When we think of 1960s design, we tend to drift toward the extremes. Just like the way we think of the 1950s as one big giant ponytailed sock hop à la Happy Days, the reality of those periods of time were NOTHING like the fantasy. The 1960s looked very little like the flower-toting brightly colored hippie-dippie utopia of our dreams.
The ’60s was an era of extremes, yes. There was a dramatic generational divide between the parent culture and the youth culture. That was the defining break point. The initial blurt of the self-centered Baby Boomer generation was doing everything it could to break away from their parents’ postwar paranoia culture. It’s only natural that their graphic design language would be as divided.
The cliché is that the ’60s was Day-Glo swirl paisley flower-power silliness. In my memory of that era, VERY little of that really existed anywhere at all. It was something you may have seen some fashionable young person wearing on a sunny day in the park and parading for the local yokels—just like a Punk may have done back in the late ’70s. But that was about it.
The prevailing cultural design language centered around black-and-white photo-realism and severe geometric hard grid layout work. Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News comes to mind. THAT’s what the era looked like. CBS News was the standard we saw daily and aspired to in order to be taken seriously. The adult and extremely conservative WWII vet generation (I REFUSE to call them “the greatest generation”) was drab and serious and severe. There was an austere beauty to the brutish feel of the style, but frankly, it was depressing.
The kids simply ran in the opposite direction. Where the dull fun-less parents were black and white, the kids were full color. The parents liked strict conformity and rigid uniformity, their kids wanted swirling freestyle chaos. Pretty predictable, ya know?
Of course, when this sort of extreme dichotomy begins to emerge in such huge demographic numbers, there is an almost Hegelian tendency in a capitalist market to shoot for the middle ground. After all, you can hit more people with your money shot, right?
This little brochure for the women’s association of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra’s 1968 annual fundraising event is a great example of what the 1960s I remember looked like, or at least the mainstream graphic design dialog of the period. It was a tense effort to meld two extremes together. It never quite worked right, but the effort made is indicative of the era.
To begin with, look at that headline type. It’s classic 1960s “big idea” Swiss grid advertising text. Is that Helvetica? Look at the interesting and intelligent stacking and interlocking of the words. Look at the way the top bleeds into the border. Notice the carefully arranged placement of the secondary typography hanging in perfect balance off the irregular headline type. Best of all, follow that age-old maxim of design education everywhere: “When in doubt, reverse it out.” The typography is all knocked out of a big black bar. A ‘Hershey bar’ treatment.
So, you have this severe and sophisticated type treatment all nicely packaged in a big black bar that can be easily separated and placed atop (or bottom, or anywhere) and not really interact with the illustration. This is a classic “gag panel” type treatment. A picture with a caption, like you see in a New Yorker-style gag cartoon. But the caption is at the top, more like an advertising headline. It’s either the mark of a staid designer too afraid of what they’re doing to take any chances and/or an amateur. It’s a design solution you still see everywhere today in the highest levels of “safe” design. It never fails. Total chickenshit stuff.
This designer (or design “team,” I fear) takes this Hershey bar safety type and plops it atop a “wild and crazy” “youth-oriented” far-out image of two wealthy hipster “radical chic” young parents (!) grooving to .... Count Basie? Perfect!
This illustration style is a classic compromise style that emerged during this era. Close to psychedelic—almost, but not quite. It has standard line art execution, and it looks like 90% of the “clip art” you could get in those subscription catalogs of the period. They used cheap two-color, but man, what TWO-COLOR! You always have to use black (think of the type!) and then you use—MAGENTA? Oh, man. Well, I guess it fit the budget restrictions. It even almost looks hip. Again, almost.
To top things off, check out that “psychedelic” type worked into the illustration itself: “Night in New Orleans.”
New Orleans?
That far-out happenin’ town of the 1960s? Huh? Psych type in New Orleans alongside Count Basie? Well, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. And when you gotta appeal to two divergent generational extremes and graphic language style—simultaneously? Well, this is what it looks like. It comes off as a competent, but poorly thought-out, answer to an imagined middle ground. No one is offended, everyone is titillated and people fork over their cash for a “fun” time. Vegas anyone?
This is what much of the graphic design of the late 1960s REALLY looked like. This is what I remember filling the design annuals of the period. This was the “new standard” that launched the ’70s illustration revolution, the crap that startled the modern graphic design world. Middle ground synthesis. Très chic.
I absolutely LOVE the anxiety of this style.