Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  All the characteristics of a large poster were brought to the forefront: strong central image, eyecatching typography or lettering, and contrasting colors.

  For its formal strength and emotional force the most memorable was his cover for Songs of Free Men by Paul Robeson—a slave’s chained hand holding a knife resonated as a symbol of freedom and heroism. Other European-inspired, though decidedly original, designs included his constructivist Eddy Duchin album and the cubist Le Sacre du Printemps. In addition to stylistic sampling, Steinweiss used classical typefaces, though he often complemented (or contrasted) them with a contemporary novelty face. For the cover for La Bohème he used an ornamental circus letter because it spoke to the frivolous nature of the opera. By the 1950s, with the advent of Swiss modernism, which proffered economical design, and the increased use of photography, Steinweiss’s illustrative work looked dated. But for a moment in design history his invention pushed packaging conventions into an entirely new design genre.

  Cheap Thrills

  R. CRUMB AND BOB CATO

  A standing ovation at the Fillmore East, New York’s premier music hall during the late 1960s, was reserved for rock-and-roll royalty. The Fillmore hosted the best bands of the age, and Fillmore audiences were jaded, demanding, and sometimes rude in the bargain. On one occasion, early in their career, the members of the band Sly and the Family Stone were shouted off stage because the audience could not wait a second longer for the evening’s headliner, Jimi Hendrix, who received one of the longest and loudest ovations ever. That is, with the exception of the time in fall 1968 when Janis Joplin announced to the assembled fans that the cover for Cheap Thrills, the recent Big Brother and the Holding Company album, was illustrated by underground cartoonist R. Crumb. The audience went wild as a slide of the image filled the huge screen behind her.

  Back then, Crumb (b. 1943) was as popular as any rock star. His cartoon inventions, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Honeybunch Kominsky, the Keep on Truckin’ chorus line, and scores of raucous and ribald comix published in underground newspapers such as the Bee, East Village Other, and Gothic Blimp Works had earned him hero status throughout youth culture. He was in the vanguard of artists who forever busted the timidity and mediocrity that had been enforced since the mid-1950s by the industry’s self-censoring organ, the Comics Code Authority. Through a combination of zany raunch and artful acerbity wed to unequaled pen-and-ink draftsmanship, Crumb’s drawings of big-hipped hippie chicks, bug-eyed nerdy guys, and weird average-American white folk engaged in extraordinary (if unspeakable) acts pounded at the propriety and sanctity of an aged establishment. No wonder the union of Joplin and Crumb (who were born in the same year) was greeted with ecstatic delight when it was made public. There is no telling how many records were sold from that night’s debut, but, musically, it was Big Brother’s best album and graphically it was the most memorable cover art of the generation.

  The Cheap Thrills cover was an ersatz comic strip with panels radiating from a central circle. Like illustrated liner notes, each panel contained a cartoon reference to either Joplin, Big Brother, or a song on the album. For the cut “I Need a Man to Love,” Crumb has a zaftig Janis (his signature female archetype) almost bursting out of her tight clothes, fetchingly strewn on a bed. For “Ball and Chain,” Joplin’s classic tour de force, the same character drags along a leg iron attached to a ball and chain, as if in an endless search for the right man. For “Summertime,” Joplin’s masterful cover of the old standard, Crumb uses a dubious caricature of a black woman, a throwback to vintage racist mammy cartoon images from the nineteenth century, holding a wailing baby with cartoon tears radiating around its head. Separately, each panel is a slapstick gag in the comic tradition; together they form a curiously hypnotic, multi-image narrative that in retrospect visually reflects the San Francisco music scene of the day.

  Aside from Crumb’s bawdy humor, what made this album cover such an icon was its good timing. Produced at a moment when cultural innovations were introduced at a fast and furious pace, this was the pinnacle of 1960s exuberance and invention, just prior to its neutering and commodification by marketers and entrepreneurs. Which is not to say that marketers and entrepreneurs were not already maneuvering in the wings—they were. But even the consumer outlets—FM radio, the record industry, head shops, and so on—seemed not to be constrained by market or conventions and were willing to take risks that went beyond “most advanced yet acceptable.” For an all-too-brief moment, youth-hippie- alternative culture was in a state of grace when everything seemed new and unfettered. Music and art were rebellious, expressive, and instinctive. Formulas, clichés, and stereotypes had yet to exert a viselike grip on creativity. Crumb’s cover for Cheap Thrills was not just a calculating effort to win market share; it was the marriage of two artists and two art forms that truly spoke to the gut of the same audience without pretense or conceit. Joplin’s music was raw emotion; Crumb’s art was pure wit.

  Nevertheless, Cheap Thrills was a product of a well-established music industry. In the wake of the mid-1960s British pop invasion, the American music establishment responded to the popular groundswell toward psychedelic and folk rock emanating from San Francisco by quickly signing as many top local bands as possible (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, and more). It churned out albums (instead of 45s, the standard music medium of the preceding generation), and with albums came a need for eyecatching cover art that telegraphed the eccentricity of the new rock. In competition with the visionary psychedelic posters that advertised San Francisco’s music palaces, simple photographs of band members were no longer sufficiently engaging to attract record buyers by the late 1960s. With the art-based collage on the Beatles’ Revolution in 1966 and the elaborate fantasy photograph on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, concept album art became a viable alternative to studio photography. Record company art director/designers were unleashed to test the limits of conceptual presentation.

  The veteran Bob Cato (1923–1999) was among the more conceptually astute. During ten years as an art director and, subsequently, as the vice president of creative services for CBS/Columbia Records, working with such decidedly contrasting musicians as Leonard Bernstein, the Band, Glenn Gould, and Johnny Mathis, Cato developed or directed the creation of some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960s. As a student of and assistant to the legendary art director and designer Alexey Brodovitch, Cato cut his art directorial teeth on the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, where Brodovitch had transformed editorial and fashion design with his innovative mixture of white space, elegant typography, photography, and modernist art. The former New York Times advertising columnist Randall Rothenberg says that these “were characteristics that would also define Cato’s own work during the next several decades.”

  Many of Cato’s album covers featured his own photography, but for others he enlisted some of the era’s most influential painters, designers, and photographers, among them Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Francesco Scavullo, and Irving Penn. But Cato did more than just conceive and execute album covers. “He was also intimately involved in the conception and even the naming of the recordings themselves,” says Rothenberg. One of these was Cheap Thrills.

  As was customary at CBS, Joplin came to see him about the design of her record. Originally, Cato wanted to shoot the group in a fabricated “hippie pad,” but Big Brother balked at the pretentious set. Instead, both Janis and Cato agreed that Crumb’s artwork was a perfect way to give the album a look sufficiently raw to match the music. Crumb worked without interference. Joplin wanted a title that was synonymous with her life and the epoch in which she lived, insisting that the album be called “Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills.” Given her soaring popularity, CBS records executives were tempted to give in. Nevertheless, “the title didn’t seem quite right to me,” Cato wrote years later in an unpublished memoir. “It said too much, gave away too much. Besides, even in the 1960s, the recording business was still a busin
ess, and there was only so much you could get away with.”

  Cato who was no novice when it came to taming celebrity egos, calmly suggested to Joplin that the words “sex” and “dope” on the cover would limit the record’s radio airplay, recommending that she use only the last two words of this phrase for the title. Joplin demurred. “Well, I’ve always settled for cheap thrills, anyway,” she said. With Crumb’s comic splash panel at the top, Cheap Thrills the record went on to become one of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time.

  Dust Jackets of the 1920s and 1930s

  In 1833 the first book jacket was used by Longmans & Co., a British publisher, to protect books from the corrosive effects of dust and light. The heavy paper wrapped around the cloth binding was meant to be discarded after purchase. Such was the ignominious beginning of what in the 1920s and 1930s became a unique artist’s medium. For its first fifty years the dust jacket was a plain paper wrapper usually with a window cut out to reveal the title and author’s name. The binding of the average trade book (which included the spine and front and back covers) was occasionally stamped or embossed with a modest filigree or vignette for decoration. In the late 1890s decoration was introduced with more regularity. The designs of Aubrey Beardsley, in England, and Will Bradley, in America, were reproduced on book covers as a kind of miniature poster. Soon, in order to increase advertising and eye appeal, publishers also printed on the paper jacket, and by the turn of the century the dust jacket had become the publishing industry’s standard promotional tool.

  Veteran book designers, however, considered the dust jacket an unwanted appendage. In the classical tradition it was not an intrinsic part of a book’s design, which only included the cover, binding, and interior pages. Many esteemed book designers did not design the jackets for their books, but rather passed that dubious assignment on to a “specialist”—usually a layout artist trained in the requisites of commerce. As late as the 1950s the jacket was viewed as the unwanted stepchild. “It could be argued that the jacket is part of the book, [a jury of book critic/practitioners including Herbert Bayer, Merle Armitage, and Sidney Jacobs] feels that this is a temporary and fallacious point of view,” wrote Marshall Lee in Books for Our Times (Oxford University Press, 1951). “One need only consider the absurdity of having one expensive cover designed that will permanently conceal another! Either the jacket is a temporary protection and sales device meant to be torn from the book the moment it is sold or it is an indispensable cover. If the latter were true, the logical procedure would be to dispense with the costly, unseen binding design. The jacket then becomes the binding, and the function of both binding and jacket will be the same.”

  Dust jackets were the low end of graphic design practice, tainted by their association to crass advertising departments. As mini billboards, they followed the principles of mass marketing applied to packaging. Dust jackets were ephemera and readers habitually discarded them before books were entombed on the bookshelf. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, trade book jackets were illustrated by taking a key sentence or word and rendering it verbatim as a monumental vignette in either a sentimentally realistic or fashionably stylized (art deco) manner. The lettering was usually done by hand in the au courant novelty style of the time. The sole purpose of the jacket was to attract and hook a reader (similar to the movie posters of the era). The pictorial representation often had little to do with the book’s essence. Even the classics sometimes acquired contemporary imagery and design motifs in order to eschew any hint of mustiness. It might have been false advertising, but the disparity between the author’s intent and the artist’s interpretation was accepted for marketing reasons. “This technique of allegory,” wrote historian Stephen Greengard in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Art (No. 7, Winter 1988), “does not require the artist to read the book itself, merely to distill from its pages a high impact visual which may be apprehended at a single glance.”

  “It seems ironic,” wrote Greengard, “so many great, important ideas, the products of the finest minds of humanity, [were] wrapped in pieces of whimsical, brilliantly colored paper.” During the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to providing protection, promotion, and genre identification, the design of book jackets made a variety of fiction and nonfiction books appealing and accessible to broad audiences. The old saying “you can’t tell a book by its cover,” is usually true, but the cover piqued interest. In some cases the cover was the best part of the book.

  Atoms for Peace

  General Dynamics was one of the wellsprings of design innovation. Formed in 1953 as the parent for a number of manufacturing firms that catered to the defense needs of the United States, General Dynamics’ products included atomic-powered submarines, electric motors for ships, the B-58 supersonic jet bomber, and the commercial 880 jet transport. It also sponsored research in electronics, astronautics, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics, and nuclear physics. In the mid 1950s nuclear energy was thought to herald the new age, and General Dynamics’ president, John Jay Hopkins, believed that his company should be positioned in the public’s mind as a purveyor of peace. General Dynamics would benefit all mankind through its scientific research, and communicating this message was one of the president’s primary goals.

  Hopkins understood that a skilled graphic designer could successfully forge and promote General Dynamics’ image, and so hired Erik Nitsche (1908–1998), a Swiss, who had freelanced in the United States since the 1930s, away from the ad agency that originally had the General Dynamics account. Working from his own studio in New York, Nitsche had been responsible for some early ads and promotional materials that wed abstract imagery to functional typography, which gave General Dynamics its progressive image. Hopkins gave Nitsche complete freedom to build a total graphic identity from scratch. He served as art director between 1955 and 1960 and his identity program—which included posters, advertisements, and annual reports—was a unique mix of modernism and individualism.

  In the spring of 1955 Nitsche was given the first major assignment to design an exhibit that would have far-reaching implications for the company. General Dynamics had agreed to attend the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, Switzerland, in August of that year. Hopkins wanted a display that would stand apart from the other mammoth technology firms, including General Electric, Union Carbide, and Westinghouse. As builders of the Nautilus, the first atomic submarine, and with contracts to produce the first atomic-powered airplane, General Dynamics had the perfect showpieces. Yet they had nothing to show. The Nautilus design was so top secret that Nitsche was only given a vague description of its ultimate design. In the absence of an actual product he had to devise a symbol. Pursuing the idea of “Atoms for Peace” he used graphics to convey the message.

  The Nautilus design was so top secret that Nitsche was only given a vague description of its ultimate design.

  Framing the exhibit, the initial corporate clarion was a series of six multilingual posters with either abstract or symbolic images—in English, Russian, German, French, Hindi, and Japanese—designed specifically for those nations where atomic energy was being used for peaceful purposes. Strongly influenced by Paul Klee since childhood, Nitsche turned to geometric forms and intersecting color planes to symbolize this new energy source. But the principle icon for the most memorable poster was not like Klee at all, but rather a painting of a huge nautilus shell from which shot out a sleek submarine. The Nautilus, named after Jules Verne’s fictional vessel in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was not presented as a missile of war, but as a missive of peace. On some of the posters a text from Isaiah read: “They shall beat swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Isaiah’s testament was, of course, dramatic, yet ironic in light of the ship’s prime mission as a defensive weapon (preserving the peace).

  The poster campaign was well received and Nitsche was commissioned to produce what amounted
to three different series of twenty-four images. Hopkins wanted to acquaint the public “with the spirit of discovery that motivates the corporation’s diverse developments.” And so Nitsche’s work soon influenced General Dynamics’ total corporate style, including the otherwise staid annual reports, which he turned into kinetic displays of visual imagery. Nitsche’s crowning achievement, however, was the design of a mammoth book of corporate history entitled Dynamic America. With its tip-ins and foldouts, Dynamic America was an exhibition between boards, a fast-paced visual document of the nation’s military and industrial history that intersected with the development of General Dynamics Company from its roots in 1880 as Electro Dynamic.

  Nitsche’s book design was a lesson in economy. He favored dynamic silhouettes and vignettes of historical artifacts, giving the book a didactic quality. Nitsche knew how to make historical engravings and paintings appear timeless. His typography was clean and crisp, a marriage of classical and modern approaches. A progenitor of information design, he virtually invented the modern time line, giving the reader textual and visual information in parallel strips. He further focused on key pieces of visual information through frequent scale changes and juxtapositions. The amazing thing about this book is that if the type were removed, it would reveal a perfect visual narrative.

  Comic Strip Ads

  In 1933 Charles Chaplin wrote about the comic strip in society: “In a troubled world such as is the one in which we live, comic strips have become a powerful force to divert the public: to such a degree, in fact, that newspaper circulation depends largely upon their popularity. A comic artist is, therefore, lost if he does not reflect the public mind and appeal to the masses.” At the same time cultural critic Gilbert Seldes wrote: “The comic strip is the most despised art form, yet with the exception of the movies it is also the most popular.”