Chapter 22

Question 1

Postmodernism

Answer 1

a climate of cultural change that took place through almost all the cultural disciplines around the 1970s. In design, it designated the work of architects and designers who were breaking with the international style so prevalent since the Bauhaus. Postmodernism sent shock waves through the design establishment as it challenged the other and clarity of modern design, particularly corporate design.

Question 2

late modernism

Answer 2

a term proffered as an alternative to postmodernism for late 20th century design. Some observers reject the term postmodern, arguing that it is merely a continuation of the modern movement

Question 3

mannerism

Answer 3

a term proffered as an alternative to postmodernism for late 20th century design. Some observers reject the term postmodern, arguing that it is merely a continuation of the modern movement

Question 4

supermannerism

Answer 4

a term first used by advocates of the purist modern movement to describe work by young architects whose expanded formal range embraced the pop art notion of changing scale and context. Zigzag diagonals were added to the horizontal and vertical structures of modern architecture. An architecture of inclusion replaced the machine aesthetic and simple geometric forms of the international style

Question 5

supergraphics

Answer 5

became the popular name for bold geometric shapes of bright color, giant Helvetica letterforms, and huge pictographs warping walls, bending corners, and flowing from the floor to the wall and across the ceiling, expanding or contracting space in scale changes relative to the architecture. Psychological as well as decorative values were addressed as designers created forms to enliven dismal institutional architecture, reverse or shorten the perspective of endless hallways, and bring vitality and color to the built environment

Question 6

new-wave typography

Answer 6

Specific design ideas explored by Wolfgang Weingart and his students in the late 1960s and early 1970s and adopted a decade later include letter-spaced, sans-serif type; bold, stair-step rules; ruled lines punctuating and energizing space; diagonal type; the introduction of italic type and/or weight changes within words; and type reversed from a series of bars. This style gave rise to a prevailing typographic approach in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Question 7

halftone dots

Answer 7

the small dots from which printed photographs are comprised

Question 8

moire

Answer 8

the patterns produced when halftone dot patterns are overlapped and then shifted against each other

Question 9

Gutenberg approach

Answer 9

the idea that designers, like the early typographic printers, should strive to stay involved in all aspects of the process (including concept, typesetting, prepress production, and printing) to ensure the realization of their vision

Question 10

legibility and readability

Answer 10

The first, a quality if efficient, clear, and simple reading, is often in conflict with the latter, which is a quality that promotes interest, pleasure, and challenge in reading

Question 11

radical modernism

Answer 11

a reaffirmation of the idealism of modernism altered to accommodate the radical cultural and social changes occurring in the late 20th century

Question 12

Memphis

Answer 12

the Italian design group led by Italian architectural and product designer Ettore Scottsass that influenced the postmodern movement of the late 1970s into the 1980s. The name reflects the inspiration of both contemporary popular culture and the artifacts and ornaments of ancient cultures; form is prevalent in its design, and became the reason for the design to exist

Question 13

retro design

Answer 13

(from “retrograde,” or backward-looking): a movement based on historical revival that first emerged in New York in the 1980s and then spread quickly throughout the world

Question 14

vernacular design

Answer 14

artistic and technical expression broadly characteristic of a locale or historical period

Question 15

Wolfgang Weingart

Answer 15

• b.1941
• Beginning in the 1960s, he began to question the typography of absolute order and cleanness. He wondered if perhaps the international style had become so refined and prevalent throughout the world that it had reached an anemic phase. Rejecting the right angle as an exclusive organizing principle, Weingart achieved a joyous and intuitive design with a richness of visual effects in new-wave design. He used the printer’s camera to alter images and explored the unique properties of the film image. Weingart began to move away from purely typographic design and embraced collage as a medium for visual communication

Question 16

Robert Venturi

Answer 16

• b.1925
• a controversial and original supermannerist architect. When Venturi looked at the vulgar and disdained urban landscape of billboards, electric signs, and pedestrian buildings he saw a vitality and functional purpose and urged designers to learn from the hyperbolic glitter of places such as Las Vegas. Venturi saw the building not as sculptured form but as a component of the larger urban traffic/communication/interior-exterior environmental system. Uncommon uses and juxtapositions of materials, graphic elements from the commercial roadside strip, billboards, and environmental-scale lettering were freely added to his architectural vocabulary.

Question 17

Barbara Stauffacher Soloman

Answer 17

• b. 1932
• A San Francisco native and painter who had studied graphic design at the Basel School of Design during the late 1950s, she used a palette of pure hue and elementary shape in compositions that transformed the totality of the space. In 1970, the American Institute of Architects presented its medal to Solomon for “bold, fresh, and exciting designs clearly illustrating the importance of rational but vigorous graphics in bringing order to the urban scene.”

Question 18

Rosmarie Tissi

Answer 18

• b.1937
• a Swiss postmodernist designer who used strong graphic impact, a playful sense of form, and unexpected manipulation of space in seeking logical and effective solutions to design problems. In a 1964 E. Lutz & Company advertisement, different kinds of copy printed by the client—headlines, text, halftones, and solids—are illustrated by elemental symbols. Rather than align these images in boxes ordered on a grid, the five images appear to have been intuitively and randomly placed

Question 19

Siegfried Odermatt

Answer 19

• b.1926
• a Swiss designer who broke away from the international style in the 1960s. He designed a trademark for the Union Safe Company in 1966 that is the antithesis of Swiss design: the letterforms in the word Unionare jammed together to form a compact unit suggesting the sturdy strength of the product, sacrificing legibility in the process. In full-page newspaper advertisements for Union (Fig. 22–4), placed during prestigious banking conferences, Odermatt treated this logo as pure form to be manipulated visually, creating a plastic dynamic on the newspaper page.

Question 20

Steff Geissbuhler

Answer 20

• b.1942
• a Swiss designer and partner at Chermayeff & Geismar. Complexity of form is never used as an end in itself in his design; the dynamic of multiple components forming a whole grows from the fundamental content of the design problem at hand (Figs. 22–9 and 22–10). Careful structural control enables Geissbuhler to organize vast numbers of elements into a cohesive whole.

Question 21

Dan Friedman

Answer 21

• 1945-95
• An American who studied at the Ulm Institute of Design in 1967 and 1968 and at the Basel School of Design from 1968 to 1970, he rethought the nature of typographic forms and how they could operate in space. Friedman addressed the problem of teaching the basics of a new typography through syntactic and semantic investigations. Texture, surface, and spatial layering were explored in his work; organic and geometric forms were contrasted. Friedman believed that forms could be provocative and amusing to look at, and he freely injected these properties into his designs

Question 22

April Greiman

Answer 22

• b. 1948
• Typographic design has usually been the most two-dimensional of all the visual disciplines, but Greiman achieves a sense of depth in her typographic pages. Overlapping forms, diagonal lines that imply perspective or reverse perspective, gestured strokes that move back in space, overlap, or move behind geometric elements, and floating forms that cast shadows are the means she uses to make forms move forward and backward from the surface of the printed page.

Question 23

Willi Kunz

Answer 23

• b.1943
• A Swiss-born designer who does not construct his work on a predetermined grid; rather, he starts the visual composition and permits structure and alignments to grow through the design process. He builds his typographic constellations with concern for the essential message, the structure unfolding in response to the information to be conveyed. He might be called an information architect who uses visual hierarchy and syntax to bring order and clarity to messages, as seen in a lecture series and exhibition schedule announcement

Question 24

Jayme Odgers

Answer 24

• b.1939
• a photographer who collaborated with April Greiman. Odgers’s wide-angle photographs with extreme depth of field have objects thrusting into the picture space from the peripheral edges.

Question 25

Kenneth Hiebert

Answer 25

• b.1930
• a designer and educator who employed intuition and play in the design process. He retained the harmonious balance achieved through experience with grid systems, but in designs such as his 1979 “art/design/play” poster for a Paul Rand exhibition (Fig. 22–23), introduced texture, a small dot pattern, and a wider typeface range, and shifted forms on the grid.

Question 26

Ettore Sottsass

Answer 26

• 1917-2007
• an architectural and product designer who led the Italian design group Memphis.

Question 27

Christoph Radle

Answer 27

• designer who headed the Memphis graphic design section

Question 28

Michael Graves

Answer 28

• 1934-2015
• A postmodernist architect, he rebelled against the modernist tradition in the late 1970s and expanded his range of architectural forms. Classical colonnades and loggias were revived and combined with visual elements inspired by cubist paintings. Graves’s geometry is not the cool purism of Mies van der Rohe; it is an energetic, high-spirited geometry of decorative surfaces and tactile repetitive patterns.

Question 29

Michael Vadnerbyl

Answer 29

• b.1947
• a San Francisco designer who worked in graphics for products ranging from woolen knit caps to office furniture (Fig. 22–30). Vanderbyl combines a casual postmodern vitality with a typographic clarity echoing his background in the ordered typography of the international style. His poster for California Public Radio (Fig. 22–27) is an important harbinger of the emerging school. Forms such as the lines and gestures signifying radio waves are carefully selected for their symbolic meaning; they also play strong decorative and structural roles.

Question 30

Michael Manwaring

Answer 30

• b.1942
• Elements are given symbolic roles and become part of the content in this Bay Area designer’s work. A lyrical resonance permeates the color, form, and texture in Michael Manwaring’s graphic and environmental designs. In his series of posters for Santa Cruz clothing (Fig. 22–31), graphic forms and color serve the function of a traditional headline, linking lifestyle values to consumer products.

Question 31

Michael Cronin

Answer 31

• b.1951
• a San Francisco designer who often builds his compositions with shapes that become symbolic vessels or containers for color. His Beethoven Festival poster (Fig. 22–33), designed with Shannon Terry, uses the repetition of diagonal and curved forms to bring order and harmony to the composition. Three treatments of display typography are unified by their structural relationship to the edges of the rectangle and the green architectural elements.

Question 32

Paula Scher

Answer 32

• b.1948
• An outspoken designer with an ironic sense of humor, she worked as a designer for CBS Records during the 1970s. By 1979, tight budgets often forced Scher to develop typographic solutions based on imagination, art and design history sources (such as art deco), and her fascination with obscure and little-used typefaces. Russian constructivism provided important typographic inspiration. Scher did not copy the earlier constructivist style but used its vocabulary of forms and form relationships, reinventing and combining them in unexpected ways. Her use of color and space are different; the floating weightlessness of Russian constructivism is replaced by a dense packing of forms in space, with the weight and vigor of old wood-type posters

Question 33

Louise Fili

Answer 33

• b.1951
• After working for Herb Lubalin and art-directing Pantheon Books from 1978 to 1989, she launched her own studio. Working in book design, she was influenced by vernacular design in Europe. Eccentric letterforms on signs at little Italian seashore resorts built between the world wars fascinated her, as did graphics from the same era found in French and Italian flea markets and used-book stalls. These vernacular graphics incorporated textured backgrounds, silhouetted photographs, and modernistic sans-serif typefaces with decorative elements or exaggerated proportions

Question 34

Terry Koppel

Answer 34

• b.1950
• partner, with Paula Scher, in Koppel and Scher studio, which was founded in 1984.

Question 35

Carin Goldberg

Answer 35

• b.1953
• describes her work as being 90 percent intuition and acknowledges the influence of early modernist designers, especially A. M. Cassandre. Goldberg’s early experience as a painter informs her attitude toward space, as does an architectural orientation inspired by classes she shared with architecture students in school and by the location of her studio, which is adjacent to her husband’s architectural office. She says she “paints with her T-square”—functioning as a typographic precisionist with a painterly orientation. This explains the personal attitude that underlies her work, transcending her myriad and eclectic sources

Question 36

Lorraine Louie

Answer 36

• b.1955
• embraced the general resonance of the retro approach. Shape, spatial composition, and color are primary vehicles in Louie’s work.

Question 37

Daniel Pelavin

Answer 37

• b.1948
• Working in the retro style, he draws inspiration from Gustav Klimt, the Vienna Workshops (Fig. 22–40 and 22–41), and streamlined art deco forms. He combines a reductive abstraction with precise mechanistic forms

Question 38

Joe Duffy

Answer 38

• b.1949
• At his Duffy Design Group in Minneapolis, he and Charles S. Anderson designed nostalgic revivals of vernacular and modernistic graphic arts from the first half of the century. Historical graphic resources as diverse as Aztec ornaments and Ouija boards were plumbed for their form and color.

Question 39

Charles S. Anderson

Answer 39

• b.1958
• Also at the Duffy Design Group in Minneapolis, his inspiration came from humble, coarsely printed spot drawings on old matchbook covers and newspaper ads; the warmth of traditional typefaces and nineteenth-century woodcuts was applied to grocery-store packaging (Fig. 22–43), decorative emblematic labels, and trademarks recalling postage stamps, official seals, and pictorial trademarks of an earlier time.

Question 40

Neville Brody

Answer 40

• b.1957
• Taking a painterly approach to the graphic arts, he has designed album covers for rock music and art directed English magazines, including The Face(Fig. 22–47) and Arena. Although Brody has been influenced by the geometric forms of the Russian constructivist artists, especially Alexander Rodchenko, and by Dada’s experimental attitudes and rejection of the canons of the ruling establishment, it would misrepresent his philosophy and values to label him a retro designer reinventing past styles. Brody’s work evolved from an effort to discover an intuitive yet logical approach to design, expressing a personal vision that could have meaning to his audience.