Time Line, 1829-1993

As a genre of graphic design, the time line combines pictorial and textual composition. Typically written in a terse, telegraphic style, the time line substitutes the rhythm of chronological order for the flow of traditional narrative. The time line visualizes history in a way that conventional prose does not, distributing words across a grid that regulates their placement.

Often what the time line visualizes is merely the temporal proximity of one event to another. Time becomes an organizing principle that overwhelms other criteria of interpretation. The time line adopts chronology as an explanatory model, conceiving of history as a ribbon whose sequence reveals the significance of events.

In the interest of brevity and clarity, the time line masks the interpretive character of historical narrative—hence its emphasis on “facts” and “information. ” The objective tone commonly used in time lines and the exclusion of critical commentary obscure the presence of an active author. Time lines are rarely “written” but are more often compiled, researched, and designed. By masking the subjectivity that is part of all writing and research, time lines tend to foster the notion that history is a matter of fact but not a question of values. Time lines de-politicize the writing of history. The linear model of the time line promotes a view of history as an organic “progression” toward contemporary values. The following series of essays adopts the discontinuous, fragmentary character of the time line. But instead of trying to present a schematic diagram of discrete events, we have tried to show how the history of graphic design is diffused across various institutions and discourses. Rather than construct a spatial field for charting the “most important” events and names, we have used the time line format to create a flexible framework for a set of independent texts.

Whereas many time lines divide a historical span abstractly according to decades, we have used the four-year cycle of the American Presidential term as our unit of measure. While a few of the case studies directly consider the Presidency, we have used the “Presidential grid” primarily for its link to the texture of public life. Some of our essays are broken into two parts, reflecting an opposition within the text. The change in typography marks a shift in content. Each break indicates a polarity such as theory/practice, production/consumption, dominant/marginal, or artistic/anonymous. These divisions have allowed us to indicate contradictions, to bring together isolated discourses, or to present a topic from two different vantages. We have thus tried to use the time line as a critical matrix for representing history.

For an expanded discussion ofthe time line as a way of representing history, see J. Abbott Miller, “Tracking the Elusive Time Line,” AIC,AJournal of Graphic Design 6, 2 (1988): 7.

Creating National Culture(s): Old Hickory and Sequoyah

1829 Andrew Jackson’s fierce campaign in 1828 against John Quincy Adams initiated the modern American system ofpolitical campaigning.’ Because of revisions in state voting laws, the election of 1828 was the first in which nearly all white male adults could vote. Candidates now had to appeal to a mass electorate. The decorum of earlier Presidential contests gave way to an aggressive use of slogans and electioneering, supported by an array of posters, pamphlets, bandanas, buttons, mugs, plates, and snuff-boxes. Jackson’s campaign workers distributed sprigs, sticks, and brooms made of hickory, playing upon the “Old Hickory” nickname that Jackson earned when he gave his horse to an injured soldier and journeyed back to camp with a walking stick made from a hickory branch. Much of Jackson’s promotional material capitalized on his image as a hero in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. His war record included the massacre of many Indian populations, earning him a reputation as a ruthless military leader. While white Americans were forging a “national” culture aided by the military and political campaigns Of Andrew Jackson, so too were the Cherokee Indians constructing a formal “nation” with written laws and elected leaders. Although many Cherokees could read English, the native

Cherokee language had no written form until, between 1809 and 1828, an Indian named Sequoyah designed an alphabet that would transform his native culture.

1 Roger A. Fischer, Tippecanoe and Trinkets Too:

The Material Culture ofAmerican Presidential

Campaigns. 1828-1984 (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1988). The material culture of Presidential campaigns dates back to the founding of the Presidency, when objects generally served as commemorative tokens. The campaign of 1828 marks a turning point in the use of objects and images for persuasive or propagandistic purposes.

Although Sequoyah could neither speak nor read English, during his contact with white Americans he became curious about their books, or “talking leaves.” Some Cherokees believed that writing was a gift mystically bestowed on Europeans. But Sequoyah believed that writing was a human invention, and he set out to design a similar system for the Cherokee language. He began by trying to match every word with a separate character, but when this proved cumbersome he began to break the language into syllables, which could be recombined into words. Initially he represented each ofhis eighty-five syllables with a picture but later turned to arbitrary signs. Many ofthese, borrowed from the Roman alphabet, were given new meanings; the rest were designed with flourishes, geometric shapes, and fragments of other letters.

The Cherokee Phoenix, established in 1828 as the first Indian newspaper, was printed in English and Cherokee, with castings Of Sequoyah’s alphabet. The new alphabet became an important tool for the dynamic Cherokee society of the nineteenth century, helping to spread political news and link communities in eastern and western America. At the same time, it participated in the destruction of old ways of life—missionaries used it to teach Christianity and European customs, while members of the Cherokee middle and ruling classes used it to promote the “civilization” of ‘”savages. “

2 On Sequoyah, see Althea Bass. “Talking Stones:

John Howard Payne’s Story Of Sequoyah,” The Colophon 0932); reprint of an 1835 account of the life of Sequoyah. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot, Theda Perdue, ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983) includes an essay on Sequoyah by Elias Boudinot, “Invention of a New Alphabet,” originally published in 1832. On American Indian presses, see Daniel F. Littlefield,

Jr., and James W. Parins, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 1826-1924 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984).

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Newspapers Become a Mass Medium Newspaper Advertising

1833 ‘P Although printed news sheets and handwritten “news 1837Unlike the established six-penny papers that were letters” were circulated in colonial America, the supported largely by subscription, the popular penny newspaper did not become a mass medium until the press depended on advertising revenues. The subser1830s with the emergence ofthe penny press. The firstvience of advertisers to the newspapers they patronized penny paper was founded by Ben Day in Manhattan,was reflected in the restriction of ads to small “agate” in 1833. The penny papers, hawked on the street,type in a want-ad style, sometimes including a larger challenged the established “six-penny” papers, sold by initial capital or a generic illustration. Such restrictions subscription to an elite business class. Whereas most did not, however, carry over into editorial matters: six-penny papers were backed by political parties, the for example, the penny press was the primary vehicle new cheap press was run by independent entre- for the spurious claims of patent medicine advertising. preneurs; politicians were now represented through an The shift in the newspaper-advertiser hierarchy is aggressive medium that chose its own candidates. registered in the increase in size, imagery, and The “news” as we know it today emerged in this period: typographic variety of ads during the nineteenth an ongoing, immediate narrative With no beginning or century. When the New York Herald allowed advertisers end, serving as both disposable entertainment and to exceed the traditional one-column width in 1836, the historical record. severe reaction among competing advertisers forced the

As the historian Michael Schudson has pointed out, paper to ban display typography and to enforce size the names of most six-penny papers included terms restrictions. Techniques for circumventing the “agate such as “advertiser,” “mercantile,” or “commercial,” only” rule signaled the gradual erosion ofthese which referred to the interests of business, while the restrictions in the face ofthe powerful and profitable titles of the new popular papers employed words such advertising industry.

as “critic,” “herald,” “tribune,” “star,” or “sun,” which suggest prophetic sources of enlightenment.

Although the penny press was progressive as an economic and literary institution, it was conservative visually: text ran in densely set columns of tiny type with minimal headlines. The need for a cheap, fast production routine discouraged editors from designing new typographic formats; newspaper production became a rigid trade, changing only incrementally before the rise of illustrated newspapers in the 1880s.

1. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social 1 For the relationship between advertising in the History ofAmerican Newspapers (New York: Basic “establishment” press and the penny press, see Books, 1967, 1973). Schudson, Discovering the News.
2. Allen Hutt. The Changing Newspaper: Typographic

2 On the early development ofadvertising

Trends in Britain and America, 1622-1972 (London:

Gordon Fraser. 1973). typography, see Frank Presbrey, •lite History and Development ofAdvertising (New York: Doubleday,

Doran, 1929).

The Ad Man

1841In 1841 John L. Hooper was working as an advertising solicitor for the New York Tribune. Advertisers who submitted copy to Hooper often requested that he place their copy in other newspapers as well. Realizing that he could work in this capacity for a number ofnewspapers and advertisers simultaneously, Hooper left the Tribune to form his own advertising office. Around the same time, Volney Palmer announced that his Philadelphia real estate office would procure and administer space in newspapers on behalf of advertisers who wished to avoid the “trouble of perplexing and fruitless inquiries, the expense and labour of letter writing, the risk of making enclosures ofmoney &c, Palmer and Hooper did not write or design ads but negotiated the complicated terrain of the newspaper trade.

Newspapers paid a commission to the new agents, who acted as space salesmen, simplifying a process that would otherwise have involved hundreds of individual requests. By the end of the 1840s Palmer had offices in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York and claimed to represent thirteen-hundred newspapers.

1 On the development of the ad agency, see

Daniel Pope, “Ille Making ofModern Advertising

(New York: Basic Books, 1983), 119.129; and Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising.

Abolition: Idealism and Realism

1845 A movement to abolish slavery in the U.S. had gathered force by 1840. Organized by white reformers in the North, the movement spoke through newspapers, pamphlets, posters, books, and almanacs, with the aim of instilling moral outrage among whites. The publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, for example, included a magazine for children called The Slave’s Friend, and an illustrated Almanac documenting Southern atrocities. The practice of branding slaves was a violent typographic act signalling the conversion of human beings into private property. ^l The white-led abolition movement identified slavery as a selfcontained evil that could be cleanly cut away from America’s moral conscience; black activists, on the other hand, saw slavery as only one aspect of a culture structured by racism. AS the historians Jane and William Pease have noted, white abolitionists had little concern for the civil rights of free blacks in the North or the political and economic future of freed slaves.² White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison transformed the movement by including blacks among the writers, speakers, and audience of his crusade; his journal The Liberator, founded in 1831, was largely supported by blacks. Garrison remained dedicated, however, to purging sin from white society: “freedom” served as an abstract ideal. The New York Weekly Advocate, a black newspaper, wrote in 1837, ‘”Free indeed!…when almost every honorable incentive to the pursuit Of happiness, so largely and freely held by his fairer brother, is withheld from [the black man]”‘ (Pease, 9).

1. Dwight Lowell Dumond’s book Antislavery:

The Crusadefor Freedom in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961) includes reproductions of anti-slavery propaganda.

2. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who

Would Be Free: Blacks’ Searchfor Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974). The illustration above was taken from Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer’s book A Pictorial History ofthe Negro in America (New York: Crown, 1969).

Chromolithography Photography and the Graphic Arts

1849 In the process oflithography, an image is drawn with a 1853Processes for recording an image on a light-sensitive grease crayon onto a stone or a metal plate. When the surface—what we now call photography—were surface of the stone is bathed in water, ink adheres onlyannounced independently by several inventors in the to the crayoned areas. A chromolithograph combines1830s and 1840s. Whereas Louis-Jacques-Mande several different stones, each carrying a separate color.Daguerre’s daguerreotype was a unique image The first American chromolithograph was printed in imprinted on a heavy plate, the English scientist Boston in 1840. Printing companies marketed William Henry Fox Talbot employed a paper negative, reproductions of oil paintings, bringing art to the which had the potential to generate an infinite series of middle classes. The technique was also used for positive prints. Talbot’s book The Pencil of Nature (1844advertisements, book illustrations, calendars, and other 1846) consisted of individually printed and mounted commercial ephemera. The industry peaked and then photographs: portraits, architectural views, began to decline in the 1890s with the improvement reproductions of engravings, and cameraless of photomechanical reproduction. silhouetted prints made by laying botanical specimens directly on light-sensitive paper.

For an extensive history of chromolithographs, One ofthe first photographic books published in the see Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: U.S. was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transformations; or, Chromolithography, 1840-1900, exh. cat. (Fort

Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, The Romance of Monte Beni. Hawthorne’s novel was

1979). illustrated with actual photographic prints, pasted in by hand. When it was reissued in 1890 it was illustrated by photogravure, a process in which a layer of fine powder is exposed to a photographic negative, and the resulting image is etched into a metal printing plate.

Photogravure offers richer, finer-grained images than process halftone engraving, invented by Frederick Ives in 1881 and commercially viable by 1893, which remains the standard method for reproducing photographs today. In this technique a screen translates tonal gradations into a fine pattern of black dots, perceived by the eye as continuous shades of gray. The halftone can be printed on the same paper, with the same ink, and at the same time as metal type. The halftone revolutionized the graphic arts, allowing photographic images to be cheaply integrated into mass-media publishing.

1. Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1974).
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Transformations; or The Romance of Monte Beni (Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1860).

Railroads: Managing Nature and Business

During the nineteenth century the railroad transformed America’s landscape, economy, and imagination: it was a vehicle for colonizing the unsettled wilderness and distributing industry, natural resources, and infor mation across the continent; its rails were often the first permanent human path to be cut into a stretch of land. ^I

Although painters such as Thomas Cole and John Kensett often included railroads in their paintings during the 1850s, they usually showed the train as a tiny machine engulfed by its natural setting—the critic Leo Marx contends that because landscape painting in America had an almost religious status, to monumentalize the details of the train would have debased the seriousness of the art.2 Popular chromolithographs, in contrast, often celebrated the smoke, speed, and mechanical details of the locomotive.

Behind the heroic image ofthe train as civilizer of the American wilderness lay a revolution ofa different sort: a revolution in management. Unprecedented quantities of capital were needed to finance a vast range of enterprises, from the laying of tracks and the construction of engines to the control of traffic and the scheduling of trains. A new form ofbusiness emerged to direct these projects: the modern corporation.

1. On American railroad culture. see Susan Danly,

“Introduction, ” Susan Danly and Leo Marx, eds„

The Railroad in American Art: Representations Of Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1988), 1-50.

2. On the meaning of small trains in big paintings, see Leo Marx, “The Railroad-in-the. Landscape: An Iconological Reading of a Theme in American Art,” The Railroad in American Art, 183-206.

In a large corporation, ownership is separate from management—there can be thousands of Owners, most Of whom have minimal influence on policy. The New York stock Exchange, where shares in businesses are speculatively bought and sold, was born in the 1840s to finance the railroads. A large corporation consists of independent units controlled by a hierarchy of salaried managers—those at the top of a given unit report to officials at the next level, who may have little knowledge Of the operations below. This division of labor was necessitated by the technical and geographic diversity of the railroads. No single individual could control—or even understand—every level of the system.

David McCallum, an executive of the Erie Railroad, designed one of the first “corporate management charts” in 1856, made available for one dollar per copy by the American RailroadJournal. Today, similar management charts remain an important form ofinternal—rather than public—imagery, visualizing the position Of each employee within a network ofvarying levels Of accountability.

3. On the history ofthe railroad corporation, see Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Belknap Press Of Harvard University press, 1977). Chandler details the growing independence and professionalization of the “managerial class” in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury America.

Picturing the Civil War: Art and Documentation

¹⁸ 6 ¹ The Civil War destroyed many American magazines by starving the Northern-focused press of its Southern readership and by cutting off supplies from the South.

(Confederate papers were sometimes printed on o wallpaper.) ¹ Yet two magazines flourished as never before: Harper’s Weekly (founded 1857) and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (founded 1855), which represented the war from the vantage of the Union, with news reports and wood engravings. ² Although photographs were extensively documenting war for the first time, they could not yet be mechanically translated into a type-compatible medium but had to be interpreted by hand into the linear codes of wood-engraving. Photography had other limitations as well: because the exposure time for film was very slow, photographs could not depict battle scenes but only landscapes, architecture, stiffly posed figures, and corpses.3

Winslow Homer had become popular before the

Civil War as an illustrator of fashionable urban life for Harper’s Weekly and other magzines. In the early 1860s he gained a reputation as a painter as well, which raised the prestige of his illustrations.⁴ Most of Homer’s war engravings represent “genre” scenes (such as Cavalry Charge, above, published in Harper’s, 1862) rather than concrete historical events. Other well-known “signature” illustrators, including Thomas Nast and A.R. Waud, produced similar centerfold designs. Printed at the middle of the journal, such pictures could be removed easily in one piece and framed like paintings. Homer’s Cavalry Charge, detachable both from the physical binding of the magazine and from the verbal context of news reports, acts as a self-contained aesthetic object that transcends its immediate context.

1. An edition of The Daily Citizen, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1863, printed on wallpaper is preserved at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
2. Frank Luther Mott, A History ofAmerican Magazines (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).

While the work of well-known artists such as Homer and Nast maintained aspects of painting in the context of journalism, many engravings emulated the documentary functions associated with photography, mapmaking, and newspaper prose. An engraving called Birds-Eye View ofthe City of Charleston, South Carolina, Showing the Approaches of Our Gun-

Boats and Our Army, ran in the same issue of Harper’s as Homer’s Cavalry Charge. Whereas Homer dramatized the violence of war, the maker of Birds-Eye View dispassionately reported the positions of land, water, boats, and army camps. The magazine credits neither the artist nor the source of the image—it could have been reconstructed in the engraver’s studio from a map, or from a photograph of a landscape, or from a written report. Thus while Birds-Eye View appears more concretely “factual” than Homer’s illustration, it may be many steps removed from observation.

The rise of fast film and halftone reproduction at the end of the century forced hand-drawn pictorial journalism to surrender its dual function as art and information. Photojournalism made the ambiguity between hard fact and interpretation unacceptable, and magazine illustration was quarantined, for the most part, to the realm of fiction and editorial commentary.5

3. Paul Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter (London: Gordon Fraser, 1986). Estelle Jussim discusses the technical relationship between woodengraving and photography in Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts.
4. Phillip C. Bream, Winslow Homer’s Magazine Engravings (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). John Wilmerding’s Winslow Homer (New York: Praeger, 1972). The author relates Homer’s illustrations to his painting career, arguing that he was influenced by the monumentality and flatness of photography. Texts on Homer tend to devalue qualities typical of illustration, such as anecdotal detail, in favor of modernist values.
5. Neil Harris discusses the importance of halftone reproduction in “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Half-Tone Effect,” John Higham and

Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

The Election and Assassination of Abraham Lincoln Visual Muckraking

1865 > At the beginning of his first campaign for the 1869 c Thomas Nast contributed to the tradition of political Presidency, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s face wascartooning in America with his visual campaign virtually unknown to the American public, creating anagainst the infamous Tweed Ring in New York City. ^l enormous demand for cheap likenesses. Yet as theThe series was published in Harper’s Weekly from historian Harold Holzer has documented, the face of1867 to 1876, concurrent with a journalistic exposé Lincoln was not considered pretty: Abraham Lincolnin The New York Times. The cartoons vividly was seen as almost comically unattractive, even by his publicized the situation, and J. Henry Harper later supporters. Walt Whitman wrote that Lincoln’s face recalled that Tweed said, “Let’s stop those damned was “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.” ¹ pictures. I don’t care much what the papers write

Lincoln was legendary for his humble frontier about me—my constituents can’t read; but damn it, origins but also for his cultured love of Shakespeare. they can see pictures! “2 Tweed was so distressed An anti-Lincoln cartoon published during his second by the cartoons that he offered Nast $200,000 to campaign, in 1864, evokes the grave-digging scene in “study art abroad.” Nast declined.

Hamlet, subtitled with the line “I knew him, Horatio:

A fellow of infinite jest….Where be your gibes now? 1 Keller, Sources The on Art Thomas and Nast include Thomas MortonNast (New

Politics of 

The cartoon makes fun of Lincoln’s sense of humor, York: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Albert which his critics believed he exercised inappropriately. Bigelow Paine, Thomas Nast: His Period and On Good Friday, 14 April 1865, Abraham Lincoln was mortally His Pictures (New York: Macmilan, 1904). wounded by a well-known Shakespearean actor, John Wilkes

Booth, a pro-South Northerner, while attending Ford’s Theatre in 2 Quoted in J. Henry Harper, The in Franklin House ofSquare Harper: A Century of Publishing 

Washington. The caption for the image above right depicting the (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), 292. assassination adapts lines from Shakespeare, positioning Lincoln as the good king murdered by the evil Macbeth.

The Civil War had ended the week before with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Lincoln had professed a conciliatory stance toward the restoration of the South, but his assassination resulted in renewed feelings of hatred toward the fallen Confederacy, which was wrongly blamed for plotting the assassination. ²

Lincoln’s death turned him into a political martyr, converting many of his former critics into regretful admirers. This murder, the first assassination of an American President, shocked the nation, and the face that had once been almost too ugly to elect entered the idealizing realm of myth, taking a place second only to that of George Washington.

1. See Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: Scribner’s, 1984), 89.
2. On public reaction to Lincoln’s death, see Thomas

Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: public

Opinion and the Assassination ofAbraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

The Public Landscape

1873 c Before the 1870s, outdoor posters and painted signs were a popular, although unorganized, advertising medium: spaces were not formally leased but aggressively taken by bill-posters. By the end of the Civil War there were 275 bill-posting companies with varying rates and business practices. The proliferation of signs accelerated with the perfection of web-fed printing presses in 1870 and the increasing flexibility of lithography. The anarchy of “guerrilla” bill-posting was a visible intrusion of advertising onto the American landscape: temporary fences, lampposts, and facades were buried in layers of typography. A formalization of the profession began in the early 1870s, when companies began to lease temporary fences on a standardized weekly or monthly basis, followed by the formation of professional associations of bill-posters, and billboard regulation. ^I Today, legally and illegally posted messages constitute a collage of commercial images in urban areas. The strength of the billboard industry is expressed in the current slogan of the Outdoor Advertising Association: “We’re not a medium, we’re a large. “

1 John W. Houck, ed., Outdoor Advertising: History and Regulation (South Bend, IN: University of

Notre Dame Press, 1969); and Presbrey, The

History and Development ofAdvertising, 490-511.

Lettering: Typographic and Lithographic

1877 The growth of advertising during the nineteenth century encouraged the proliferation of new “display” o letter styles for use in posters and other ephemera.

A technique was invented in 1828 in America for mass producing typefaces from wood, a material cheaper and more durable than lead. The process involved tracing over the lines of a drawing with a device linked to a mechanical wood-engraver. Whereas the molds for lead type (“punches”) were laboriously crafted in metal, the pattern for wood type was simply a drawing.1

The wood-type industry reached its creative and economic peak in the 1860s and 1870s, when it was in dynamic competition with the more graphically malleable technique of lithography. Whereas the material constraints of wood or metal typography encourage grouping separate elements into parallel rows, lithography allows letters to be freely arranged in overlapping, interlacing, curving, and perspectival patterns. And, unlike typography, lithographic lettering could be easily integrated with illustrations drawn on the same surface.

Compare the perspectival illusion of a wood-type design with the chromolithograph above. Only by fighting the natural logic ofthe medium could the letter-press printer compete with the lithographer—by cutting the blocks of type to make them touch, for example, or by setting them into plaster beds to make them follow a curve. The typographic poster remained more economical than the lithograph, however, because the printer could reuse its elements again and again.

1 Rob Roy Kelly, American Wood Type, 1828-1900 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969). For a more condensed essay by the same author, see

“American Wood Type,” Design Quarterly 56 (1963).

Selling with Pictures and People

¹⁸⁸¹ During the 1880s, new production and distribution methods transformed American food culture. Advanced technology made some goods, including flour and beef, more widely available, while it p flooded the market with new products, such as cigarettes and oatmeal, for which there was minimal demand. As historian Alfred Chandler has noted, the automatic factory for milling oatmeal forced the leading processors to “invent the modern breakfast-cereal industry” (253).

When Henry P. Crowell opened the first automatic oatmeal factory in 1882, the product had a tiny U.S. market. Breaking the custom of distributing grain in bulk, Crowell decided to ship his product in convenient, graphically appealing containers; he wrapped the oatmeal in its own advertising, enticing the consumer with contests and boxtop premiums and enforcing brandname recognition in store and pantry. Other companies, such as Procter & Gamble, Borden, Campbell Soup, and H.J. Heinz, employed packaging and brand names to create new habits of consumption in the 1880s and 1890s (Chandler, 295).

In 1888 Crowell and his competitors merged into a giant oatmeal conglomerate, the American Cereal Company. One of the businesses the company absorbed had used a picture ofa Quaker as its trademark. ^l The conglomerate adopted the symbol and in 1901 changed its name to The Quaker Oats Company.

The symbol of the Quaker has remained constant throughout the product’s history, but its graphic form has changed. The logo used in 1946, designed by Jim Nash, replaced the older fullfigure Quaker. Nash’s Quaker was an established

“household face” when graphic designer Saul Bass was asked to design a corporate mark for The Quaker Oats Company in 1970. Bass, who has designed symbols for Bell Telephone, United Airlines, Minolta, and other companies, created a schematic, shorthand, corporate Quaker in a TV-shaped frame. The modernized mark appears on contemporary packages with the company’s address, while the cereal’s main image remains a realistic, full-color portrait.

Familiar personalities such as Dr. Brown, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Old Grand-Dad came to replace the shopkeeper, who was traditionally responsible for measuring bulk foods for customers and acting as an advocate for products. Particularly after the rise of mass-distribution food chains such as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in the early twentieth century, a nationwide vocabulary of brand names replaced the small local shopkeeper as the interface between consumer and product.2

1. Hal Morgan’s book Symbols ofAmerica (New York: Viking, 1986) provides brief illustrated histories of many trademarks, including that of Quaker Oats, 130.
2. On supermarkets, see Chester H. Liebs,

Main Street to Miracle Mile: American Roadside

Architecture (Boston: Little Brown, 1985), 117-135•

KNAPP

SOME RELIABLE RECIPES. SOME PRACNCÅL DISHES.

Women as Consumers,

Modern Advertising Women as Producers

1885 The first advertising agencies of the 1840s acted as 1889By the time The Ladies’ Journal (which later became

< liaisons between advertiser and newspaper. Through theThe Ladies’ Home Journal) was founded in 1883, efforts of such agencies, the placing of ads wasinnumerable goods previously manufactured at home simplified and rates became more uniform. In 1869 thewere being mass produced, making shopping a central advertising agent George Rowell published his Americanpart of American life. ^I Under the direction of editor Newspaper Directory, which made circulation andEdward W. Bok and publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis, publication data—the guarded expertise of competing The Journal became a profitable medium for advertising advertising agents—commercially available. The consumer goods. By 1900 The Journal’s back cover was function of the agency as a “space-broker” was the most expensive advertising position in American challenged by advertising’s own professionalization and magazines. ² by the growing force of national media, which, sure of The Journal built up the trust of its readers by their power, could set and rnaintain rates without the refusing to mention brand names in articles. Yet while help of intermediaries. Brand-name manufacturers forbidding direct links between editorial and developing national marketing strategies also needed advertising, The Journal recognized the fruitfulness of advertising services that could maintain a consistent juxtaposing relevant ideas; ads for seeds appeared image across national and local media. The 1880s saw beside the gardening column, and ads for buttons and the development of the “full-service” ad agency, which, lace showed up in the fashion section. The ad (opposite in addition to securing space and facilitating page) for Extract of Beef strongly resembles the transactions, offered writing, design, illustration, and illustrated logo for the monthly “Practical Housekeeper” production to its clientele. column (above right), which appeared on the same page. While both women wear white aprons, dark

On the full-service ad agency and Rowell’s dresses, and pinned-up hair, the Extract of Beef cook is role in its development, see Pope, The Making

Of Modern Advertising. 117-140. far more elegant than the Practical Housekeeper. Her apron is pleated rather than plain, her dress is tailored, her hair is ornamented, and her utensils are not homely pots and pans but a decorated tureen and some richly labeled tins of Extract of Beef. The advertiser used the Practical Housekeeper, an image familiar to Journal readers, as a modest counterpoint to a glamorous life enhanced by modern packaged goods.

1. On women and work. see Christopher Clark,

“Household Economy. Market Exchange and the

Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800-1860,” Journal ofSocial History 13, 2 (Winter 1979): 169-189.

2. Salme Harju Stienberg, Reformer in the

Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and The Indies’ Home Journal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University press, 1979).

LIEBIGUSE COMPANY S OF EXTRACTBEEF.

The audience of The Ladies’ Home Journal was presumed to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and middle class; its female readers were assumed to be mothers working in the home. Whereas this audience provided a mass of consumers for advertising, another group of women was engaged in graphic arts production. Many working-class women held wage-earning jobs, especially during early adulthood, and in the middle classes, a woman who was unmarried, widowed, or abandoned had to choose between work and dependency on family members.3

In response to the growing number of women in need of employment, some reformers promoted the decorative arts as appropriate work for females. While traditional academies taught painting, sculpture, and crafts as genteel avocations for middle-class “ladies,” the Woman’s Art School in New York, founded by Peter Cooper in 1852, aimed to give working-class women respectable professions in illustration, textile design, and teaching. One of the main skills taught at Peter Cooper’s school was wood-engraving, a painstaking and usually anonymous task, in which the engraver translates a design produced by an illustrator into the codes of woodblock printing.4

3. See Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning

Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Women by no means dominated the graphic arts work force, however. According to an 1883 account, women in the design industries were paid much less than men, and they would usually do piecework at home rather than earn regular salaries (Tentler, 79). A study conducted forty years later found that among 276 designers surveyed in advertising agencies, only five were women; out of 324 designers employed by independent studios, only eighteen were women.5

In 1986 roughly half the students enrolled in collegelevel art programs were women. ⁶ More women are represented today in trade annuals than there were thirty years ago, indicating an increased interest in, and perhaps opportunity for, professional self-promotion. Yet there has been little feminist activism within the field. ⁷

4. On women’s education and the industrial arts, see Thomas B. Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, vol. 2. (New York:

Science Press, 1929), 75-80. Peter Cooper’s

Woman’s Art School later became part of The

Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Although The Cooper Union had a coeducational night school, the day art school did not admit men until 1933. See The Cooper Pioneer, 8 March 1933.

5. Charles R. Richards, Art in Industry: Being the Report ofan Industrial Art Survey Conducted under the Auspices ofthe National Society for Vocational Education and the Department of Education ofthe State of New York (New York: Macmillan, 1929).
6. Peterson’s Guide to Four-year Colleges (Princeton, NJ: Peterson Guides, 1988).
7. In 1960 the Annual of the Art Directors Club of New York listed approximately 380 “art directors and designers,” including about a dozen women, or 3.2 percent (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960). In 1982 the Annual listed about 1,120 “art directors,” including about 240 women, or 26 percent.

White City, Whited Sepulcher

1893 The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, was housed in bright white neoclassical palaces dedicated to art, industry, and agriculture. This architectural setting, dubbed the “White City,” was the fair’s most spectacular exhibit. It helped make Beauxo Arts neoclassicism the favored style for major civic projects at the turn of the century.1

In addition to nourishing an architectural style, the World’s Columbian Exposition helped change the role of museums in American culture. Whereas early collections of artifacts were assembled primarily for scholarly study, scientific museums at the end of the nineteenth century turned to the education of the general public. As one historian proclaimed in 1888, “An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated with a well-selected specimen.”2

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., prepared displays on American Indians that elucidated artifacts with charts, diagrams, photographs, and explanatory texts. Historian Robert Rydell has argued that the Columbian Exposition presented Indian life as a “primitive” culture doomed to extinction. ³ A newspaper illustration from the period depicts wax Indians encased in glass; an exhibit on “physical anthropology” described the differences between racial types with charts and diagrams.

1. On the style and influence of the “White City” see Mario Manieri, “Toward an ‘Imperial City’:

Daniel H. Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement,” The American City: From the Civil

War to the New Deal, Giogi Ciucci et al., eds.,

Barbara Luigi La Penta, trans. (London: Granada, 1980), 1-142; and Richard Guy Wilson, “Architecture, Landscape and City Planning,” The American Renaissance, 1876-1917, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 74-109.

A book by anthropologist F. W. Putnam, a lush photographic folio of ethnic “types” in costume, combines the conventions of artistic portraiture with the scientific realism of photography. ⁴ The publications of the Columbian Exposition were distinguished from those of previous fairs by the preponderance of halftone photographs. The fair marked the death knell of chromolithography and birth of the photographic book. American Indians were not given the opportunity to produce their own exhibits for the exposition; they were treated only as objects of study. Petitions by black Americans to participate were denied, leading Frederick Douglass to write that “to the colored people of America…the World’s Fair…[is] a whited sepulcher. “5 Nonwhite Americans, whether black, Indian, or Asian, appeared in the fair as anthropological specimens or menial servants but not as creative participants—a black woman dressed as Aunt Jemima brought graphic design to life, serving pancakes in the food pavilion.6

2. Kenneth Hudson, A Social History ofMuseums: What the Visitors Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975).
3. On the racial message of the 1893 exposition, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
4. F. W. Putnam, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Types ofthe Midway Plaisance (St. Louis, Mo.: N.D. Thompson, 1894).
5. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979): 106.
6. The presence of Aunt Jemima at the exposition is noted in Morgan, Symbols ofAmerica, 55.

The Modern Poster:

Artistic and

Anonymous

1893 A new kind of advertising emerged in America in the

1890s: the “artistic poster.” The genre had originated in France, where posters for books and cultural events incorporated styles such as Art Nouveau and PostImpressionism. The new French posters functioned both as advertising and as art. During the 1880s books, magazines, and exhibitions established the poster as a legitimate child of painting and inspired the interest of art collectors in Europe and New York.

The first American business to extensively use the artistic poster was Harper’s Monthly, which assigned its in-house illustrator Edward Penfield to design placards in 1893. Other magazines quickly followed Harper’s, commissioning posters from Will Bradley, Maxfield Parrish, Ethel Read, and others. By the mid-1890s there was a collecting “craze” in American cities. Booksellers sometimes chose to sell the posters rather than display them—the prints proved more valuable as art than advertising.

As historian Victor Margolin has noted, the artistic poster helped establish graphic design as a respected profession by bringing American illustrators into contact with the European avant-garde, encouraging them to develop distinctive artistic styles and to compete in the international art community. ^l Will Bradley, one of the most influential American poster artists, was also one of the first designers to be called an “art director.” His work included typefaces, books, ads, and magazines as well as posters and illustrations. ² In 1894-1896 Bradley worked for The Chap-Book, a progressive magazine that published European avant-garde literature and graphics by Toulouse-Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley, and others.

1. Victor Margolin, American Poster Renaissance (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1975).
2. Roberta Wong, Bradley: American Artist and Craftsman, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972).
3. Arsene Alexandre et al., The Modern Poster (New

York: Scribner’s, 1895); and Stuart Wrede, The Modern Poster (Museum of Modern Art, 1988).

The first American book devoted to the poster genre, entitled The Modern Poster, was published in 1895. In 1988, nearly a hundred years later, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, published an exhibition catalogue with the same title; despite the historical span dividing the two books, they are remarkably similar. Both describe a history of “the modern poster” that begins with the French lithographer Jules Cheret and progresses toward the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and other avant-garde painters whom he influenced. Although some art historians consider Cheret stylistically frivolous, they refer to him as the “father” of the modern poster because his work, featured in books, magazines, and art galleries, transcended its mundane advertising function to serve as a new kind of fine art.³ Such genealogies of the poster value graphic design for its relevance to museums and collectors rather than for its role in commercial life. These histories omit “nonartistic” or anonymous posters, which constituted a powerful advertising medium by the 1890s and would continue to flourish after the poster craze ended at the turn of the century. ⁴ Most advertising graphics were produced by anonymous artists less interested in developing personal styles or in challenging artistic conventions than in depicting products in a clear and dramatic way. The visual impact of the flour poster above comes from delivering a clever concept in a direct, descriptive style.

4. Victor Margolin, The Promise and the Product:

200 Years ofAmerican Advertising Posters (New York: Macmillan, 1979).

Public Pickles, Private Enterprise

1901 In 1869 Henry John Heinz began to sell processed horseradish in rural western Pennsylvania, and by 1890 he was manufacturing a nationally distributed line of preserved, packaged, ready-to-serve foods. ¹ Heinz’s advertising included ten-foot-high, cast-concrete renditions of the number 57, the symbol of the company’s range of products, installed on a dozen hillsides across the country. Heinz built one of the first large electric signs in New York, a six-story billboard at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, where huge letters made 0 of light bulbs flashed below a forty-foot pickle.2

Environmental graphics like these promoted Heinz products; at the same time, the company worked to advertise the industrial process that made the pickles possible: the factory production of food. A pioneer of the corporate image, Heinz used fine art and feminine beauty to proclaim the benefits of modern industry to his consumers and employees.

Beneath the six-story electric sign in New York was a display window where attractive young women packed vegetables in clear glass jars; one could see hundreds more such workers when touring Heinz’s plant in Pittsburgh. The centerpiece of the factory complex was the Time Office, a freestanding Beaux-Arts monument to wage labor. Paintings and drawings were displayed in public spaces, an early use of fine art as a public relations tool.

Heinz provided his all-female labor force with sunroofs, classrooms, and a swimming pool, bringing contentment to his workers and goodwill from the community. Young women commonly worked in factories for several years before marrying, and they routinely were paid less than men for comparable labor—it was assumed that women did not need wages for survival. Heinz used this business custom not only for its obvious economic advantages but also for the image it gave his factory. As period photographs indicate, the women Heinz employed were not only young but also white and well groomed; each wore a freshly laundered uniform that she made from fabric purchased from Heinz, and every week she received a manicure. Heinz’s model factory used labor itself as a form of advertising.

r Robert C. Alberts, The Good Provider: H.J. Heinz and His 57 Varieties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

2 For a cultural history of the electric light bulb, see Carolyn Marvin, “Dazzling the Multitude: Imagining the Electric Light as a Communications Medium,” Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future, Joseph J. Corn, ed., (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 202-217.

Machines and Craft

The American type designer Frederic W. Goudy o designed the font Village in 1903. By the end of his life, o in 1947, he had designed more than one hundred o typefaces, an achievement that would have been nearly o impossible without the invention in 1884 of the pantographic punch-cutter, which produced molds for metal type. The new technology enabled any letterer to make designs for a typeface; in contrast, typographers traditionally had carved metal punches by hand—a slow, painstaking craft.1

WAS THE TERRACE OF

God’s house

That she was standing on, —

By God built over the sheer depth

In which Space is begun;

So high, that looking downward

Although Goudy depended on modern technology, much of his work reflected a medievalizing trend in American design that emerged in the 1890s and continued through the 1920s and beyond. Goudy, Will Bradley, Bruce Rogers, and others were inspired by the English socialist reformer William Morris, a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement.3

1. A useful primary text on early twentieth-century typography is Frederic W. Goudy, A Half-Century of Type Design and Typography, 1895-1945 (New York: The Typophiles, 1946). Secondary sources include Sebastian Carter, Twentieth Century Type Designers (New York: Taplinger, 1987).
2. Numerous “literary” and “private” presses were founded in the 1890s, but many failed economically by the turn of the century. Several enlightened trade publishers in the early twentieth century sustained the movement by opening fine-press subdivisions. Bruce Rogers, for example, designed sixty limitededition books for Houghton Mifflin Company’s Riverside Press between 1900 and 1912. In the 1920s Alfred A. Knopf commissioned innovative book designs from William Addison Dwiggins and Merle Armitage. See Joseph Blumenthal, The Printed Book in America (Boston: David R. Godine, 1977).

ILLIAM MORRIS items preserved at the University Press, Cambridge, include the punch’ es, matrices and some cast type of the three Kelmscott founts, Golden (in which these pages are set), Troy, and Chaucer; two

Morris, reacting against the debased products and working conditions brought on by the Industrial Revolution, rejected contemporary styles and techniques and called for the unification of aesthetics and production that he believed had existed in the Middle Ages. The cost of his labor-intensive products, however, made them inaccessible to most consumers.

Morris modeled his typeface Golden (1891) after the fifteenth-century Venetian font Jenson; his dark letters, with thick slab serifs and a relatively uniform line weight, were a visual critique of the spiky, airy, book faces that dominated Victorian printing. Morris’s dense pages fueled a generation of American designers.

Arts and Crafts-inspired typographers such as Goudy, Bradley, and Rogers were moved by the idea of joining aesthetics and technique, yet they worked in a period when devices like the pantographic punch-cutter and Linotype and Monotype machines were widening the gap between design and production. Bradley and Goudy both designed faces for Monotype; the longevity of their influence lies not in reuniting art and craft but in acting as modern “designers,” whose plans are executed by technicians and machines.

3 On the Arts and Crafts movement, see William Morris, The Ideal Book: Essays and Lectures on the Arts of the Book, William S. Peterson, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

GRAPHIC DESIGN IN AMERICA 183

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OCTOBER 19 ^th

Analyzing the Market The Suffragette and the Suffragist

¹ 9 ⁰ 9 f “Legitimate advertising is simply calling people’s atten- 1913 The struggle for women’s voting rights entered a new tion to a good thing, and describing it. “l This o phase in 1910 when the National American Woman statement from an 1890 article called “Advertising 0 Suffrage Association, having successfully campaigned o from a Religious Standpoint” indicates how in a number of states, began a concerted effort toward advertising professionals understood their practice. o federal legislation. One of the tactics employed by By 1900 the notion of advertising as a benevolent suffrage activists was the picture poster. As historian information service gave way to more aggressive and Paula Hays Harper observes, these images mark some sophisticated strategies. Pamphlets, lectures, and of the earliest uses of the political picture poster, articles on “advertising psychology” appeared as early predating its extensive use in World War I, when as 1896; the first book-length study, Walter Dill Scott’s posters and publicity helped consolidate and legitimize The Theory ofAdvertising, appeared in 1903, followed in the advertising industry. ^l Prior to the war, suffragists

1908 by The Psychology ofAdvertising. ² had established the picture poster as a political forum,

Advertising psychology questioned the dominant using commercial imagery for a political struggle. The understanding of the consumer as rationally motivated, suffragist’s use of commercial imagery was not, and devalued “objective” or “reason why” approaches to however, parodistic or subversive. Instead it used advertising. ³ Scott’s theory was based on the concept of images of women as wives and mothers to assure the suggestion: “Every idea of a function tends to call that continuity of roles in spite of political change. One such function into activity, and will do so, unless hindered by poster features a row of marching toddlers, stylistically a competing idea or physical impediment” (195). reminiscent of figures from children’s books, who plead Because purchases are made impulsively, suggestion for daddies to “GIVE MOTHER THE VOTE.” These posters must be pleasurable and directed, yet not strong enough affirmed traditional roles for women and thus acted as a to “lead the reader into a critical or questioning state of buffer to anti-suffrage posters that represented mind” (190). According to Scott, ads should describe not suffragists as enraged, homely spinsters. the product itself but its pleasurable effects. He also advocated the use of the direct command (“Use Pears Soap”) and the return coupon.4

1. Quoted in Merle Curti, “The Changing Concept of ‘Human Nature’ in the Literature of American Advertising,” The Business History Review, 41, 4 (Winter 1967): 339.
2. Walter Dill Scott, The Theory ofAdvertising (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1903); and The Psychology of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1908).

The references here are to the 1931 edition of The

Psychology ofAdvertising (New York: Dodd, Mead).

3. “Reason-why” advertising is credited to John E. 1 Paula Hays Harper, “Votes for Women?: Powers, who advocated telling the truth rather A Graphic Episode in the Battle of the Sexes,” than exaggerating in the manner of patent medicine Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin, eds., Art and advertising. See Presbrey, The History and Architecture in the Service of Politics (Cambridge: Development ofAdvertising, 302-309. MIT Press, 1978), 150-161.
4. David P. Kuna, “The Concept of Suggestion in the 2 Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Women’s Suffrage Early History of Advertising in Psychology,” Journal of Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia the History ofthe Behavioral Sciences 12 (1976): 347-353. University Press, 1965).

The War and The Masses

1917 Many Americans opposed United States entry into

World War I because of commitments to pacifism,

1. cultural ties to Europe, or belief in America’s former policy of neutrality. President Wilson’s statement that

Some of the posters invoke the high-culture tradition o “It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is of artistic design, using the decorative style and Pre- a nation,” aptly summarizes the government’s interest Raphaelite imagery of the Art Nouveau posters that in securing unified national support for the war. The advertised cultural events and publications. As Harper principal means of mobilizing public sentiment was the notes when discussing this pictorial tradition, “They are Committee on Public Information (CPI), founded in ‘feminine’ styles not created by women but carrying 1917, which served as information clearinghouse, connotations of what constitutes femininity from a publicity organ, and censor.

masculine point of view.” As women’s enfranchisement George Creel, a journalist who chaired the CPI, rested in the hands of a male legal system, so, too, did was an early critic of any form of blatant, unreflective their imagery: “They had no tradition of image making censorship. The information and public relations to draw upon except the masculine one in which they aspects of the CPI were intended, as Creel noted, to were embedded as second-class citizens” (156-7). overshadow its repressive, undemocratic role as censor: Thus the projection of positive, traditional imagery “suppressive features [will be] so overlaid by the maintained politically useful notions of the feminine. publicity policy that they will go unregarded and Perhaps this conservative strategy was a response to the ridicule, unresented” (17-8).

hostility, and violence that had confronted the earlier suffrage The committee’s twenty divisions each concentrated movement of the nineteenth century. Historian Aileen Kraditor on particular forms of propaganda. Press releases, has noted that the early suffrage movement, shaped by its pamphlets, radio programs, photographs, films, books, abolitionist origins, waged its campaign on the moral issue of cartoons, lectures, store displays, English classes, equality. Early leaders, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy exhibitions, and posters were disseminated in America Stone, and Susan B. Anthony, encouraged a fundamental and in more than thirty countries. Described as a “war reevaluation of social roles and familial traditions, questioning emergency national university,” the CPI gave America values considered sacred to the middle class. When these pioneer and the rest of the world a crash course in activists died or retired in the 1890s, their posts were filled by “Americanism” (37-9). Creel conceived of the younger, more conservative women who, in response to the committee as an educational agency that would provide intensified anti-suffrage movement, based their appeals on the a “simple, straightforward presentation of facts” (20). political expediency and social benefits of suffrage rather than on Conflicts between the educative aims and the more incendiary issues of equality and justice. The broad manipulative tactics of the CPI are visible in the posters critique initiated by the early women’s movement was narrowed and graphics produced by the Division of Advertising into a contest for the ballot: marching toddlers proved more and the Division of Pictorial Publicity. The Division of effective than appeals to equality. Advertising engaged the ad industry in the creation of

1. Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines:

Democracy, Nationalism and the Committee on

Public Information (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 251. Quotations from the makers of the CPI come from this text.

campaigns and the contribution of space in service of the war effort. The Division of Pictorial Publicity, headed by the prominent illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, worked to promote enlistment, volunteer work, war bonds, and other interests. Creel’s ideals of “objectivity” and “facticity” were not shared by Gibson, whose belief that people are essentially irrational echoed contemporary advertising theory. The posters commonly make an emotional appeal by connecting domestic comfort and intimacy to the specter of modern war: “Every bond you buy fires point blank at Prussian

Terrorism,” “Don’t Waste Bread! Save Two Slices Every Day and Defeat the U Boat.” Less subtle threats to the sanctity of the home were horrific illustrations of atrocities in Belgium, which portrayed women being choked and children having their hands cut off.³ Despite the propaganda efforts of the CPI, many people discerned in the war the corrupt interests of big business. Among the voices of antimilitarism and dissent was the socialist press, which was a growing vehicle for progressive and reform issues.4 “A Revolutionary and not a Reform Magazine” called The Masses, founded in 1911, rejected the “official” left-wing imagery of the period, which consisted of romanticized allegorical figures symbolizing the class struggle. ⁵ Irreverent and inconsistent, The Masses was a forum for radical writers and artists.

Collectively owned, and edited through group meetings, the magazine rejected traditional editorial hierarchies. Writers and artists received no pay and were not commissioned; thus the topic and editorial angle of a given piece were not predetermined. This was especially liberating to artists, who, when working for the commercial press, were expected to “illustrate” someone else’s article. The Masses considered illustration equal, rather than

2. Creel Report: Complete Report ofthe Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, 1917; 1918; 1919 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 43. Reprint of first edition, published in 1920.
3. Creel stated that atrocity materials were used in instances not under his supervision. The poster referred to is This is Kultur, reproduced in Vaughn, 165. For Creel’s statements on atrocity images, see Vaughn, 156-158.

186 DESIGN WRITING RESEARCH

subservient, to text. This parity was reinforced by the design of the magazine, whose generous margins and high production values accorded an autonomy and importance to images.6

Writers and artists attracted to The Masses—Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, John Reed, John Sloan, Art Young, Stuart Davis, and others—were part of the larger bohemian community of Greenwich Village. The magazine’s effectiveness in reaching “the masses” remains dubious, since the range of issues it covered— free love, Freud, contraception, feminism, homosexuality—placed it outside mainstream America.7

In 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act, allowing the government to suppress activities and messages considered injurious to the U. S. When an issue of The Masses was declared “unmailable,” the editors brought the case to court. The government was forced to specify the treasonable items, which included a drawing by Henry Glintenkamp entitled Physically Fit. The drawing darkly alludes to a contemporary newspaper account of the Army’s plans to order coffins in bulk quantities. The court eventually ruled against the magazine. Drained of funds and without access to the postal service, The Masses closed in December 1917.

4. Rebecca Zurier, Art for The Masses: A Radical

Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 85-91. An indication of the importance and range of socialist positions on the war is the fact that the CPI organized lecture tours for “patriotic American socialists” to represent our positions on the war to foreign leftists. Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 79.

5. The Masses began with a traditional socialist look and agenda but departed from those conventions in 1912.
6. The Masses was modeled after visually sophisticated European satiric journals such as Le Rire, Simplicissimus, and Jugend.
7. The magazine was distributed through Socialist Party offices in a number of states. All records have been lost, thus it is impossible to know if The Masses reached its namesake (Zurier 66).

Artistry and Industry

1921 The Art Directors Club was formed in 1920. An annual exhibition and catalogue of “advertising art” were the club’s chief means of publicity. The first exhibition, held in the prestigious galleries of the National Arts Club in New York, displayed paintings and drawings that had been commissioned for advertisements—the ads themselves were not shown, however. This blurring of the distinction between fine art and mass media was reinforced by the catalogue: paintings and drawings appeared as large-format reproductions at the front of the catalogue, while their “application” in actual advertisements appeared in an appendix of small images at the back.

The exclusion of actual advertisements—which represent an art director’s use of the artist’s work— was not repeated in the second exhibit, a decision considered “valuable” by the exhibition committee, even though a reviewer felt it “detract[ed] a bit from the neat and orderly arrangement. “1 The second exhibition also included photography, a medium pervasive in advertising yet relatively new to the art gallery. Throughout the early catalogues the work is described as not merely equal to fine art but more significant, since it is an art for the masses, able to “create a new state of mind in a nation” (13).

The artistic status of advertising art and the professionalization of the art director were part of a larger expansion of advertising in the 1920s. As manufacturers increased in number and output, market research became an important agency service. ² J. Walter Thompson, then one of the largest firms in the country, added, in 1919, a statistical and investigation department and two planning departments—one for male and one for female consumers. Such bureaucratic complexity had a twofold appeal: it mirrored the structure of the corporations that such agencies served, and it helped build the image of advertising as a science.

Stanley Resor, president of J. Walter Thompson, hoped to create a “university of advertising” at the firm, instituting a two-year course for incoming employees and hiring John B. Watson, a former Ivy League professor, who was well known for his controversial books on behavioral psychology. Watson believed that three instincts guide human behavior: fear, rage, and love. These result from, respectively, a loss of support, constraints on bodily movement, and stroking of the skin. For Watson, all other emotional responses emerge from this original trio; advertising could learn to guide consumers by triggering such sensations. Fear was frequently turned to the advantage of business through advertisements that played upon the insecurities of women as inadequate dates, wives, mothers, or housekeepers. Behaviorism lent to advertising the rhetoric of science, serving to legitimize an increasingly irrational conception of human nature.3

1. The Second Annual of Illustrationsfor Advertisements in the United States (New York: Art Directors Club, 1922), 14.
2. On the expansion of advertising agency services see Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising. The expansion of agency services has continued into the present: the JWT Group, a holding company for J. Walter Thompson, has subsidiaries specializing in recruitment and medical advertising, two public relations firms, and a market research company.
3. For information on Watson’s career in advertising, see David Cohen,J.B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviorism. A Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979): 168-194. For the cultural context in which behaviorism came to fruition, see Lucille Birnbaum, “Behaviorism in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 7, (Spring 1955): 15-30.

ABCD M. F. Benton, Broadway, 1929

Josef Albers, stencil, 1925

Modernistic vs. Modern

¹⁹²⁵ The term “Art Deco” was derived from the title of the

1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs n et Industriels Modernes. Historian Rosemarie Haag o Bletter has called the Art Deco architect “an avant-garde traditionalist,” a term that suggests the way elements of Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism were used to construct an appealing, uncontroversial, and often luxurious interpretation of modernism. In the 1920s Art Deco styling was applied to numerous department stores, corporate headquarters, restaurants, and hotels in New York and other cities. In graphic design and illustration, Art Deco encompassed a loose set of ideas and motifs, ranging from reductive geometry, elongated figures, and mannered angularity to the repetition and regularity associated with the machine, as seen in M. F. Benton’s typeface Broadway.

The opulence of Art Deco was curbed by the 1929 stock market crash. During the Depression, the availability of new materials—aluminum, plastic, black Vitrolite glass, Masonite, linoleum—encouraged industrial designers to develop a simple vocabulary that made Art Deco appear fussy and anachronistic. Many designers began looking to the machine as both a functional and aesthetic model. The American interpretation of the machine amended austere European precedents with complex curves and tapering forms borrowed from the aerodynamic streamlining developed for airplanes and automobiles. Parallel stripes and “speed whiskers” were employed as graphic expressions of speed, progress, and modernity.2

1. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Art Deco Style,”

Skyscraper Style, Cervin Robinson and Rosemarie

Haag Bletter, eds. (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1975), 41. See also Patricia Frantz Kery, Art

Deco Graphics (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986).

2. On streamlining, see Donald J. Bush, The Streamlined Decade (New York: George Braziller,

1975); and Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).

Walter Dorwin Teague’s streamlined facade for a 1932 exhibition, Design for the Machine, in Philadelphia, uses continuous, flush surfaces and spare detail. The customized lettering combines the step-motifs of Art Deco with an “ascetic” modern interest in the elementary forms of the circle, square, and triangle. ³ Art Deco and streamlining have been devalued by proponents of the supposedly more pure and functional modernism exemplified by the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented exhibitions such as Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in 1932 and the first American survey of the Bauhaus in 1938. MoMA positioned itself as an arbiter of good design and an opponent of “modernistic” streamlining.4

The effort to separate “modern” from “modernistic” betrays the links between popular and elite design. Benton’s typeface Broadway and Teague’s facade lettering share with Josef Albers’s stencil alphabet an interest in standardized, geometric elements. Albers’s typeface, designed in 1925 at the Bauhaus, is composed from an armature of geometric shapes. Like Benton and Teague, Albers adopted an assembly-line logic of interchangeable parts.

The work of Albers issues from the vanguard heritage of the Bauhaus, while the American designs embrace a more decorative, consumer-oriented tradition. The unquestioned separation of these discourses, however, obscures the interconnections between mass culture and the “progressive,” critical heritage of modernism.

3. Teague refers to the “ascetic manner” of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe in Design This Day (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), 172.
4. See John McAndrew, “Modernistic and

Streamlined,” Bulletin ofThe Museum of Modern

Art 5, 6 (December 1938): unpaginated. Today, Art Deco is still barred from MoMA’s canon. In the words of the late curator Arthur Drexler, “The department’s definition of quality excludes unsuccessful or ephemeral styles….Even such popular manifestations as Art Deco and other ‘modernistic’ furniture which, in the 20s and 30s, initiated the stepped contours of skyscrapers, are not eligible for inclusion.” The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984).

Fashion Plates

European modernism was filtered to American audiences through fashion and interior design maga zines. ^l These transient media deployed modernism oo as a range of stylistic options, freed from the weighty dogmas that characterized the historical avant-garde movements. In the 1920s Vogue and Vanity Fair brought European illustration and industrial and graphic design to an American audience. This tradition was pursued more actively in the 1930s by Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar and Mehemed Fehmy

Agha at Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden. ² While Agha preceded Brodovitch and provided a model for his work at Harper’s Bazaar, the two designers worked in a situation of mutual influence, bringing similar backgrounds to similar tasks. Agha came to America from Berlin in 1929 at the invitation of the publisher Condé Nast; Brodovitch, who had come from Paris to teach in Philadelphia, was invited to New York by Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow in 1934. Thus both men were “imported” and then empowered to bring a specifically European quality to American magazine design. Their pluralistic approach to European art and design is evident in the range of artists they employed: A.M. Cassandre, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dali, Lisette Model, Brassai, Jean Cocteau, Isamu Noguchi, and others.

1. Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Condé

Nast’s fashionable arts and letters magazine Vanity Fair, was a key member of the organizing committee for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 11-18.

2. On Brodovitch, see Andy Grundberg, Brodovitch/Masters ofAmerican Design (New York:

Documents of American Design, Harry N. Abrams, 1989). For information on Agha’s contribution to magazine design, see Sarah Bodine and Michael Dunas, “Dr. M.F. Agha, Art Director;” and M.F. Agha, “Reprise: On

Magazines,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 3, 3 (March 1985): 3. Brodovitch and Agha are profiled in R. Roger Remington and Barbara J. Hodik, Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

Prior to the work of Brodovitch and Agha, magazines such as Harper’s and Vogue used traditional layouts and conventional framing techniques—circular insets, overlapping corners—which treated photographs and illustrations as discrete compositional units. Spreads designed by Brodovitch (top) and Agha (bottom) often let images cross the binding and bleed off the page, bringing an unprecedented centrality and force to photography in publication design. By considering the coherence of each spread and the sequential rhythm of the entire magazine, Brodovitch and Agha transformed the role of the art director in publication design.3

3. In addition to his impact on the profession as a practitioner, Brodovitch taught classes and seminars at a number of schools, influencing a generation of art directors and photographers, including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Art Kane, Henry Wolf, Otto Storch, Bob Gage, Sam Antupit,

Steve Frankfurt, and Helmut Krone. See Allen

Hurlburt, “Alexey Brodovitch: The Revolution in

Magazine Design,” Print 23, 1 (January-February

1969): 55•

Representing the New Deal:

Stylization and Documentation

933 The Works Progress Administration (WPA), instituted by President Roosevelt in 1935, employed millions of workers left jobless by the Great Depression. ^l Although most WPA programs utilized unskilled labor, the

Federal Art Project (FAP) employed professional o writers, painters, actors, and musicians. At the height of o the New Deal these artists constituted only two percent of WPA employees, and the arts projects received less than seven percent of the total budget.2

Divisions within the FAP ranged from easel painting and community art centers to film and stained glass. The poster division, which publicized health-care issues, cultural events, and WPA programs, began as a primitive atelier in New York City, where artists hand painted individual posters, often producing several copies from a model. Through the efforts of artist Anthony Velonis, New York’s poster division moved into the age of mechanical reproduction, and its output increased to six hundred posters a day. ³

The reduced, bold shapes typically employed in the posters reflected the influence of such vanguard designers as A. M. Cassandre, Stuart Davis, and Joseph Binder. The posters’ reductive style also exploited the qualities of silkscreen printing, an inexpensive technique used for short-run commercial printing. The silkscreen process favors the use of simple, stencilled forms, bold expanses of opaque color, and hard-edged silhouettes, as seen in the poster shown above left by the Detroit designer Merlin.

1. On the FAP, see Francis V. O’Connor, Federal Art Patronage: 1933 to 1943, exh. cat. (College

Park: University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1966).

See also The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs, Francis V. O’Connor, ed. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972).

2. Basil Rauch, The History of the New Deal, 1933-38 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1944, 1963).
3. Christopher DeNoon, Posters of the WPA (Los Angeles: Wheatley, 1987).

Anti-New Deal sentiment was, from the very beginning, intense. The FAP was especially contentious, since the arts were viewed as elitist and urban. Much of the overtly political work produced under the WPA, such as the Federal Theater Project’s “Living Newspapers” and the documentary photographs of the Farm Security Administration, garnered the hostility of conservatives, who claimed the project’s membership was comprised of leftwing radicals. The words and pictures of poverty and decay reported by writers and photographers compose an image of the era quite different from that conveyed by the bright compositions of the poster division. Neither the textual conventions of “documentary expression”—techniques such as quotation, statistical evidence, and direct address—nor the photographic “evidence” that inspired so many of the photo-texts in magazines and books, seems to have influenced the poster units.4

Most WPA designers avoided the use of photography. A notable exception is Lester Beall, who designed the poster shown above right for the United States Housing Authority in 1941. ⁵ Beall’s design combines the flat colors and schematic shapes characteristic of the poster projects with a documentary photo sensibility. Perhaps influenced by the political photomontages of John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, Beall’s work conveys a feeling of urgency and contemporaneity that is absent from the more painterly posters.

4. On documentary and the WPA, see William

Stott, Documentary Expression in America (University of Chicago Press, 1973, 1986); and John Rogers Puckett, Five Photo-Textual Documentaries from the Great Depression (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984).

5. Beall, who emerged as a major corporate designer after the war, earlier had produced a series of strikingly simple and forceful posters for the Rural Electrification Administration that have become icons of vanguard American design of the 1930s. Beall is profiled in Remington and Hodik, Nine Pioneers ofAmerican Graphic Design.

Corporate Design,

Corporate Art

1937 In 1934 Walter paepcke, founder and chairman ofthe Container Corporation of America, hired the Chicago designer Egbert Jacobson to redesign nearly every surface of his company: factories, offices, trucks, stationery, and advertising. ^I This kind of commercial “packaging,” which encases not the product but the company that manufactures it, is known today as “corporate identity” or “corporate image.”

CCA’s most influential contribution to business culture was its advertising program. At the advice of the agency N.W. Ayer & Son, Paepcke commissioned designs from European modernists, including A. M. Cassandre, Herbert Bayer, and Gyorgy Kepes. The first ad ran in the luxurious, design-conscious business journal Fortune in 1937. Some ofthese early images incorporated photomontage, and would have been considered aesthetically radical at the time, departing from the more established Art Deco and streamlining modes of modernism.

After World War Il CCA advertising shifted away from avant-garde design toward contemporary “fine art.” Two 1940s campaigns featured tentatively cubist, expressionist, or pseudo-primitive illustrations. In these ads, typography ceased to be integral to the design and served instead as discrete captions for autonomous paintings. CCA’s most celebrated ad campaign was Great Ideas of Western Man, in which artists and designers interpreted quotations from the Western tradition, from Aristotle to John F. Kennedy. The 1959 collage by Herbert Bayer, shown above, was a commentary on American consumer culture; the ad makes no reference to packaging and instead aspires to be a work of art with an oblique advertising function.3

On the cultural projects of Walter paepcke and

CCA, see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusadefor Cultural Reform (University of Chicago Press, 1983). See also Neil Harris, “Designs on Demand: Art Nouveau and the Modern Corporation,” Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: Tie Collection ofthe Container Corporation ofAmerica, A Gift to the National Museum ofAmerican Art (Washington, D.C.:

Smithsonian Institution, 1985), 8-30.

Such acts of patronage promoted CCA as a benevolent sponsor of the arts. As artist Hans Haacke has pointed out, corporate patronage buys respect for the corporation from a public that might be suspicious of business while admiring high culture.4 The CCA collection was eventually donated to the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, an event celebrated with a major exhibition in 1985. The catalogue for that exhibit chose to represent all the works from the CCA collection as if they were fine art, even those conceived as applied design. Thus the early ads, which had actively integrated word and image, are presented in the museum’s catalogue without typography. The ad above is shown as it originally appeared and as it was reproduced by the museum. Like CCA’s later advertising programs, the museum’s presentation favored fine art over applied design.

2. See Container Corporation ofAmerica, Modern Art in Advertising: Designs for Container Corporation of America, exh. cat. (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946).
3. Trade articles dealing with CCA’s Great Ideas campaign include Walter J. Johnson, “The Case for Management’s Advertising,” public Relations

Joumal 19, 10 (October 1963): 10-12: and Andrew J.

Lazarus, “Corporate Advertising—A Fad or

Fundamental?” Public RelationsJournal 20, 10

(October 1964): 35•37•

4. On Haacke, see Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (New York: The New Museum and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
5. The book Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation, cited above, is the catalogue for this exhibition. Other corporate patrons of the fine arts have included the Johnson Wax Company, which commissioned its corporate headquarters, in Racine, Wisconsin, from Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s. The company also sponsored the fine arts. “Art: USA: Now Thanks to a Wax Company,” Fortune 66, 3 (September 1962): 133-139.

The New Bauhaus: Function and Intuition

The New Bauhaus was founded in 1937 by a group of citizens seeking to revitalize Chicago manufacturing.1 The school was directed by the Hungarian artist and designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who had taught at the

Bauhaus in Germany. After a year the association o withdrew its support, unprepared for the radicalism of the school. Moholy-Nagy reopened the institution as the School of Design in 1939; it became the Institute of Design in 1944 and is now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The name Bauhaus is commonly associated today with “functionalism,” the theory that an object’s use, materials, and means of production should dictate its form. The lettering shown above left was designed in 1938 by Hin Bredendieck, a student at the New Bauhaus. All angles are drawn with a T-square and a right triangle, and all curves are made with a compass. Thus the letters meet one of functionalism’s basic criteria: the method of production helps generate form.

1. Documents related to the New Bauhaus appear in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969). See also 50 Jahre New Bauhaus: Bauhaus Nachfolge in Chicago (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1987). James

Sloan Allen describes the founding of the New

Bauhaus in The Romance of Commerce and Culture.

2. See Stanford Anderson, “The Fiction of Function,” Assemblage 2 (February 1987): 19-31.
3. On Herbert Bayer, see Gwen Finkel Chanzit,

Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in America, 1926-1976 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: IJMI Research Press, 1987); and Mike Mills, “Herbert Bayer’s Universal

Type and its Historical Contexts,” The Bauhaus and Design Theory, Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 38-49.

4. Kandinsky develops a theory of visual

“language” in Point and Line to Plane (New York:

Dover, 1979); published as a Bauhaus Book in

1926. See also Clarence V. poling, Kandinsky’s

Teaching at the Bauhaus (New York: Rizzoli, 1986).

192 DESIGN WRITING RESEARCH

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Functionalism, however, rarely worked as an objective, value-free design method, or as a self-contained formula for decision-making. Design strategies such as simplified form, exposed structure, and standardized elements were weighted with philosophical ideals and cultural connotations. Criteria such as faithfulness to materials and fitness to purpose rarely dictated every aspect of a design, but were supplemented with taste and intuition.

Bredendieck’s student lettering project was inspired by Herbert Bayer’s “universal alphabet,” designed at the Bauhaus between 1925 and 1928. Bayer eliminated capital letters, contending that because the uppercase/lowercase distinction does not occur in speech, it is artificial and unnecessary. ³ Bayer’s reform of the alphabet belonged to the broader search for a “language” of vision at the Bauhaus.⁴ His geometric letters offered a simplified medium for the written word—at the Bauhaus, writing was often viewed as an enemy of the immediate, universal structures of geometry. Bayer’s alphabet was not, however, a neutral solution to a utilitarian problem but a critical gesture that uncovered a “problem” that had not existed before. His font is too radical to be explained by a strictly utilitarian definition of functionalism.

Whereas some Bauhaus exercises yielded geometric solutions, the results of others appeared random or organic. For example, a New Bauhaus object called a “hand sculpture” was a smooth, irregularly shaped piece of wood designed to be comfortably held; it gave students a “tactile experience” that could be tapped later in the design of telephones, glassware, or handles. ⁵ A statement in a 1939 brochure read: “Mastered Technique = Freedom of Creation… discipline merges with fantasy and genuine results for application begin to appear.” (50Jahre 114). Bauhaus design theory combined the objective criteria of functionalism with subjective experience.

5. The “hand sculpture” project is documented in 50 Jahre, 116, 117; and in Moholy-Nagy’s account of the New Bauhaus, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947).
6. A 1945 trade article stresses the liaison of rationality and individuality at the Bauhaus. A phrase that occurs again and again in the essay is “creative and functional.” See Edward J. Frey, “Postwar Graphic Arts Education: What Changes

Will Come in Teaching Design?” Print 3, 4 (Fall

“Good Design”

¹ 945 Designers who came into prominence in the years following World War Il—notably Bradbury Thompson, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, and Ladislav Sutnar—brought the expressive sensibilities of the modern artist to advertising and graphic design. Paul Rand’s influential book Thoughts on Design (1947) defined the designer as a o professional who tempers the instinct of the artist with the functional requirements of advertising. ^l The designer’s role is to “restate his problem in terms of ideas, pictures, forms, and shapes. He unifies, simpli fies, eliminates superfluities. He…abstracts from his material by association and analogy” (4).

The symbols and techniques employed by Rand and others were often derived from modernist painting and sculpture. Designers borrowed techniques such as collage, montage, childlike drawing, visual puns, and biomorphic shapes from Klee, Picasso, Arp, Mir6, Chagall, and others. Rand described such forms as “attention-getting devices,” whose obscurity may need to be balanced with “universally recognized forms” (54). His use of abstraction and visual punning can be seen in his 1949 cover for Modern Art in Your Life, shown above left. Rand and others used techniques and motifs from the fine arts to divorce themselves from the “bromidic advertising (that caters to) bad taste” (136).

1. Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 1.
2. Robert Goldwater and Rene d’Harnoncourt, Modern Art in Your Life, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949).

Modern art and design established a foothold in America after the immigration of European artists, designers, and architects in the 1930s. The spread of modernism was also facilitated by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, established in 1929. In a series ofexhibitions called Useful Objects, initiated in 1938, the museum defined its notion of “good design.” Although the pretext of these shows was the utility and quality of consumer goods, features such as function, durability, and safety were secondary to appearance. Items were generally selected for their formal affinities to modern sculpture and painting. Useful Objects was followed by a series called Good Design, which continued from 1950 to 1955. By advocating modern design in home furnishings, the museum hoped to influence the taste of both manufacturers and the public.²

The 1949 MoMA exhibition Modern Art in Your Life exemplifies the museum’s attempt to elevate industrial and graphic design by associating them with painting and sculpture: “When the (book) jacket designer makes up his page with a few rigorous lines against large immaculate areas, when the package designer limits his appeal to square-cut letters and a minimum of rectangles, they…share Mondrian’s delight in a bold and subtle simplicity.” At the same time, fine art is democratized because it is shown to influence everyday life. Modern Art in Your Life displayed the products of the art world alongside advertisments, book covers, and consumer goods. Shown above right is Alvin Lustig’s 1947 jacket for A Season in Hell, which has high-culture antecedents in the paintings of Mir6 and Arp.

The Expansion of Corporate Identity

1949 The CBS “eye” is the most prominent feature of that company’s design program. Since 1951 it has appeared on everything from television screens and print ads to napkins, matchbooks, wallpaper, and adhesive tape.

William Golden, who became art director at CBS in 1949, designed his own postal meter slugs, with colored inks to match the printing on various packages.1

Advertising was the main product advertised by the witty and elegant campaigns of CBS, which promoted television and radio to advertisers and account executives. Several other early corporate identity programs also used sophisticated design to sell designrelated products—the Container Corporation of America began employing modernist designers in 1934, and Knoll International commissioned work from the Swiss designer Herbert Matter in the 1940s.2

By the end of the 1950s, however, professionally designed identity programs had been adopted by more diverse industries. The new genre was enthusiastically embraced by trade magazines, which heralded corporate “image” as a lucrative field for ad agencies and public relations departments.

A writer for Advertising Age in 1959 offered business as a subject for psychoanalysis: the corporation is “just as subject to neuroses and inner searchings and optimism and depression…as any single person is.”3 Psychoanalysis became popular in the 1950s, the decade when the analyst Erik Erikson coined the term “identity crisis.”⁴ In the midst of this popular fascination with the invisible histories behind human will, the corporation emerged as a new personality type. Designers and public relations officers were called on for diagnoses and cures.

Print magazine was particularly energetic in promoting and documenting corporate graphics. In 1953 it exchanged its bookish, scholarly image for a big, glossy format, and the editors announced a new focus on design and business. Especially well documented in Print at the end of the 1950s were identity programs directed by mature designers who had begun their careers in the 30s and 40s. Paul Rand and the architect Eliot Noyes collaborated on a design program for IBM, initiated in 1956. Rand, Noyes, Herbert Matter, and Charles Eames collaborated on the 1959 identity program for Westinghouse. Matter designed graphics for the New Haven Railroad in 1955, and Lester Beall established a program for International Paper in 1960. ⁵ Thus in the same decade that International Style architecture became the preferred idiom for new office buildings, the rise of corporate image signaled the integration of modernist graphic design into corporate culture and the expansion of the design profession.

1. On CBS see William Golden, “My Eye,” Print 13, 3 (May-June 1957): 24-29; Cipe Pineles Golden et al., eds., The Visual Craft of William Golden (New York: George Braziller, 1962); and Dick Hess and Marion Muller, Dorfsman and CBS (New York: American Showcase, 1987).
2. On Herbert Matter’s work for Knoll, see Eric Larrabee and Massimo Vignelli, Knoll Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981).
3. Howard Gossage, “Give Your Company A

Clear, Consistent Identity, and Its Advertising

Will be Easier, Better,” Advertising Age (9 March

4. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W.Norton, 1985).
5. Print devoted its May-June 1957 issue to corporate identity. See also “Four Major Corporate Design Programs,” Print 14, 6 (November-December 1960):31-50.

Chambers of Commerce Visual Thinking

¹ 953 ⁰ The postwar rush to the suburbs encouraged urban ¹ 957 ⁰ In a 1955 design annual, the rise of television was retailers to establish branches outside the city equippeddescribed as marking “a transition from word thinking with large parking lots. The lifeline of many suburbsto visual thinking” in magazine design. ^l The new became the strip of retail stores, eateries, and moviedouble-imperative of magazine graphics—greater theaters whose illuminated, blinking and revolving signsattention to images and faster delivery of information— created a dense, graphic corridor of commerce.put increasing pressure on the art director to shape While restaurant chains were formed as early as thecontent. Many of the leading art directors of this

1870s, the first to standardize its architectural image was period—Henry Wolf (Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar),

White Castle. In the early 1920s the White Castle Otto Storch (McCall’s), and Sam Antupit (Esquire)—had System of Eating Houses had established a fiefdom of studied with Alexey Brodovitch. Others, such as crenellated, rusticated, and turreted snack shops, Bradbury Thompson (Mademoiselle), Cipe Pineles whose stainless steel shimmer and lavatory whiteness (Charm), Allen Hurlburt (Look), Alexander Liberman promoted the restaurant’s hygienic hamburgers. ^l (Vogue), Art Kane (Seventeen), Tina Fredricks (Glamour), McDonald’s was among the first and most successful and Will Burtin and Leo Lionni (Fortune), also came to postwar chains to adopt the White Castle model of prominence in this era.

standardized food and imagery. In 1952 Richard and Magazine designers used typography, photography, Maurice McDonald, working with Ray Kroc, began to and illustration to provocatively represent subject matter franchise their successful self-service restaurant. and editorial angle. Henry Wolfs covers for Esquire in By 1953 the yellow parabolic arches were the company’s the 1950s used clever visual punning to express urban, trademark. According to historian Philip Langdon, this “gentlemanly” sophistication. The fusion of images and zealous expression of technology and modernity has words extended from cover designs to page layouts, in roots in Le Corbusier’s unrealized plan for the Palace staged photographs incorporating text type and in of Soviets in Moscow and other kinds of “dynamic typography composed of three-dimensional objects.

structural modernism” (84-109). Such efforts to collapse the verbal and visual helped

The novelty rooflines and expressive appendages of magazines compete with television’s rhythmic flow of the 1950s were attacked by environmentalists and imagery overlaid with spoken and typographic texts. community leaders during the late 60s. In 1969 Wolfs techniques were pursued in a more aggressive McDonald’s unveiled its first environment-conscious, way when Esquire, facing economic collapse in 1962, restrained, brown brick buildings, with discretely enlisted advertising designer George Lois to art direct illuminated ribs on a mansard roof. ² The industry-wide covers for the magazine. ² The 1965 cover shown above shift from futuristic bombast to domestic and historical attempted to shock and titillate readers with its blunt references—Colonial, Southwest, Victorian, Cape Cod— interpretation of a feature article on the “masculinreflects the eclecticism of suburban residential ization of the American woman.” architecture and the tastes of municipal zoning boards.

1 Wallace F. Hainline, “Editorial Layout,” The 34th Annual ofAdvertising and Editorial Art and Design (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1955).

1. Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches:

The Architecture ofAmerican Chain Restaurants 2 Victor Margolin situates Lois’s work for Esquire

(London: Michael Joseph, 1986). in the context of American political graphics in

“Rebellion, Reform, and Revolution: American

2. Regina S. Baraban, “Eat and Run,” Metropolis 7, Graphic Design for Social Change,” Design Issues 8 (April 1988): 52. 5, 1 (Fall 1988): 59-70.

Lemon.

The New Advertising and the New Ad Agencies/ The Old Advertising and Pop

1961 “The new advertising” refers to the unorthodox strategies that transformed the character of advertising in the 1960s. ¹ The campaign that became the icon of the new advertising was created by the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) for Volkswagen. Irreverent humor, disarming wit, and a new self-consciousness about advertising were the hallmarks of the Volkswagen o campaign. A simple layout, a sober black and-white photograph, and an unexpected caption were the antithesis of the hard sell; the modest appearance of the car jabbed at Detroit’s obsession with styling at the expense of engineering and economy.

The creative director of DDB was Bill Bernbach, who initiated the concept of the “creative team,” composed of a copywriter and an art director. ² In his own career as a copywriter, Bernbach had found that the traditional separation between writing and art directing led to ads whose text and imagery were arbitrarily or awkwardly linked. The new advertising transformed not only the look of ads but also the structure of agencies. Previously, the copywriter and art director had served the will of an executive staff that relied heavily on market research and demographics. As the new advertising flourished, creative teams gained executive positions, and there was a proliferation of “boutiques,” small agencies headed by creative teams that often had broken away from larger firms. Another result was the dismantling of the Anglo-Saxon, upper-middle-class, old-boy network of Madison Avenue.

1. Robert Glatzer, The New Advertising (New York: Citadel Press, 1970): 10′, and Larry Dobrow, When Advertising Tried Harder (New York: Friendly Press, 1984).
2. Bernbach began working directly with an art director when he teamed with Paul Rand on playful advertisements for Ohrbach’s department stores in the late 1940s.

While Doyle Dane Bernbach represented the sophisticated avantgarde of American advertising, it existed alongside a larger mainstream of commonplace commercial graphics. In London in the mid-1950s the term Pop Art was coined by a collective of artists and designers called the Independent Group; Pop named a class of objects banished from the realm of good design. Stylish Detroit automobiles, Hollywood film posters, and the routine ads of the “old” Madison Avenue were held up as symbols of freedom against the austere modernism promoted after World War 11.³

In 1955 the critic Reyner Banham praised the American Cadillac as a paragon of Pop values—it was ephemeral, emotional, sensual, and symbolic. Banham attacked the Volkswagen in 1961 as a product of false modesty, whose lack of superficial design “styling” belied an absence of technical and aesthetic imagination: the VW’s “overwhelming virtue in the eyes of men of liberal conscience was that in a world of automotive flux its appearance remained constant….ln other words, it was a symbol of protest against the standards of Detroit, the mass media and the Pop Arts.” ⁴

In New York, Pop Art emerged in the late 1950s as a response to the heroic Abstract Expressionism of the previous decade; Pop tried to find a less personal brand of abstraction in the flat colors, halftone screens, and mechanical repetition of the mass media. Most of the commercial imagery incorporated by the American Pop artists was not modernist design or conceptually sophisticated “new” advertising, but rather the slick mainstream of fast-food, comic strips, supermarket packaging, journalistic photographs, and ordinary automobiles, as in James Rosenquist’s 1963 Untitled (Broome Street Truck), shown above. While celebrating the life of the present, Pop Art also provoked nostalgia for a golden age of unselfconscious, truly “American” design and media.

3. On the British Pop movement, see Brian Wallis, ed., This Is Tomorrow Today: The Group and British Pop Art, exh. cat. (New York: The Clock Tower and the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987).

The book includes reprints of 1950s articles by Reyner Banham, Richard Hamilton, and others.

4. Reyner Banbam, “Design by Choice,” first published in Architectural Review, July 1961, and reprinted in Penny Sparke, ed., Design by Choice (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 97-107.

Sonle Alltericall are color blind.

Black Markets/

Black Power Posters and Protest

1965 In the late 1950s and 1960s, magazines directed 1969Collecting stylish Art Nouveau posters that advertised at African-American readers, such as Ebony, Jet, Negro literary periodicals and cultural events was a fashionable

Digest, and Tan, encouraged national advertisers to pastime in the 1890s. The poster craze of the late o promote their products to black markets. John H.1960s and early 70s was just as fashionable, while Johnson, publisher of all four of these periodicals, lacking pretensions to the genteel world of the salon. helped generate national awareness of black consumers. This second wave of poster art had its origins in youth The ad shown above ran as a full page in The New York and pop culture, specifically in the promotion of San Times in 1969; art directed by Herb Lubalin, the ad Francisco-area rock groups. The posters’ psychedelic urged manufacturers to recognize that “the Negro is not colors and writhing letter forms, suggestive of drugthe white man’s burden….he’s earning $30 billion a induced hallucinations, quickly gained an audience and year;…he spends a greater percentage of his income on became commercially available through several poster food, home furnishings, and personal care products houses. As their popularity increased, distributors— than white people of comparable income do.” mostly mail-order houses—began to offer a wider Whereas Johnson urged advertisers to reach the black market selection, reflecting the disparate sources and through black publications in ads showing black consumers, influences of youth culture in the 1960s: themes of African-American models were rarely seen in “mainstream” peace and protest, underground comics, science fiction, publications such as Time or Life, whose readership was assumed political heroes and despots, nineteenth-century to be white. In the early 60s the Congress of Racial Equality temperance images, and pop stars. ^l

(CORE) and other civil rights groups began to call for a fairer A recurring strategy was to amend the American representation of blacks in the mainstream media, countering the flag. For the disillusioned of the 1960s, the flag had practice of “separate but equal” ad campaigns. In 1963 CORE become a symbol of militaristic, right-wing America. pressured the ad industry to increase black representation in the Numerous protest posters used visual punning to revive advertisements, television programming, and in the composition an icon whose meanings had become diffuse and of the ad industry itself. Efforts toward integrated advertising contradictory. The poster above was designed by George reflected the extension of civil rights activity beyond the primary Maciunas.

issues of education and voting into the areas of affirmative While the posters collected at the end of the 1800s action and anti-discrimination. originally functioned as advertisements, the bulk of poster production in the 1960s and 70s did not. Most of

An expanded discussion of this issue appears in the essay “White on these late twentieth-century posters had a brief public

Black on Gray” included in this book. life—on board fences, kiosks, or newsstands—but were primarily intended for domestic display.

David Kunzle, American Posters of Protest, 196670, exh. cat. (New York; New School Art Center, 1971): 15. For a more general account of political graphics, see Robert Philippe, Political Graphics: Art as a Weapon (New York: Abbeville, 1982), 281.

Signature Styles/lnternational Styles

The political posters available from the retail stores and 1973 By the end of the 1960s a major movement had distribution houses were purchased and hung to express emerged in American graphic design, which coincided solidarity with a cause. They were not, like the street posters with a widespread reaction against modernism or the

z

produced by student groups in the late 1960s, tools of a specific International Style among architects. A group of political struggle. oz graphic designers, including Milton Glaser, Seymour

The popular interest in posters made them an effectiveChwast, and Herb Lubalin, rejected such ideals as medium for groups lacking access to radio, television, andfunctionalism and neutrality in favor of a witty, eclectic newspapers. From 1968 to 1970, student demonstrations reachedstyle, assembled out of bits and pieces of art history, a peak on campuses throughout the country; two of the majorpopular culture, and personal experience. ^l issues were the struggle for minority recognition and increased Milton Glaser, after attending The Cooper Union student power. At Columbia, as at many other colleges and School of Art in New York in the early 1950s, studied universities, students questioned the relationship between the etching in Italy with Giorgio Morandi, a classical artist school and the community it inhabited. The war in Vietnam— who had worked with the avant-garde “metaphysical” particularly as it affected the university through ROTC, on-campus painters early in the century. This experience in Italy recruiting, and military research—was another major issue in would inform his lifelong commitment to drawing as a student protests.2 tool for design. As early as 1960 he criticized designers The 1969 poster shown above was anonymously produced in who depend on collaging together existing images: response to the violent police action taken when students “A designer who must rely on cutouts and rearranging occupied an administration building at Harvard University. The to create effects, who cannot achieve the specific image tal<eover began after negotiations to initiate a black studies or idea he wants by drawing, is in trouble. “2 program had proven ineffective. The poster employs the boldly Glaser founded the Push Pin Studios with Seymour simplified forms, terse language, and deliberately crude lettering Chwast, Reynold Ruffins, and Edward Sorel in 1954. that were hallmarks of the posters of the student/worker Although the studio’s early work employed uprisings in Paris of May 1968. ³ For many activists in the United expressionist mannerisms typical of 1950s design, the States, the events of May served as a model, proving that “Push Pin style” came into its own in the 1960s, revolutionary action was possible in a modern industrial state. yielding images that were personal yet highly controlled, Few examples of student-protest posters remain, for their role characterized by bright colors, flattening outlines, was related more to the expendability and urgency of newspapers exaggerated, fattened forms, and clever, sometimes and graffiti than to interior display. bizarre juxtapositions. According to Glaser, designers should work within a “vernacular language,” manip-

See Student Protests, 1969 (Chicago: Urban ulating culturally familiar elements in a new way.

2 

Research Corporation, 1970). For the period 19681970, see Ronald Fraser et al., 1968: A Student

Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988). 1 The Push Pin Styles (Palo Alto: Communication

Arts Magazine, 1970); Seymour Chwast, The Left3 The posters produced during the Paris uprisings Handed Designer (New York: Harry N. Abrams, were the collective effort of the Atelier Populaire, a 1985); Milton Glaser, Graphic Design (Woodstock: group of art students who had seized their schools’ Overlook Press, 1973); and Gertrude Snyder and printing studios and produced as many as five Alan Peckolick, Herb Lubalin: Art Director, hundred posters a day. The posters were Graphic Designer, and Typographer (New York: statements of resistance, daily news reports of American Showcase, 1985). Other artists who factory strikes, and notices of police brutality. See worked with the Push Pin Studios include John James C. Douglass, “The Graphics of Revolution,” Alcorn, Sam Antupit, Paul Davis, Herb Levitt, Print 22, 5 (September-October 1968): 1, 5-20. Reynold Ruffins, and Barry Zaid.

Whereas the camera and scissors have dominated avantgarde design since the 1920s, the Push Pin designers celebrated an aesthetic of the hand. In the 1968 poster shown above, Glaser inserted the client’s product— a portable Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass—into a landscape borrowed from the fifteenthcentury painter Piero di Cosimo. Glaser thus depicted Pop-inspired Italian design with references to Renaissance classicism, metaphysical surrealism, and

American comic book illustration.3

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223 .37STRéET

Like the illustrations of Glaser and Chwast, the typography of Herb Lubalin shows a love for exaggerating the familiar. Lubalin abandoned modernist standards of “invisible” text and classical proportions in favor of intensifying the distinctive features of an alphabet— thinner thin strokes, rounder “o’s,” sharper serifs, and inventive ligatures. Lubalin’s own corporate logo, designed in 1967 with his partner Tom Carnase, has sinuous swashes that recall Victorian engraving, but whose fat, almost uniform weight makes the mark bold and “contemporary.”

While Glaser, Lubalin, and others appealed to the changeable tastes of middle-class consumers, another segment of the American design profession searched for a universal style that would communicate through a neutral vocabulary of photography, geometry, schematic drawings, systematically applied grids, and spare, sans-serif typefaces. Although the notion of an “International Style” seemed inappropriate in the U.S. for the design of popular media or for promoting consumer goods, it was embraced in the 1960s as the official visual “language” of corporate, institutional, and governmental communications, in the tradition of design for the public good.

In 1974 a set of pictorial symbols, designed for use in airports, hospitals, and office buildings, was endorsed by the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AICA). The project was overseen by a committee of prominent designers, including Thomas Geismar, Rudolph de Harak, and Massimo Vignelli, each of whom had built successful businesses during the 1960s designing signage and identity programs based on modernist principles. Seymour Chwast also belonged to the committee— for the rigorously eclectic Chwast, modernism, like any historical style, had its appropriate uses.4

The project aimed to express objective scientific methods rather than the personalities of individual designers. The group analyzed past examples and instructed the firm Cook & Shanosky to design a new set of symbols. The committee used semiotic terminology to phrase its recommendations, adding to the “scientific” authority of its report. Although the DOT symbols aspired to rational universality, their plump, sausage-like forms carry the faint yet unmistakable flavor of the Pop design culture of the 1970s.

For a more detailed discussion of international symbols, see the essay “Modern Hieroglyphs” included in this book.

2. Glaser is quoted in Sterling Mcllhany, “Milton

Glaser,” Graphis 16, 93 (November-December 1960): 508. For a more recent statement of the same idea, see Milton Glaser, “Some Thoughts on Modernism: Past, Present and Future,” A/GA Journal of Graphic Design 5, 2 (1987): 6.

3. Glaser connects his work to comic book art in

“Comics, Advertising, and Illustration,” Graphis 28, 160 (1972-1973): 104-117. On the historicism in 1960s design, see “Art Nouveau: Then and Now,” Print 18, 6 (November-December 1964).

4. American Institute of Graphic Arts, Symbol Signs (New York: Hastings House, 1981).

‘To bring to an end the state of war’

Designing Newspapers

1977 In the 1930s and 1940s many newspapers adopted modern headline typography. Flush-left lines, lowercase letters, and limited type families yielded clean, orderly designs that echoed the journalistic ideal of objectivity. In contrast, tabloids continued to use mixed typography and sensationally scaled, boldly presented images. ^l Several papers changed more dramatically during the 1960s, a period when labor disputes and intense competition with magazines and television devastated many papers—The New York Herald Tribune was redesigned by Peter Palazzo with large, magazine-style photographs and assertive typography, but the paper did not survive the decade. ²

The notoriously conservative New York Times developed an entirely new graphic image during the mid-1970s. Louis Silverstein, an advertising designer who had been head of The Times’s promotion department since 1952, brought techniques from progressive advertising, such as large type and photographs and witty juxtapositions of image and text, to the newspaper. Silverstein’s imaginative use of typography in the newspaper headline above infused the journalistic message with emotional power.3

The national daily paper USA Today, founded in 1982, exemplifies current trends in newspaper design. USA Today’s full-color photography, bold information graphics, and telegraphic editorial style brought the spirit of network television to the newspaper industry, condensing events into an easy-to-read, ready-to-serve, nationally uniform package. ⁴

Contemporary newspaper design is described in greater detail in the essay “McPaper” included in this book.

1. Developments in newspaper design during the 30s and 40s can be seen by comparing John E. Allen’s Newspaper Makeup (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936) with his later book Newspaper Designing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).
2. Peter Palazzo, “Behind the Trib’s New Look,” Print 17, 5 (September-October 1964): 32-35.

New Wave, Neo-Conservative

1981 For the classic Swiss Modernism of the 1950s and 60s, grids, sans-serif type, and photography represented such values as objectivity and universality. By the early 1980s members of a younger generation were using the same elements to express an apparently contradictory set of values: ambiguity, complexity, and individuality. Proponents of “Postmodernism” or the “new wave” working in the U.S. included April Greiman, Dan Friedman, and Willi Kunz. ^l

The logo for the retailer Vertigo, designed by April Greiman and Jayme Odgers, is composed of rules, geometric letter forms, and primary shapes—the ingredients of classic Modernism. But here the elements form a free-floating series of marks held together by an external frame. Whereas classic modernist design aimed to produce unified, “organic” wholes, the Vertigo logo consists of discontinuous parts.

Compare, for example, Lester Beall’s 1960 mark for International Paper, where the framing element is formally consistent with the interior symbol, having the same heavy line weight and geometric clarity.

The clientele for new wave design in the early 80s consisted largely of art- and fashion-oriented businesses—clothing stores, architectural firms, restaurants, museums, and the art schools where the style was taught. As the decade progressed, however, the new wave became attractive to corporate clients. For a growing population of “young urban professionals,” new wave graphics offered a fresh, forward-looking companion to fashionable Postmodern architecture, established as a corporate idiom during the age of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

1. An early article to use the terms Postmodern, new wave, and Swiss-punk in reference to graphic design is Jean W. Progner, “Play and Dismay in Post-Modern Graphics,” ID 27, 2 (1980): 42-47.
2. On new wave corporate graphics, see Michael Bierut, “Corporate Design: A Cutting Edge in the Age of Entropy?” ID 35, 2 (1988): 30-33.

Electronic Publishing: Off-line and On-line

1985 During the 1980s the microcomputer became a commonplace office machine. By making typographic production less expensive and by centering many tasks in an accessible network of machines and services, the system of “desktop publishing” (whose equipment rarely sits on a single desk) has enabled many designers to establish small studios. Computers have also encouraged more people to publish more documents— with or without help from professional designers.

Microcomputer typography can closely approximate the appearance of traditional typesetting, or it can be emphatically crude. In the mid-80s designers Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans dramatized the potential harshness of bit-mapped typefaces. Calling themselves “the new primitives,” they refused to use the computer as an instrument for imitating typographic norms.1 They founded the digital type foundry Emigre in 1984, anticipating the proliferation of numerous small, independent distributors of typefaces in the early 90s. In addition to transforming design for print, the rise of the microcomputer spurred the growth of on-line communication, in which documents are stored and disseminated electronically. Since the 1970s, database services have transmitted centrally-stored information to terminals in libraries and offices. Networks such as the Internet, once restricted to university and government employees, became increasingly accessible during the mid-90s, while smaller databases and interactive publications were available on CD-ROMS and other media.

The design considerations involved in on-line publishing are different from those of print. How many ways will a document be output? How is the information organized and accessed? How is the user oriented within the document? Does the interface imitate a familiar environment—such as an office desktop—or does it try to develop a new “vernacular” for an electronic culture?

1. Zuzana Licko and Rudy Vanderlans, “The New Primitives,” ID 35, 2 (March-April 1988): 60.
2. An early work on this subject is Stephen T. Kerr, “Instructional Text: The Transition from Page to Screen,” Visible Language 20, 4 (1986): 368-392.

History of Design/Design as History

1989 Graphic design has been established as a relatively unified “profession” for several decades, with tacitly understood aims and limits. Graphic design has emerged as a humanistic discipline which, like painting and architecture, aims to transcend utility to enrich sensual and intellectual experience. Some critics, however, have recently noted that graphic design lacks the historical self-awareness common to other humanist disciplines, which have long traditions of debate over theory, style, and purpose.1

Some design historians have worked to identify a base of important movements and individuals: a humanist discipline needs a humanist heritage. Philip Meggs produced the first encyclopedic history of graphic design in 1983. His narrative begins with cave painting and progresses toward the modern profession and the work of individual designers.2

A history of the design profession could be fortified, complemented, or even engulfed by a study of those forms existing beyond or beneath the domain of “graphic design”—the bulk of graphic communication, from interoffice mail to anonymous soapboxes, does not appear in the annuals of professional societies. Scholarship that fits this more inclusive view includes Adrian Forty’s 1986 Objects of Desire, which analyzes the politics and economics of design through case studies ofthe sewing machine, the automated office, and the graphics of the London Underground. ³ For history to be valuable to contemporary designers, it should address the origins and aims of the profession; this orientation helps make scholarship relevant to practice. But the profession can be studied as a changing institution that has interacted with and defined itself against other modes of expression.

1. See Victor Margolin, “A Decade of Design History in the United States, 1977-87,” Journal of Design History 1, 1 (1988): 51-72.
2. Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983).
3. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society from Wedgewood to IBM (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

Mass Media/Micro Media

1993 The 1980s and early 90s witnessed the growth Of huge global corporations that own hundreds and even thousands Of media properties in film, publishing,

0 music, and television. perhaps the most spectacular corporate takeover of the period was the merger of Warner Communications and Time Inc., which made Time Warner one ofthe largest media owners in the world. In 1990 Time Warner commissioned Cherrnayeff& Geismar Associates to design a symbol for the new conglomerate. Steff Geissbuhler, an associate at the firm, designed a hieroglyph that combined schematic drawings of an eye and an ear to symbolize Time Warner’s conquest of the senses.

The daring attitude ofthe new logo was matched by a series Of annual reports designed by Frankfurt Gips Balkind, who incorporated elements from pop culture—from the typography of surfing magazines to the info-graphics of Spy—into the conservative realm of annual reports.

In 1993, shortly after the death of CEO Steven Ross, whose flashy West Coast persona had embodied Warner Communications’ corporate culture, Time Warner replaced the eye/ear hieroglyph with a bland typographic mark, explaining that Geissbuhler’s symbol had overpowered the brand identity of the individual companies that make up Time Warner. The corporation also returned to more conventional design in its annual reports.

While major corporations have extended their reach during the past fifteen years, there has also been a proliferation Of independent producers across the media industries. The birth of “desktop publishing” and the growing accessibility ofinexpensive printing and photocopying services has encouraged the spread of “zines” or “fanzines”—small, crudely produced, sporadically issued journals aimed at narrow audiences. Lines have charted the philosophy and style of numerous subcultural movements, feeding fandom in the realms Of music, film, sexuality, fashion, literature, sports, and countless Other areas. The store See/Hear in New York’s East Village specializes in music zines and small-issue recordings.

Fanzine publishers, independent music producers, club promoters, and other makers of contemporary urban life draw imagery from a vast range Of sources, from local graffiti to national brand identities. Such underground activity is carefully monitored by huge entertainment companies like Time Warner, who frequently convert the energy of the street into products for mass consumption.