20th-Century American Industrial Graphic Design

Take a good look at this photo. This is what real home-grown American graphic design looks like. This was not influenced by the schools of Bauhaus or Constructivism or Modernism or anything else out of Europe. These guys never heard of Milton Glaser or Paul Rand or Helvetica or anything else out of New York City. The designers who made this sort of graphic design were American workers earning a living and learning how to do this stuff by either working in a print or sign-painting shop, in the Army, or taking those mail order classes advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics. This is real, unadulterated American graphic design as it was done for generations.

I first encountered this stuff while rummaging around in a junk store in a small town in a remote corner of Washington state. Part of the in-store stock seems to have been the treasure of a hoarder who had accumulated boxes and boxes of paper stuff going back some 70 years. The owner of the shop was shuffling items into the floor stock as they unpacked. This was almost 30 years ago and the same little shop is still unpacking crap.

Apparently this hoarder was interested in American industry. He seemed to have subscribed to dozens of trade magazines from across the spectrum of American industry. I found sets of the trade magazines from the iron industry (The Iron Age), the nuclear industry (Nucleonics), the chemical industry (Chemical Industry News), the timber industry (The Logger), and even the funeral industry (Sunnyside & Casket). All of these magazines were from a period covering the postwar years (1945–65).

I was fascinated by these things. I began to collect trade magazines from across the 20th century. What initially attracted me were the wonderful images I found. Incredible photographs, charts, logos, layouts, illustrations. As I collected these magazines together, along with other advertising brochures and publications, I began to notice something. Something sorta mind-numbing to a contemporary-schooled graphic designer. Seems it didn’t matter what industry, which era or what the subject matter was, or even the function of the piece—every single one of these publications looked the same!

In fact they were identically designed, as far as ideas and aesthetics go. It was as if one single designer designed every single thing I looked at. On top of that, it looked almost nothing like what I had been taught and had studied in mainstream design education and readings. It was as if I had tripped across a forgotten world—a huge American Empire of commercial arts and design that was completely forgotten. What the heck was going on?

Nearly all of the publications had the same primary color schemes, the same geometric layouts, the same typographic stylings, the same sort of images and illustrations. It was scary. There was an abundance of images of the products. If they produced sprockets, there would be a beautifully displayed selection of their sprockets laid out and photographed. If they had a new factory, they would reproduce a photo or an etching of their building. If they had a handsome boss, he would be in the adverts, pointing at the product. Everybody seemed to have the coolest little logos and logotypes. If they were particularly patriotic, they would have an eagle in their logo. Often the product (let’s say a gear) would be designed into the logo itself. This kind of “propaganda” thinking was the same overall for industry in America at the time. Over and over, morticians, nuclear scientists, iron workers, loggers, you name it. All the same. Arrows pointing, Hershey-bar type, cartoons, catalog covers, the whole works. How was this possible?

I wanted to learn this language. It was a design landscape lost in time. It was a language that spoke optimistically of the future. One cover story in the magazine Nucleonics actually addressed what to do if your Atomic car had a meltdown at the corner of First and Main. Logging was going to save America’s wildlife. Plastics were the future. Amazingly silly thoughts and ideas, but all honest as the day was long. They were not lying. They were just optimistic, as America and Science were obviously going to lead the world into a brighter better future.

Learning this design language was exactly like trying to learn a foreign tongue. I began by simply taking a prime example (to my eye) of the style, then physically tearing it down, pulling it apart and rebuilding it through my sensibility, my own accent. The result was the “Night Gallery” poster for COCA in Seattle in 1991. I call it the “Tool” poster.

It was an advertisement for a series of performance artists who were presenting their work as involved with technology and the machine. It was like the first steps of a language education: You tear it into pieces and learn what those pieces are, what they do. For this, I went to extremes. For example, to echo the lead type feel, which can’t be reproduced with modern techniques, I used two different typefaces that were remarkably similar in appearance to the untrained eye (Futura and Franklin Gothic). Then I set all the text copy twice, once in each typeface. Then I mixed them up as I pasted them into the poster. The result was the explosion of two similar typefaces clashing. It felt exactly the same as the impact of the lead type hitting and squishing into the paper: a “clunk buzz.”

The results were spectacular. The design world recoiled in horror. No one knew what to do with it. Steve Heller used it as a prime example in his famous essay “The Cult of the Ugly.” It won dozens of design awards and was collected by museums. The critical reviews for each of the events advertised on the poster itself would quickly degenerate into a rave about the poster, as if the poster were the only thing worth remembering. It was embarrassing.

This little exercise in studying the design language of mid-century American industry really taught me how powerful this kind of thing can be. What I was doing was basically the classic deconstruction and appropriation of another language. It was the classic “postmodern” experience.

However, none of this seems to explain exactly where this language came from, or even why everything I’ve found looked so dang similar. The best explanation I could muster was that one guy did it all—a physical impossibility.

The real answer was much more simple and human. Upon reflection, I realized these guys who did this design style were not graphic designers—they were industrial designers/engineers. They designed gears and machinery and sprockets. When the boss bought an ad in an industry magazine, he’d walk back to the drafting department, slap it down on the desk, and say, “Here, I bought an ad in this magazine to support the biz. Make an ad for me.” The designer would say, “Me? I make sprockets! I don’t know from adverts!”

The boss would then reply, “Here, make it look like these. These are ads. Make it look like this…”

Thus was born a style and a language so powerful that it dominated American design language forms for most of the 20th century. Non-graphic designers did graphic design by copying other folks’ examples. After a while, a set of standards became solidified and adhered to. An unspoken graphics standard manual was created. That’s why everything looked the same.

This was also how I learned this language. I can “speak it” at will. It is now incorporated into every piece of design I do. It’s as if I analyzed Hemingway so thoroughly that I absorbed his style into my own. That’s how we all do things. It’s how we learn to do everything we know. We don’t invent walking, we watch our parents walk and try to walk like them. In time we walk our own way, and we become ourselves. We’re just people, you know?