Abstract
Despite assertions of order and function, modernism in its earlier forms was essentially a romanticized search for the essential and the expressive. By the 1970s, corporate adaptation of the idiom in America had embraced its clarity and cleanliness, but quashed its attempts at meaningful expression. Academic postmodernism attempted to present the world not as a series of essential truths, but as a contradictory array of decentered contingencies in constant flux. In the wake of what some saw as the “urbane and defeated irony”1 of 1980s postmodernism, observers in the 1990s began to look for ways to reinsert meaning and expression into design while at the same time applying a juxtaposition of styles and layering of images.
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Chapter 6-Redefine and Redesign: Making Postmodernism Work
Natalia Ilyin, “Warm, Fuzzy Modernism,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 16,2 (1998): 4–5. Ilyin sees a revival of the clarity of modernism as a nostalgic embrace of the familiar.
Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 120.
For the book S,M,L,XL Mau worked with the subject of the massive volume, Rem Koolhaas, helping to shape the nature as well as the presentation of the book’s content. Will Novosedlik, “The Producer as Author,” Eye, Winter 1994, 44–53. Donald Albrecht, Ellen Lupton and Steven Skov Holt. Design Culture Now: National Design Triennia (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 166–7. Dan Friedman found the world of commercial design, even at a progressive firm like Pentagram, too stifling, too strongly dictated by corporate demands. In order to pursue the design’s subjective possibilities and social responsibilities, Friedman forged his own career in which he could practice graphic design as a facet of a larger creative endeavor that existed within the world of fine art as much as that of graphic design. Peter Rea, “Born in Ohio: Dan Friedman,” Eye, Autumn 1994, 10–6.
See Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver, Understanding Hypermedia: From Multimedia to Virtual Reality (London: Phaidon Press, 1993).
William Owen, “Design in the Age of Digital Production,” Eye, Autumn 1994, 35.
Max Bruinsma, “The Aesthetics of Transience,” Eye, Summer 1997, 43.
Recent critics have pointed out that the use of conceptual photography has become a marker of cutting-edge literature and that illustration seems a bit passé. Véronique Vienne, Chip Kidd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 7; 13; 15.
Ellen Lupton, “Carin Goldberg’s Variations on Book Cover Design,” Graphis, November/December 2001, 79.
Paula Scher, Make It Bigger (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 78–82.
Richard Eckersly, “Book Design: 50 Books/50 Covers,” 365: AIGA Year in Design 23 (2002): 345.
Véronique Vienne, “The Company It Keeps,” Annual of the American Institute of Graphic Arts 21 (2000): 42–53.
Still, even the designers at Knopf have claimed to be stifled by a corporate marketing sensibility. Chip Kidd: “We really don’t get a say in this”; Archie Ferguson: “They’re trying to cloak everything in something they’ve done already”; Carol Carson: “they only want to see what they’ve seen before.” Randall Rothenberg, “A Love Child in Hell: Book Design at the Millennium,” Speaking Volumes 3 (New York: American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1995), 10; Authors’ interview with Carol Devine Carson, 13 January, 2004.
Vienne, “The Company It Keeps,” 42–53.
Paula Scher, Make It Bigger, 78–82.
Authors’ interview with Carol Devine Carson, 13 January, 2004. Many of Knopf’s designers aim to acknowledge and even amplify the viewers’ understanding of the book as an object, as Ellen Lupton put it, “a concrete, physical artifact, not simply as a neutral solid to be cheerfully concealed by a paper wrapper.” Ellen Lupton, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 119.
Vienne, Chip Kidd, 9–10; Ken Coupland, “Chip Kidd,” Graphis, March/April 2002, 62–75.
In his cover for the paperback version of Sexual Slang, Kidd overlaid parts of images of nude figures with their slang labels, replacing words with pictorial icons. He managed to convince the publishers to have male and female versions of the cover, but ran into trouble when major book chains bristled at the female version of the cover. Chip Kidd, “Run with the Dwarves and Win: Adventures in the Book Trade,” Print, May/June 1995, 21–3.
Steven Heller, “Culture Wars,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 17,2 (1999): 5.
Kidd’s covers with their evocative, multifaceted combinations of photographs and text have been compared to those of Alvin Lustig. Vienne, Chip Kidd, 16.
Gall rates Lustig’s cover for Lorca’s Three Tragedies as an example of a design that satisfies these needs and at the same time “pushes the design envelope.” John Gall, In the Hat’s Designer, John Gall,” Critique, Winter 1998, 64.
Steven Heller, “Complex Understatement,” Print, July/August 1996, 44–9.
She points to Barbara Kruger as an example of a designer who has stepped beyond the design world into a socially active role as a fine artist. Kruger worked at Mademoiselle from 1967–78 as a designer and picture editor. Maud Lavin, “Design in the Service of Commerce,” in Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, ed. Mildred Friedman (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), 139–43. Rick Poynor, contemplating the early 1960s manifesto by Ken Garland, recently restated the need for the designers to be aware of how their practice shapes society, echoing observers like Katherine McCoy and Johanna Drucker who point out that design is neither passive nor neutral, but is a tremendously active medium that reflects the agendas of its clients. Rick Poynor, “First Things First,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 17, 2 (1999): 6–7.
Ellen Lupton, “The Designer as Producer,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 15 (1997): 6.
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Drew, N., Sternberger, P. (2005). Redefine and Redesign. In: By its Cover. Princeton Archit.Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-56898-633-5_7
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