How do you refer to this style? What would you call it? It’s the coolest look of our youth (well, at least for us baby boomers). It stretched from the mid-’50s (when it first appeared in Italian graphic design) and through our childhood until it became the ‘retro’ remembrance of the ’50s through the mid-’60s in America. Everything hip and cool to our eye today from that period of time is in this basic style. “Graphique Moderne”?
Its hard-edged minimalist reductive “abstract” language was primarily based on the design solution of making a bold and simplified (almost generic) shape or icon/image. This image was then simply “knocked out” (in the old parlance) of a background color field (usually a bold primary color) and used as a background texture/image for the basic starting point.
Next, an image lifted from a different technology or medium, or a found item (a pencil stroke, a blow-out lifted halftone photo, a crude line drawing, etc.) is over-printed (printed on top of) that underlying bold abstract image. The resulting juxtaposition of contrasts created a beauty that’s hard to match. Often it was executed in many bright colors, but it also worked incredibly well with limited two-color designs. It was cheap and fast and effective.
This dust jacket for a z-level encyclopedia yearbook (1963—the peak era of the style) shows exactly what I’m talking about. This is the graphic language of a lost generation. It went from the high point of sophisticated design language to a junk store bin-filler so fast that it was like lightning. It worked so well that it was literally used to death. The youth simply pushed it away as the exhausted vision of an older generation it had become.
It was an easy “one solution fits all” approach that was used on everything from all those Disney/Golden books up through the heyday of popular graphic style seen in advertising and television. It even branched into graphic-heavy mediums like cartoons. Chronicle Books did an entire book of cartoon films called Cartoon Modern dealing exclusively with this look (think Mr. Magoo). You can’t pick up a magazine or design annual from the era without being bombarded with this “graphique moderne” style.
When it crashed into the corporate Swiss Helvetica style of the ’60s (that European design fad that dominated New York design culture back then), it morphed into the official corporate art style of NASA. Like Flash Gordon devolving into Neil Armstrong, it became a precarious hybrid style era until the very generation raised on this look for their every visual experience of learning rebelled. The radical separatists of the baby boomers dumped their old world and attempted to build a new one. Basically, Psychedelia and the “new” youth culture wiped out this period style.
Or so I thought. But a funny thing happened. In the Internet world, there appeared a new generation—the children of the baby boomers, if you will. “Gig” and show posters came back into style in a big way.
There emerged a large contingent of new artists making new posters and displaying them online for discussion. A new wave of illustrators and designers of the hip young generation could actually do work and publish it for general acknowledgment and learning.
There were many “copycat” stylists, simply learning by aping what they liked. New versions of Psychedelia and Punk emerged, as well as homages to all Rock iconography of the past. Soon there were more widely versed designers that joined into the mayhem and began to draw from their favorite design styles of the past.
These new stylists began to experiment with this old “retro” style and pushed into arenas where it had never gone—like Rock & Roll. It worked beautifully. The basic idea/approach of this lost/rejected style worked SO well in this application that it became the dominant look to emerge from this Internet-born phenomenon. It APPEALED.
It rapidly broke out of the confines of a website subculture and swept into the larger graphic design mainstream, so fast that it happened almost overnight. Now, you see it again everywhere you look, from TV commercials to theater posters to advertisements to magazine design, etc. etc. It became the graphic cliché style of the “oughts,” the Look of the decade.
To dismiss this as a “retro” faddish short-lived aberration is to miss the larger, deeper significance of what happened here. The group of people who were reared and weaned on this look in everything from the Wonderful World of Disney to Campbell’s Soup ads to Roadrunner cartoons associated this style with their childhood. It was their familiar comfort zone, the place of the womb (if you must).
The fact that this was originally the style of one of the most insecure, fearful, radical, fragile and psychologically violent eras of human history makes this an important stylistic movement. When the comfort zone depicted for the language of a new generation is the style associated with nuclear annihilation, paranoid Communist threat, amoral scientific achievements, political assassinations and crumbling social structures, what does that say about us? Some people like to call this style “Atomic Moderne.”