Design Cult. Steven Heller
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Design Cult - Steven Heller страница 2
![Design Cult - Steven Heller Design Cult - Steven Heller](/cover_pre683015.jpg)
Take for example the psychedelic style of the late 1960s that was smothered in flamboyant ornamentation (indeed much of it borrowed from Loos’s dreaded art nouveau). Nonetheless, it was a revolutionary graphic language used as a code for a revolutionary generation—which was exactly the same role art nouveau played seventy years earlier with its vituperative rejection of antiquated, nineteenth-century academic verities. Likewise, psychedelia’s immediate predecessor, Push Pin Studios, from the late 1950s through the 1970s, was known for reprising passé decorative conceits. In the context of the times, it was a purposeful and strategic alternative to the purist Swiss Style that evolved into drab corporate modernism, which had rejected decoration (and eclectic quirkiness) in favor of bland Helvetica. In their view, content and meaning were not sacrificed but rather illuminated and made more appealing.
Antidecorative ideological fervor to the contrary, decoration is not inherently good or bad. While frequently applied to conceal faulty merchandise and flawed concepts, it nonetheless can enhance a product when used with integrity—and taste. Decorators do not simply and mindlessly move elements around to achieve an intangible or intuitive goal: rather, they optimize materials at hand to tap into an aesthetic allure that instills a certain kind of pleasure.
Loos and likeminded late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century design progressives argued that excessive ornament existed solely to deceive the public into believing they were getting more value for their money—when in fact they were being duped through illusionary conceits. These critics argued that art nouveau (and later art deco or postmodern) decoration on buildings, furniture, and graphic design rarely added to a product’s functionality or durability; it also locked the respective objects in a vault of time that eventually rendered everything obsolete. Decoration was therefore the tool of obsolescence.
However, decoration also plays an integral role in the total design scheme. It is not merely wallpaper. (And what’s wrong with beautiful wallpaper, anyway?) Good decoration is that which enhances or frames a product or message. The euro paper currency, with its colorful palette and pictorial vibrancy, is much more appealing than the staid U.S. dollar. While the “greenback” is composed of ornate rococo engravings, the U.S. bills lack the visual pizzazz of the euro. Of course, visual pizzazz is irrelevant if one is clutching a score of $100 bills: Putting the respective face values of the currencies aside, the euro is an indubitably more stimulating object of design because it is a decorative tour de force with a distinct function. One should never underestimate the power of decoration to stimulate the users of design.
Decoration is a marriage of forms (color, line, pattern, letter, picture) that does not overtly tell a story or convey a literal message but serves to stimulate the senses. Paisley, herringbone, or tartan patterns are decorative yet nonetheless elicit certain visceral responses. Ziggurat or sunburst designs on the façade of a building or the cover of a brochure spark a chord even when type is absent. Decorative and ornamental design elements are backdrops yet possess the power to draw attention, which ultimately prepares the audience to receive the message.
It takes as much sophistication to be a decorator as it does to be a wire framer. A designer who decorates yet does not know how to effectively control, modulate, or create ornamental elements is doomed to produce turgid work. The worst decorative excesses are not the obsessively baroque borders and patterns that are born of an eclectic vision (like the vines and tendrils that strangulated the typical art nouveau poster or page) but the ignorant application of dysfunctional doodads that are total anachronisms. A splendidly ornamented package, including the current crop of boutique teas, soaps, and food wrappers, may cost a little more to produce but still have quantifiable impact on the consumers with discerning tastes who buy them (and who sometimes keep the boxes after the product is used).
There are many different kinds and degrees of decoration and ornamentation. While none of it is really sinful, much of it is trivial. And yet to be a practitioner of this kind of design does not a priori relegate one to inferior status branded with a scarlet (shadowed, inline, and bifurcated) letter “D.”
Some designers are great because they are exemplary decorators.
The Decade of Dirty Design
Postnostalgia stress syndrome for the nineties (a curious love/hate relationship with grunge type) is finally ending just as the twenty-first century enters its second decade. Nostalgia is so nineties. It is time for design pundits to start looking back at these past ten years in order to neatly categorize and define the design of the era (assuming this can be labeled an era). Actually, I’m putting my dibs in to be the first to offer some viable categorization. I know it is cheating to do so before 2010 is officially over, but I am looking forward. What’s more, I hold that fairness is not an issue when staking out one’s pundit-turf. So let’s begin . . .
The year 2000 began tumultuously with the contested election of George W. Bush. The nation was in fairly good economic health owing to the surpluses accrued by the Clinton administration, and graphic design was rolling merrily along with plenty of work for everyone. Stylistically, designers had just emerged from a period of hyperexperimentation that pitted old modernist verities, such as order and clarity, against computer-driven chaos, which some called “postmodern” and others (myself included) sarcastically referred to as “ugly.” Yet from a more sympathetic and reasoned perspective, “the early ’90s was an extraordinarily fertile period,” according to Ellen Lupton at printmag.com, “In the U.S., a far-flung vanguard had spread out from Cranbrook and CalArts, where several generations of designers—from Ed Fella to Elliott Earls—had embraced formal experimentation as a mode of critical inquiry. Emigre magazine, edited and art directed by Rudy VanderLans, provided an over-scaled paper canvas for experimental layout, writing, and typeface design.” And let’s not forget David Carson’s stinging jabs at typographic propriety. He significantly influenced a generation to embrace typography as an expressive medium.
No matter which side of the aesthetic or philosophical divide one was on, this was a critically exciting time to be a graphic designer. Although the computer was the dominant medium, during the early nineties designers were transitioning from the hand to the pixel, experiencing all the visual quirks and anomalies that came with technological unease. By the end of the decade and the beginning of the twenty-first century, despite the Y2K-end-of-civilization hoopla, the computer was firmly entrenched in the lives of designers, and not only was there an aesthetic calming down, but a frenetic media migration. Designers were relying on the computer not only for clean, crisp, and flaw-free print work, they were turning from the printed page to video, audio, and other motion and sound formats.
Mastery of the computer’s options meant by the end of the twentieth century a new generation of designers were commanding much more than merely Illustrator, Quark, and Photoshop programs; they had figured out how to wed technique to concept, and produce design that often had an exterior life other than the client’s message. The earlier grungy experimentation gave way to a new clarity and rationalism—even a new minimalism began to take hold with the return to Helvetica and other emblematic sans serif faces.
So arguably neomodernism of the kind practiced in, say, Wallpaper * magazine was the defining style of the decade. But actually that was not the case. Eclecticism was still in force, and while some designers were out-of-the-closet modernists, others followed an expressionist model. (You want names? Just look at the AIGA Graphic Design Archive for the evidence.) But eclecticism is too broad a notion to be a decade-defining style. The nineties was clearly the digital decade with all that that represents: an evolution from embracing digital mistakes