard’s pioneering effort, it is possible that objectivity as method and style would have taken much longer to catch on.
The First Record Album
ALEX STEINWEISS
Alex Steinweiss (1917-2011) created the first record albums with original cover art in the late 1930s. What seems commonplace today was revolutionary back then, when heavy shellac seventy-eight rpm records were packaged in unadorned cardboard covers with craft paper sleeves bound inside. The title of the album was usually embossed on the cover’s front and spine, and on rare occasions an album might include a reproduction of a famous painting. Steinweiss’s art was both original and stylish, conforming to contemporary French and German poster fashions where symbolic forms and metaphors expressed the message. Rather than a portrait of the recording artist, Steinweiss believed, and the management of Columbia Records concurred, that provocative graphic symbols would stimulate the audience’s interest in the music. According to a 1939 article in Newsweek, sales of the first illustrated album cover rose over 800 percent.
“I tried to get into the subject,” Steinweiss explained in an interview, “either through the music or the life and times of the artist/composer. For example, fo
r a Bartok piano concerto I took the elements of the piano—the hammers, keys, strings—and composed them in a contemporary setting. Since Bartok is Hungarian, I also put in the suggestion of a peasant figure.” For the album La Conga Steinweiss painted an enlarged pair of hands playing on a stylized conga drum. For Gershwin’s original recording of Rhapsody in Blue he placed a piano on a dark blue field illuminated only by the yellow glow of a lone street lamp. The moody scene captured both the music and the city.
Steinweiss’s designs maximized the limited image space. All the characteristics of a large poster were brought to the forefront: strong central image, eyecatching typography or lettering, and contrasting colors. At the time the illustrated album cover was first introduced, record stores, which were often sections near the record players in appliance stores, comprised shelf upon shelf of dreary album spines facing outward (they were called tombstones in the trade). Steinweiss’s albums not only brightened up the surroundings, but the imagery also provided focal points for the consumer. Merchants began to display albums as objects of art, and listeners related the music to this art. Steinweiss inspired other record companies to use evocative covers, but until after World War II his were definitely the most distinctive.
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