Back in grade school and even junior high school, most of us were expected to subscribe to various Scholastic News Service magazines. It was always a struggle for me, because I came from such a poor family that these subscriptions (cheap as they were) became a burden because they were never budgeted for.
But we’d dutifully subscribe and we’d get these really lame little magazines every week. The teachers would teach the “current events” sections of the week’s lessons by making us all read this out loud and then try to discuss it with some sort of newly acquired understanding. Yeah, right. Imagine sixth graders discussing the Israeli/Palestinian situation with any sort of understanding or sophistication. It was a prime breeding ground for the more bigoted idiot teachers to try to turn us all into little John Birchers or commie liberals. We all hated these magazines.
Recently I found a small stash of these things. I was rather surprised. Not only is the reporting rather well done, but the bias is completely neutral. They say almost nothing as comprehensively as imaginable. It’s like reading a rather dull press release for a Rotary club. The memory of indoctrination seems to have been entirely instructor-induced. Who would have guessed?
The thing that struck me most of all is the visual style of these little mags. They were deliberately trying to look “hip” but not “too hip.” They needed to attract the students’ interest without alienating the teachers. They were likely designed by the 1960s equivalent of “fresh students,” young professionals taught at the highest levels of the education system as it existed then, working for a magazine company that sold to highly educated teaching professionals. This was “like talking to like.”
So, what did these things look like? Lame. But they were lame in an incredibly contemporary way. I love this sort of thing—American industry anonymously attempting to echo or even ape the graphic languages of the subcultures around them. They fail every time, but they fail in really interesting ways.
In this case, they fail along the lines of what was considered cool and “edgy” to grad students of the era. Like this collage/montage style. It’s the coolest. This is what collage/montage looked like in the mid-1960s (this is from August 1967). This is what “professional hip” found imagery looked like in 1967. Coincidentally, that was the infamous “Summer of Love.” Not even close, eh?
At the same time, it displays an enormous amount of print production sophistication. To prep this artwork by hand would require a rather extensive knowledge of graphic manipulation and printing understanding. Never mind that our current collective panic over copyright laws would make such a design impossible today. Back then, nobody cared about copyrights (except Disney). Today, everybody is fighting tooth and nail over the tiniest imagined “infringement of rights.” Craziness.
These covers exhibit extremely well-executed mediocrity. Strange, that’s the very same accusation leveled at contemporary graphic design of today. It’s like a perfect echo. It seems we’ve become people who really know how to put together designs of no depth at all. What we’re looking at here is not really graphic DESIGN, so much as graphic DECORATION. It’s just a nice image to decorate the cover. There is very little point beyond that. That’s what graphic design at its very worst always has been—decoration.
At best these covers attempt to copycat styles of the “hip professionals” of the era like Push Pin studios, Peter Max, John Alcorn, Lou Dorfsman, or any of a large number of extremely visible design/illustration hotshots that were studied in the professional magazines (and thereby design classes) of that era. It is always interesting how imitative design language is over the generations. We always learn to walk by copying the walking we see others do. We don’t individually invent walking by ourselves. All us young walkers slowly learn to walk in styles that reflect our own ideas and personalities.
The derivative design stylings of these crummy little magazines are sort of the perfect expressive form, the perfect intro (like the noncommittal writing style). It introduces us to this language as it exists in practice around us at the time. But it does so in a lame dull imitative unimaginative way that only induces us to explore further for more meaning. Thus we all learn. Cool, huh?