In my classes over the years I’ve always encouraged (insisted actually) that my students try to learn to combine type with image. There’s nothing worse or more mind-numbingly lame than the classic “picture and type” layout—where you have a picture and place all of the typography below it like a gag panel cartoon. Supposedly people take classes from people like me to get away from that kind of thinking. So, I always pushed my students into different realms.
Often the assignments would involve forcing the students to attempt to literally infuse the image with the type, slam the elements together, put them in a Mixmaster. The easiest initial step to combine picture and type is to take the letterforms and make them become an image. There is a term for this sort of thing. It’s called “illustrative typography.” There have been some wonderful books written on the subject, my favorite being a tome on its history authored by Massin.
One of the places where this sort of thing flourished and prospered was in American trademark design. For the relatively unsophisticated American designer, the most direct and descriptive solution to creating a trademark was to take the product the company makes (for instance, springs) and turn that product into a little cartoon character. “Mister Springy”!
The old trade magazines and newspaper ads are crammed with this sort of naïve design solution. I think it was the way graphic design trademark creation was actually taught for decades. Today there is a constant stream of charming books being published that put together collections of these upbeat and optimistic logo designs.
Another example of the sort of solution was the early record album cover. When the concept of album cover art was invented by the amazing mind of designer Alex Steinweiss, records were literally packaged in albums, like a photo album. They had a spine and a durable, heavy cover flap. Once you opened one, there were pages with pockets to hold the 78 RPM records. Each one weighed a ton. When the 33⅓ LP came into existence, the format morphed into the single-sleeve bulky cover of today.
Just like today, when a designer/artist/whatever was hired to do a record album cover, there were technical restrictions and tight budgets that had to be acknowledged. Using large photographs and big typography was prohibitively expensive compared to just using the printing process to create hand-rendered imagery (production art or “mechanical art”). By creating the illustration on the printing press using the hand-layered succession of individual colors, you could do it extremely cheaply and not have to incur the expenses of hiring outside skills like photo processing or lead typesetting. You can slam the elements together quickly, take your money and pick up another project right away, thus ensuring a steady flow of work. Often, record companies hired scores of these artists to create work even more cheaply on a salary, thus keeping their overhead costs down.
One of the very best ways to depict lively upbeat danceable music was to create “dancing type,” a solution I love and still use myself now and then. Just take some springy letterforms and bounce them around on the baseline and it literally looks like the type is dancing. So simple, so true.
The next trick of the trade is to make the type look like the client (just like those industrial trademark designers did). In this case, the client is the artist or the musical style involved. Thus, the dancing letterforms become Cugat dancing along with the band. You can’t get the point across much more directly than that, can you?
We don’t think like this much anymore. We are too cynical and too “sophisticated” now. We are more interested in making type pretty and then putting a swoosh or a dot in it, like all those stunningly lame pharmaceutical and sports logos. We worry about not creating anything too concrete in concept or it may run the risk of someone actually having an opinion about it. We practice a nonhuman, completely inoffensive, unchallenging design style. It’s almost as if the best logos and designs today are conceptually created to elicit literally no response from the viewer—a corporate dead spot as a “brand.” Zero risk equals good design! I miss those old dancing Mr. Springy logos.
Lately I’ve noticed a renewed interest in crudely hand-drawn type and lettering dropped into otherwise pristine layouts. It might be the harbinger of a hunger for the human hand to be allowed back into the largely machine-generated design of contemporary design culture.
This is step one into a larger backlash that may take a few years to cycle through our thinking. Or it may die on the vine and produce nothing and go away like a silly fad. I’m waiting to see what happens.
