Castles
Made
of Sand

by Lorraine Wild

Thousands of Brochures

In 1980, my friend Bill Bonnell, a very successful and elegant designer of the American-Swiss persuasion, was working as a consultant on a brochure about some sort of customer service offered by IBM. At the time, all design work for the company had to be approved by Paul Rand, who was also a consultant for IBM, though “consultant” doesn't begin to describe the command that Rand wielded over that organization and its designers, both in- and out-of-house. Bonnell, like so many others at that period, was exhilarated by the typographic moves of Weingart, Friedman, Kunz, and probably also by the Russian avant-garde (which, after all, was the root of Swiss revisionism). There was a big exhibition on the Russians in Washington, which was one of the first times you could actually see the work that had only really become available in publications a few years earlier, and a lot of young designers were excited by it.

So Bonnell, hardly a rebel but alive to all this, made the tiniest formal move on his brochure—layering a plus sign, which was a meaningful part of the text—with its own shadow in the center of the brochure. The plus sign and its shadow (approved by his client, since it functioned within a design that adhered to the IBM identity guidelines) reverberated with a sprightly energy, with its allusion to the “deep space” of an El Lissitzky composition and the Basel revisionists.

Thousands of the brochures were printed, yet when Paul Rand saw them, he angrily demanded that they be put in the trash (which they were). Bill was told to do it over and scolded like a recalcitrant school kid. I vividly remember Bill telling me this story, and how incredulously funny the whole thing seemed. On one hand, how could a little old drop shadow damn a piece of print (and its designer) to the garbage can? On the other hand, how could a guy like Rand, who knew so much about typography, be so brittle as to think that the minimalized modernism of the 1970s was the ultimate, perfected form of visual communication, never to be altered in the least little bit?

Sounds stupid, doesn't it? Well, if you think it sounds dumb now, can you imagine how stupid it all seemed if you were young back in the late seventies? Can you imagine a job interview where you were warned you would only be allowed to use four typefaces (with no idea of what the typefaces might be used to communicate)? Or how about being told in graduate school that correct typography consists of using only one font with one weight change? This would happen despite trips to the library to see great books of the past, many of them typographic mélanges that would cause any of your professors to drop dead. Or what if every “good designer” you knew started projects with the mechanics of the grid, and concepts seemed to be something only advertisers worried about? What if you saw the daily evidence piled up around you that the world operated with thousands of visual codes, but somehow you would not be taken seriously if you used any of them other than the desiccated form that modernism had devolved into? Could you be forgiven, perhaps, for beginning to suspect that what you were being taught was not actually modernism at all, but habit? Or bizarre fraternity rituals? The similarities to frat hazing were alarming; if you did what you were told without questions, you would be let “in”; everything depended upon emulating the cool, older guys who had managed to convince everyone that they were in charge. If you asked questions, there were no sensible answers and you definitely risked rejection.

Could you be forgiven, perhaps, for beginning to suspect that what you were being taught was not actually modernism at all, but habit? Or bizarre fraternity rituals?

***

A book on the history of Graphic Design

Personally, I decided in the face of all that I had already experienced as a young designer, with doubts, to escape to graduate school, where I thought I could recuperate some sense of design as a process, with a history, an ethos, etc., etc. That's another story, but while I was there, perusing the paltry literature of graphic design, I assumed that it would be minutes, just minutes, until the art history students I saw around me discovered graphic design.

After all, art historians had recently discovered photography, and in just a short while, a time certainly no longer than the years Mr. Poynor documents in No More Rules, a rich literature of historical and contemporary photography had appeared. And I'm not just talking about picture books, but books with ideas attached to the pictures: historical documentation, analyses of contemporary work, exhibitions, and diverse interpretations.

About as terrorizing, it turns out, as Y2K, and similarly groundless. For reasons that are obviously complex, if not mystifying, the story of graphic design is still pretty much below the general academic radar. I would bet cash that there are still more college seminars on Madonna (or, pathetically, Britney) than there are on graphic design. Poynor himself admits in No More Rules that though (some) designers have used critical theory, cultural historians and theorists have still barely recognized the existence of graphic design. Not that there is a shortage of books on graphic design, but most of them are picture books of interest to practitioners only (not that these do not play an important role in the field, but still...).And now we have blogs, and we do not have to worry about anyone coming up with new or original ideas about graphic design, despite the self-proclaimed rebellion in so much of the current digital “conversation.” No documentation, no footnotes, no idea that anyone, designer or not, has ever said anything about graphic design before, other than what has just scrolled by on whatever thread you are reading. Every day is a new day on the blogs.

Poynor himself admits in No More Rules that though (some) designers have used critical theory, cultural historians and theorists have still barely recognized the existence of graphic design.

So I cannot be anything but grateful for the publication of No More Rules. I do not think it is widely understood just how difficult it is to pull a book like this together: to gather the material, clear the rights, substantiate and present the story with any sort of confidence at all. Let's just say that it is part of the reason that the literature of graphic design is evolving so slowly. Rick Poynor is one of our heroes; not a graphic designer, but a self-described “fellow traveler” who, as the founding editor of Eye, reestablished (and reinvented) an international approach to graphic design journalism that transcended the dog 'n' pony show-ghetto into which most magazines had devolved in the eighties. He is also responsible for one of the most important compilations of new typography to document the work as it was happening: Typography Now, published in 1991; and recently, Obey the Giant, a compilation of his own essays on graphic design that has become required reading in many design departments.

***

What about those left behind?

No More Rules is about graphic design produced between 1980 and 2000. In his introduction, Poynor claims that it really isn't a history as such, but an explanation of a period marked by new images, ideas, arguments, experiments, and technologies driven by the influence of postmodernism. I'm not sure this distinction will register with many readers, since Poynor's book takes the familiar form of a survey. He provides a clear definition of postmodernism as an ongoing cultural phenomenon (rather than a formal fad), and he describes fairly accurately the commonly overlooked (or denigrated) relationship between graphic design practice and postmodern theory. He wisely substitutes the usual cavalcade of geniuses with an exploration of the origins of the work, and then a set of themes: Appropriation, Techno, Authorship, and Opposition.

Many of the original critics of the sort of work featured here excoriated it on the grounds that it was too marginal, not commercial enough, and ultimately unimportant (and oh, yes,“ugly”). Of course, the very reason this work is worth reviewing is that it turned out to be massively influential beyond its tiny scale. The vitality of the experiments spoke to an audience that was ultimately seen as a market. That work and its proliferation, along with the shift to digital means, burst the bubble of the selfsatisfied design scene I described earlier. But the reader of No More Rules would never know that from what is actually depicted, since the work is shown in isolation, without any sort of mapping of the way that the production and proliferation and consumption of the new work proceeded. There are no examples of what these designers were visually reacting to; no cause and, equally, no effect.

Poynor claims that it really isn't a history as such, but an explanation of a period marked by new images, ideas, arguments, experiments, and technologies driven by the influence of postmodernism.

And that's the problem with the book, to this reader who witnessed and participated in the scene. It's missing so much of the specific energy and texture, the seriousness and rebellion, the orneriness and fun. As far as the late eighties and early nineties goes, it certainly is the only time I've ever witnessed designers arguing overtly about graphic design as if it meant something. If you read the “Letters to the Editor” from Emigre during those years, you begin to get the idea. Another example is that people no longer accepted the blank judgments of design competitions. Jurors' comments were insisted upon—a new phenomenon at that point, believe it or not.

Poynor describes a dialogue published in Print in 1990 between Tibor Kalman and Joe Duffy that addressed the issue of stylistic appropriation. What he omits is that Print was trying to capture a public argument that had boiled over between the two at the 1989 AIGA conference in San Antonio, after Kalman accused Duffy (by name! on the main stage!) of making what he deemed phony work. Can you imagine two designers almost punching each other out over anything at an AIGA conference now? Tibor's attack, correct or not, was fueled by the same sort of crazy enthusiasm on which the designers of the postmodern typographic experiments were running. One could sense the end of a bad old system, and it was time to take it down and/or reinvent it through a challenge to its visual language.

Younger designers desiring to explore other avenues were on their own. Poynor really focuses on the turn toward theory, but seems to miss that this was part, but not all, of a desperate search—which included design history and the investigation into vernacular—by young designers who had concluded that the only way to reinvigorate graphic design was to look beyond its conventional borders.

One of the problems with the themes of No More Rules and Poynor's insistence that they all be viewed through the scrim of theory is that he imposes an artificial order where there really wasn't much. This results in the work seeming more programmed and much more dependent upon the influence of theory than it really was. Some work included thus seems anomalous because it illustrates the author's theme, not because it is particularly representative of what a given designer did before or after the production of a given piece. I found myself wishing for more actual reportage, if not history, wondering what the designers (or the clients!) would have said they were up to—or would have revealed they were looking at—at the point of making or commissioning the work. There are a total of four “reference images” in this book (images that are there as illustrations of outside influences), all in the introduction, all book covers of theoretical texts.

Poynor claims that he is not writing a history, but I wish he had spoken to more people and written his book as a reporter, because the story of the big generational change that ran alongside the technological one is going to be much harder to reconstruct...

I just don't believe that Poynor really thinks that the graphic design he is describing was instigated entirely by designers obediently reading and translating theory (and in fact he does address the issue of the [sometimes creative] misunderstanding or misuse of theory), but his concentration on theory as the primary engine of change seems a misrepresentation. Without a fuller explanation of what was behind the formal experimentation, the admittedly challenging design and typography of this period can appear to be pedantic and/or pretentious. I mean, who wants to see theory illustrated, anyway?

***

Rules dissolved by the water

The graphic design in No More Rules was simply not as purely bred by theory as Poynor describes. In the chapter “Appropriation,” Poynor connects the practice of visual quotation from either historical or vernacular sources with the critique (citing Fredric Jameson) that essentially says that when stylistic innovation is impossible, contemporary art (and by extension, design) becomes empty, and more about itself. He describes the distinction between parody and pastiche (in a nutshell: parody is meaningful/good, and pastiche is meaningless/bad). Then Poynor walks through his list: Barney Bubbles, Neville Brody, Tibor Kalman, Peter Saville, Paula Scher, Art Chantry, Charles Spencer Anderson, and on to Old Navy, describing their work as if it was created by a reaction to the existence of a theoretical debate (Old Navy?) around postmodernism, and as if “retro” was invented around 1978.

In the seventies a graphic design student might be asked to study Jan Tschichold or the classical “Swiss” books of Emil Ruder and Joseph Muller-Brockmann, but he or she was also probably spending a lot of time flipping through the bins at the local record store, which were a whole alternative typographic education in themselves. It is easy to forget how full of nostalgia and “appropriation” the imagery of pop music was, even in the sixties (look at the typography of Rolling Stone to this day, which adheres to a love of the muscular advertising vernacular of the American Type Foundry circa 1920), or how detached and “ironic” the imagery of a lot of pop music already was, even before Peter Saville (though he was really great at it).Who can explain why those naked kids are clambering up rocks on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy?

The graphic design in No More Rules was simply not as purely bred by theory as Poynor describes. In the chapter “Appropriation,” Poynor connects the practice of visual quotation from either historical or vernacular sources with the critique (citing Fredric Jameson) that essentially says that when stylistic innovation is impossible, contemporary art (and by extension, design) becomes empty, and more about itself.

Next to Poynor's theory books and the big pile of magazines and album covers I'm proposing, I'd add the ironic visuals of Warhol, Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, and pop and conceptual art of many kinds; comic books, especially the underground ones; psychedelia of all sorts; “ad hocism”; the playfulness of Letraset; the relative novelty of Xerox art and mail art; Monty Python; and the deadpan vernacular of the National Lampoon parodies; not to mention all of the campiness of so much sixties culture, high and low. Poynor does mention the postmodern architects. There's no doubt that Venturi was important, and that by the seventies young graphic designers thought architecture was pretty interesting for its debates. And people were already scavenging through the flea markets for vintage clothing, old furniture, and printed matter, too; of course. The preferred era was the stuff just on the cusp of modernism, the thirties and the forties, which was valued for its ironic contrast to the stripped down, bland version of modernism one was supposed to master.

And if you were a student at Cranbrook in the seventies, you already knew Ed Fella's “art design” (though he did not call it that yet), which was already anticipating the tsunami of change. It was obvious. You did not need theory or Wolfgang Weingart to know which way the wind blew. And forward to the eighties: there was punk, the free-for-all of the Dutch work that was so inspiring (which Poynor does include), and where in the world is Tadanori Yokoo? I could go on and on, the point being that young designers in the seventies and eighties let life into what was a closed visual system. Though Poynor translates this largely as a search for autonomy or selfexpression, I strongly disagree that this is all that accounts for the energy and effort of that work. I think the desire to make work that participated with as much intelligence and vitality as the rest of the culture was what was at stake!

That certainly was what motivated me, along with so many other young educators later in the eighties, to begin to work by revising the way that design was taught; that, and using design history, understanding that the visual conventions of modernism were not timeless truths, but instead, the results of a visual response to social, economic, and technological change, and that we were facing a similar situation. My question back in 1991 was, “If the audience has changed and the production has changed, and the messages might change, wouldn't common sense suggest that the notion of form might evolve too?”

***

And there were piles of sand...

Poynor documents a lot of work that came out of the schools, but the limitations of his survey format hinder his explanation. For a time, some of the design schools were more responsible for creating a space where a little perspective and independence about the practice and the “profession” could occur than anywhere else. The formal investigations produced by students and teachers were produced against this context, which utilized, and was enabled by, a reading of critical theory, and had large targets. However, the forms themselves, despite the early resistance to them by an older guard, were so alluring (and so specific to a younger audience) that, like every other formal expression of a cultural idea in our consumer-based society, they entered into the life cycle of visual style; that is, they were marketed. It was not only for the students' benefit that David Carson, for instance, regularly visited several graphic design programs in the early nineties. The designer who continues to make big claims for the mystical power of intuition certainly—and wisely—saw something worthwhile in the sort of surrogate graduate study that he could access though his travels.

Another weird omission from No More Rules is the impact of the digital tools for motion circa the mid-nineties. There are no images of Web sites or frames of motion graphics included in the book at all!

Another weird omission from No More Rules is the impact of the digital tools for motion circa the mid-nineties. There are no images of Web sites or frames of motion graphics included in the book at all! There is some discussion in the “Techno” section of the postmodern “simulacra” and the now charmingly old-fashioned optimism attached to it all in the pages of Wired, etc. But, again, Poynor's survey creates greater distinctions than actually existed between things that were in fact working simultaneously. Certainly the new “techno” tools had a big impact on “authorship” and this was expressed, again, through content, process, and form, since the space between conceptualization and designing (and publication) had so rearranged itself as to make the functionalist paradigm of modernism useless.

Well gosh, there's all sorts of work that designers do that falls somewhere in the spectrum between marketing and protest (Emigre magazine, for instance), and I would argue that some of it is critical to the existence of what culture we have, unless you cynically write off all culture within a capitalist society as simply serving a market.

That we can even talk today about corporate work, commissioned work, independent work, designers as authors, designers as entrepreneurs, or designers as socialist resistance fighters represents one small triumph of the “experiments” that Poynor describes: that design is not just one thing anymore, but many (maybe too many) things. Now we have the freedom to call ourselves designers or whatever, with no one acting as gatekeeper. It's true that there are No More Rules. Now you are to be judged on the quality of your work, period. Today the curious question is what constitutes the designer's mind, but it's a collective problem, one that you see playing out in a lot of contemporary dialogue, even if it's not very articulate. But the generational dissing so prevalent in, say, the recent responses to “Rant,” reminds me of what it sounds like to hear young women denigrate feminism. They have forgotten that the very ability to “make choices” is the result of the work of their predecessors, and an unflattering caricature of the efforts of the earlier generation has somehow superseded reality. The design equivalent—and Poynor's narrative—is that all that postmodern graphic design was concerned with was supercilious theory play, or formal solipsism, and it all got used up to sell sweaters or shoes, so who cares? In “Context in Critique,” Dmitri Siegel proposes that what “graphic design needs is an opportunity for all sides in the Legibility Wars to come clean, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of sorts. Then maybe we can move on and begin to examine graphic design as a process that inscribes economic and social context.” I wholeheartedly agree with Siegel: I just wish that No More Rules had supplied denser, richer, and more informed evidence of what transpired during the last twenty-five years, so that those who were not there to experience it firsthand might be able to make some sense of it. In the meantime, my paranoia about the historians taking over the story of graphic design has faded away, and every week some undergraduate reveals to me that another chunk of the very recent past is floating out to sea, as well...

I just wish that No More Rules had supplied denser, richer, and more informed evidence of what transpired during the last twenty-five years, so that those who were not there to experience it firsthand might be able to make some sense of it.

***