10 Contemporary Graphic Design
 

Since 1990, Western designers have been open to an eclectic range of postmod­ern styles. There has also been a greater acceptance of the use of vernacular material such as "street art," comics, and other non-traditional graphic media. Because graphic design successfully established itself as an artistic professionduring the modern period, postmodern designers now feel comfortable refer­encing the popular culture that designers hitherto had rejected. Also, as large corporations attempt to develop corporate identities that transcend political and ethnic boundaries, there have been serious efforts to create globally effec­tive design campaigns. Together with the rapid development in new technology, these changes amount to a revolution in the graphic design industry.

Eclectic Experiments
 

"Grunge" Designs

 

In the 1990s new and innovative styles proliferated, and graphic designers continued to experiment with the limits of legibility. One powerful trend in popular culture that influenced graphic design was an interest in celebrating the unkempt, the ragged, and the disheveled. The term "grunge," most often associated with the music scene that sprang up in Seattle during these years, is an apt term for the overall effect of many designs of the 1990s. At this time, the Southern California-based designer David Carson (b. 1956) came to the fore through his work for a number of niche magazines, especially Ray Gun between 1992 and 1994. Carson's style can be summed up by the phrase "expressive deconstruction," meaning that he broke just about every standard rule regarding composition and legibility in pursuit of expressive effect; his works look as if they are in the process of being dismantled. While many of the elements that make up Carson's work—overprinting, chaotic typography, disor­der, deliberate "errors," blurred photographs—had precedents elsewhere, both in earlier movements such as Dada and in con­temporaneous designs, he put them together in a novel way that brought a new level of decorative energy to postmodernism. On the other hand, critics have repeatedly raised the issue of whether Carson's designs exist only on a surface level, lacking a thorough conceptual basis. According to their analysis, the word "decora­tive" takes on a negative tenor, suggesting ephemeral pleasure at the expense of serious thought.

Other noteworthy examples of expressive, chaotic graphics were produced in the 1990s by the British firm Tomato. Founded in 1991 by a collaborative group that included people with back­grounds in visual art, writing, illustrating, and design, Tomato created a number of dramatic record covers including one for Underworld (fig. 10.1). Although the band's name and the name of the album are quite legible near the top of the front cover, the rest of the text, some of which is reversed, is so overprinted with other letters and fragments of abstract designs as to be nearly impossible to read. Despite this unruly clutter, a bold symbol consisting of a fractured handprint inside a broken circle stands out clearly. This strong abstract mark looks somewhat like a sinister corporate trademark, its geometric clarity disrupted by the hand­print, which could remind the viewer of a crime scene. Overall, there are a number of deliberate "mistakes" in alignment and so forth that give the image a powerful kinetic energy, while the layering of type suggests a three-dimensional sculptural element that belies the flat surface of the cover.

     The expressive, illegible aesthetic still represents a significant force in graphic design in the twenty-first century. New young artists are exploring its potential, while basking in the aura of radical chic that surrounds it. For example, the French designer Benjamin Savignac, art director and one of the founders of DEdiCate, a very hip fashion magazine based in Paris, has made a name for himself mining the sort of expressive visual chaos that arose in the 1990s. The page shown here displays a glossy frontal bust-length view of a model typical of the fashion genre, yet the photo has been transformed in myriad ways (fig. 10.2). First, a hairline horizontal rule about three-quarters of the way down the page calls attention to a shift in tone and color intensity, as the lower portion of the photo is overall lighter than the upper sec­tions. Second, the shoulders of the model feature ghost images that make it appear as if she was moving during the exposure, even though the lower part of her body is frozen. Third, and most dramatically, the model's face has been shifted horizontally out of the central axis. The type on the page further masks her face, while a giant "X" seems to cross out the whole cover. A touch of humor is added by the grayedout vision of a hairdresser at the upper right, who seems to be overwhelmed by her flowing tendrils. Savignac's synthesis of hip design and the fashion industry, which also relies on glamour and spectacle, points to the high profile that graphic design has attained as an indicator of coolness.

10.1 Tomato, Dubnobasswithmyheadman by Underworld, 1993. Album cover.

10.2 Benjamin Savignac, DEdiCate, Paris, 2003.

Benjamin Savignac. Covers.

Depoliticized Design

Grunge designs have also run into criticism for their apparent lack of interest in considering graphic design an important part of social activism. Carson's oft-quoted remark, "graphic design will save the world right after rock & roll does," suggests a depoliticized sensibility that rubs more politically committed designers the wrong way. In an era when a vocal minority of working professionals have explicitly questioned the morality of fueling capitalist consumer culture, there has often been criticism of graphic designers who do not actively question the corporate dominance of graphic design. Because many elements of grunge design, and especially the overall impact it has of appearing radical and anti-establishment, are related to the strategies developed by the most political design movement of all time, Dada, some practitioners have been criticized for not sharing Dada's oppositional attitude toward the mainstream. As a conse­quence, the "citizen designer" movement has risen to the fore.

     Part of this mini-controversy over grunge design came about because of the penchant over the last two decades for corporations to try to appear hip and trendy in order to appeal to young consumers. This phenomenon actually began as early as the 1970s, when the "new advertising" swept through Europe and the United States, and companies began proffering an often ironic, playful sensibility to the customer. While it had taken decades for the work of the historical avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s to be absorbed into commercial culture, in the 1990s advertising agencies proved adept at identifying and exploiting elements of youth culture only months after trends appeared.
     Along with Neville Brody and Tibor Kalman, David Carson achieved a near-celebrity status in the mid-1990s that represents a new trend in the graphic design profession, as earlier artists, no matter how great their professional reputation, never received the son of adulation these designers garnered. One aspect that has helped to fuel the emergence of the graphic-designer-as-celebrity phenomenon has been the publication of monographs that enhance the visibility of designers even when they are still quite young. Whether graphic designers will continue to enjoy this sort of attention from the mainstream, or whether the era of celebrity designers will seem quaint in a few years, is unknowable.

Art Chantry

A number of artists with a wide variety of experimental, idiosyn­cratic styles have been able to find niches in today's design scene. Art Chantry first emerged in the 1980s in Seattle, where he found work publicizing concerts and bands that were a part of the thriving independent music scene developing there. Chantry is exemplary of the "contrarian" designer, who is on the one hand j part of the anti-establishment subculture while on the other working selectively for mainstream commercial clients. Part of Chantry's reputation comes from the fact that he has resisted the use of digital technology, which a number of designers feel has led to repetitive, homogeneous graphics in recent years. Chantry's idiosyncratic, expressive style makes use of lettering and images appropriated from the vernacular world to create compositions with a forceful kinetic energy that draw the viewer in. The poster Kustom Kulture (1994; fig. 10.3) publicized a local art exhibition and shows Chantry's unique blend of found photographs, chaotic varied lettering, vivid colors, and fanciful doodles. Chantry usually works to achieve a horror vacui effect, whereby every available square inch of the page is covered. The tongue-in-cheek tone of this work, featuring photographs of people with absurdly serious expressions, appealed to young people who cultivated an ironic, detached attitude toward the world.

    Throughout the history of graphic design there are examples of progressive trends later being accepted by, or arguably exploited by, corporate advertisers. As it turns out, Chantry's style was a perfect fit for advertisers who sought to appear hip to young consumers. Chantry, helped out by Hank Trotter, devised a sale flier for Urban Outfitters, an American retailer of clothing (fig.10.4). Featuring a mix of Futura, Franklin Gothic, Trade Gothic, and Rockwell, the flier is an ironic recreation of the cluttered, poorly designed advertisements of years past; it gently mocks the culture of the young consumer's parents. Flashy detail, such as the ridiculous Urban Outfitters mascot at the lower right, reinforce the satire. The text complements this design, as it features silly, old-fashioned-sounding phrases such as "A Fine Value!!" While fliers like this are of course quite ephemeral, they also give designers the satisfaction of seeing their work reproduced in enormous print runs; this flier was reproduced in a run of 1 million. The argument can be made that this son of commercialized counterculture is in some ways more insidious than straightforward corporate identity, inasmuch as it co-opts and-authoritarianism in pursuit of commerce.

10.3 Art Chantry, Kustom Kulture, 1994. Poster. Sengraph.

10.4 Art Chantry, Urban Outfitters, 1994. Brochure, norvheatset newsprint.

Historicism and Appropriation

David Lance Goines (b. 1945), a graphic designer based in San Francisco, has developed a historicist style that contains elements of both Art Nouveau and the Sachplakat approach of the early twentieth century. Historicist design dif­fers from the appropriation of the vernacular insofar as the artist borrows solely from artistic movements throughout history, and not from common signage or the like. A poster for the Berkeley Conference Center (fig. 10.5) revives the flat pattern of Japonisme as it was practiced by artists such as Edward Penfield in the 1890s (see fig. 1.30). Nineteenth-century advertisements often showed people absorbed in reading, like the figure in Goines's poster. The sensuous curve of the figure's back resonates with the curvilinear rhythm of Art Nouveau. Of course, the dense block of back­ground text further flattens the image while creating a swath of overprinting that would never have been seen in the 1890s.

In June 2005, Nike found out the limits of historicist appropriation as a marketing device when it borrowed from the graphics of the punk band Minor Threat. In order to create a promotional poster publicizing Nike's line of skateboarding shoes, the company almost exactly reproduced a famous cover from an album that the band released in 1981. Followers of the anti-consumerist independent record label Dischord Records reacted immediately in calling attention to Nike's appropriation. The shoe company quickly backtracked, issuing a press release that stated, "Minor Threat's music and iconographic album cover have been an inspiration to countless skateboarders since the album came out in 1984 [sic] ... for the members of the Nike Skateboarding staff, this is no different." Nike also assured the public that it would destroy all copies of the image.

     Nowhere has postmodern nostalgia for styles of the past appeared more startlingly strange than in Russia. After the col­lapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the now faded empire has gone through an identity crisis of sorts, and it is still not quite clear today what the future holds; will Russia become fully inte­grated with the predominantly capitalist countries of Western Europe, or will it remain somewhat separate from the West and continue to maintain social and economic policies derived from its Communist past? Whatever the case, there has been a pro­nounced thirst in Russian society in recent years for images that invoke the grandeur of either the former Soviet Union or even the Tsarist regime that the Bolsheviks overthrew in 1917. Take, for example, the package of dumplings shown here; it features an image of what any Russian would immediately recognize as a remnant of the Soviet era, a "heroic worker" shown with a hammer and anvil (fig. 10.6). The triangles that fly through the air because of the force of the hammer blows, as well as the forthright lettering at the top of the image, are reminiscent of the geometric style favored by 1920s Russian Constructivists such as Alexander Rodchenko. Other contemporary packages feature symbols of the tsars, including crowns and the double-headed eagle of their insignia. In a statement published in Print, the Russian graphic designer Yevgeny Dobrovinsky made light of the contradictory situation in Russia's graphic design community, suggesting that the perfect symbol of today's Russia could be "a double-headed eagle with a hammer in one claw and a sickle in the other." Russian designers have yet to establish a new style that will signify to people the changes that have taken place politically and socially in Russia. Just as Constructivist graphics were evi­dence of a strong vision for a new society in the 1920s, so the historicism and chaos that characterize today's Russian graphic design are evidence of a society that is not sure what it stands for.

By the 1990s, the ironic appropriation of "retro" visual culture had become a staple of the graphic design profession. A cover of Rolling Stone magazine from 1997 is a fine example, slyly sending up the pulp fiction covers of the 1940s with a photograph of the actress Gillian Anderson in the grasp of a hokey-looking monster (fig. 10.7). The hand-drawn lettering shows many of the same overwrought devices, such as the steeply foreshortened words "Beast Within!" which had been used by illustrators in the 1940s. Of course, Fred Woodward (b. 1953), the art director at Rolling Stone, is able to have it both ways, as he mocks the salacious themes of pulp fiction while simultaneously featuring a scantily clad young woman prominently on the cover. This sort of work is emblematic of postmodern artists' embrace of "kitsch," popular visual culture that is so awful as to be good.

10.5 David Lance Goines, Berkeley, 1993. Poster.

David Lance Goines. Posters.

David Lance Goines. Posters.

David Lance Goines. Posters.

David Lance Goines. Posters.

David Lance Goines. Posters.

10.6 Russky Khit, Russian Dumplings, 2002.

10.7 Fred Woodward, Rolling Stone, Feb 20, 1997. Magazine cover.

Fuel

The London-based studio Fuel, formed by Stephen Sorrell (b. 1967), Damon Murray (b. 1967), and Peter Miles, came to the fore in the 1990s with a style that was much more understated than the prevailing taste for densely ornamental graphics. The members of Fuel arc exemplary of the contemporary trend for young designers to coalesce into a firm through which they do not stress their individual contribution but rather the synergy created by their collaboration. Design firms' promotional materials these days are filled with references to "cross-pollination," "teams," and the "studio approach," whereby a diversity of viewpoints is integrated into each project. This trend partly represents the diffusion of postmodern theories regarding what some consider to be an over-emphasis on the individual that has characterized modern Western society; a point of view that has been especially evident in the way in which the history of art has been conventionally written. Collaborative design studios seek to reject the individual celebrity of a Carson or a Brody in favor of a collective reputation. Many of these new firms tend toward "hipper-than-thou" names as well as a rejection of traditional specializations, in tune with their unorthodox approach to the design industry.

One of Fuel's most inventive conceptual campaigns was produced for Microsoft's Xbox game console. In a series of print images, the slogan "play more" is written across witty photographs that appear to be culled completely from outside the realm of electronic games. In one image, there is an absurd picture of a set of false teeth soaking in a drinking glass complete with straw (fig. 10.8). The glass is perched on a prosaic-loo king table in a modest room, an image that contrasts sharply with the excitement nor­mally used to market video games. The ironic message is that people are becoming absent-minded as they delve more into the virtual world of the Xbox. The use of such plain-looking photos and simple text separates this advertisement from the chaos of grunge or the horror vacui style of Chantry and others.
 

10.8 Fuel, Play  More, 2000

Elliott Earls

In recent years, it has become harder and harder for graphic designers to create something that will get them quickly noticed. In an era when iconoclasm reigns, it is often necessary to stake out new territory in order to garner attention. Elliott Earls (b. 1966), who received his Master of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1995 after several years working in various design firms, has been an influential figure over the last decade with his striking designs for clients including Nonesuch Records. Now the designer in residence and head of 2D design at Cranbrook, Earls has been widely acclaimed in the design com­munity because of his visionary experimental projects, including work on films, poetry, music, and performance art. The sense that Earls has pushed graphic design into an expanded field encom­passing many disparate aesthetic realms has added to his high profile. In addition, he has assertively stressed his own reputation as an iconoclast, famously including on his resume the note that in 1988 he was 'Tired from Deharak and Poulin Associates NYC for 'general incompetence,'" and in 1995 he was again "fired from Elektra Records for 'general incompetence.'" In the 1980s, the firm of Deharak and Poulin was a staunch defender of the International Style, so being rejected by them serves as a young radical's badge of honor. Earls's popularity with young designers has garnered him the sort of rock star status associated with Carson and Brody.

    Earls calls his studio the Apollo Program, a retro reference to the sense of optimism that pervaded the exploration of space in the 1970s. His first success in typography came in the mid-1990s, when a numher of his custom typefaces were published by Emigre. The Emigre collection now includes typefaces such as Elliott's Blue Eyeshadow, part of the Apollo Program Font Set (fig. 10.9). Elliott's Blue Eyeshadow features organic forms and long, winding serifs that sometimes seem to turn back and attack or embrace the letter itself. In other letters, such as the "W," a sans serif form is shadowed by a calligraphic doppelganger. Some of the letters are so irregular in form that they appear to be falling apart in a quite literal demonstration of the theory of deconstruction. What is unique about Earls's typefaces is the way in which the overall work seems to have a strong sense of internal logic, despite the wide variation in individual letter forms. Without being too reductive, it is fair to say that Earls's typefaces feature the unkempt expressiveness that is associated with the ascendance of a grunge aesthetic.

    It is always fascinating to gauge how designers such as Earls with aggressively illegible tendencies put together publications that need to stress information as well as visual impact. Earls's pamphlet Presenting Cranbrook  is a fine example, as a series of rules and color shifts create structure, impinging on the text at the same time that it sets it apart (fig. 10.10). A repeated abstract floral drawing appears and reappears across the pages, sometimes confined-looking as if it has gravitated to a corner of the design, and in other instances roaming free of the grid, blocking parts of the illustrated works.

10.9 Elliott Earls, Elliott's Blue Eyeshadow Typeface, 2000

10.10 Elliott Earls, Presenting Cranbrook, p. 58. Pamphlet. Courtesy All Madad.

Stefan Sagmeister

 

One of the most recent new celebrity designers is Stefan Sagmeister (b. 1962), who grew up in Austria but moved to New York City in the 1980s, when he attended the Pratt Institute on a Fulbright scholarship. He later worked at Tibor Kalman's studio, M&Co. Like Kalman, Sagmeister yearns for design that means something, that connects to people at a human level. In 1996, he pioneered a unique stylistic device, a tattooed look, for a poster publicizing a new album by Lou Reed called Set the Twilight Reeling (fig. 10.11). In a technique somewhat similar to that used by the makers of psychedelic posters as well as Tomato's record cover for Underworld, here Sagmeister sets the basic fac­tual information in the lower right against a black background so that it is easy to pick out. While the recording's title also appears at the top of the poster, it is much harder to see because it seems to be drawn across Reed's forehead. This device extends across the musician's entire face, as the lyrics to a song are tattooed across Reed's skin. The image also looks as if a close-up headshot of Reed has been attacked by a graffiti artist; the expressive strokes of the hand-drawn lettering disfigure a pristine image. Reed's tormented lyrics are perfectly matched by this writing on his face, as if his powerful emotions are bursting out of his head.

Sagmeister took this eyecatching technique to a new extreme in 1999, when he produced a poster publicizing a lecture sponsored by the Cranbrook Academy and the Detroit branch of AIGA (fig, 10.12). In this image, rather than digitally adding the letters to a photo, as he had done in the Lou Reed poster, Sagmeister instead had an assistant carve the letters into his own body with a knife. There is an element of Kalman-like humor in the way in which Sagmeister's hand is shown clutching a box of bandaids, as if anything could cover the broad slashes across his body. The spirit of Kalman is also evident in the elements of sensationalism and sexuality that the work contains. Like his mentor, Sagmeister has been disillusioned by the commercialism of design, and at this point is able to be selective in choosing what projects to take on. The slogan that appears on the poster, "Style=fart," was one he had posted on a sign in his studio, there to remind everyone that graphic design must be more than just a trendy style that sells. In some ways, Sagmeister's philosophy is directly counter to that of David Carson, who has been attacked, perhaps unfairly, for turning graphic design into nothing more than a stylish commercial endeavor. In 2001, Sagmeister, like so many young high-profile designers, published a book that gives an overview of his career to date. Written with Peter Hall, the book is titled Sagmeister: Made You Look, and simultaneously celebrates his work while satirizing it. The subtitle, Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff), is typical of Sagmeister's self-reflexive sense of humor.
 

Stefan Sagmeister. Posters.

Stefan Sagmeister. Posters.

Stefan Sagmeister. Poster.

MTV

During the past decade, the time between when a new design style appears in an schools or in small, self-published printed ephemera or on the web, and when it appears in the corporate world, has diminished to the point where a distinction can often no longer be made. In fact, it is arguable that large commercial design firms and in-house corporate departments have co-opted the anti-authoritarian attitude so effectively that the age-old process whereby art on the margins gradually joins the main­stream has ceased to exist. A fine example of this phenomenon is the work of the in-house design department of the MTV net­works. MTV was originally founded in 1981 with a fairly simple concept of presenting music videos. From the first, the producers of the network wanted to establish a unique, hip design identity. For this reason, the original rather staid logo was created as only a touchstone, as the animator Fred Seibert (b. 1951) developed the now familiar process whereby it is constantly in flux, transforming into an eclectic set of shapes (fig. 10.13). Using cell animation, Seibert would have the logo shift from its original form into any manner of person, place, or thing, often including witty references to popular culture.

     In 1985, MTV was beught by the Viacom Corporation, which has since grown into a "Fortune 100" company that owns a stable of media properties, including CBS Television, Paramount Pictures, and Infinity Broadcasting. In the 1990s, MTV gradually shifted away from the music business and turned into a series of lifestyle channels that, because of its clout with desirable young consumers, wields enormous influence on the music, television, movie, advertising, and retail industries. Today, MTV maintains design departments headed by Jeffrey Keaton that consist of about forty designers of various types. Under Keaton, MTV has made a practice of hiring young designers fresh out of art schools in New York City such as the Pratt Institute and the School of the Visual Arts. These young employees are charged with the task of creating a continuous stream of graphics for both the on-air programs and the T-shirts, coffee mugs, publications, and print advertisements produced by the network. Essentially, young cre­ative people who would formerly have been trying out unconventional styles and concepts in their own time as they built a career are instead making lively, "experimental" designs for a division of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Because corporate entities such as MTV have so effectively absorbed and marketed the counterculture impulse of the young, designers who want to stay on the fringe, such as Earls or Sagmeister, have to go to greater extremes in order to maintain some sort of non-commercial credibility. But still, companies such as MTV are employing the young, talented admirers of "radical designers" as fast as they can identify and hire them.

     On any typical day, MTV's designers churn out compelling new graphics that make use of the most advanced trends. For example, when the network relaunched its channel, MTV2, in 2004, a series of teaser advertisements featuring a two-headed dog appeared on television, the web, and in print (fig. 10.14). One of the earliest teasers did not mention the network but used fractured words and an austere silhouette style to grab the viewer's attention. Later versions of the advertisement gradually filled in the informa­tion missing from the original. The MTV2 campaign and logo were designed to make a blunt statement, complete with a mutant junkyard dog, in order to appeal to the young men who were the target audience of the channel. In contrast, the 2005 launch of MTV's Logo channel, devoted to the gay and lesbian community, has been greatly understated (fig. 10.15). The logo for the new channel makes use of custom-drawn lettering that is reminiscent of the pure geometric type of the 1920s, as each "O" forms a per­fect circle while the bowl of the "G" does likewise. In turn, what could have been an unwieldy "L" is carved out of the negative space of yet another circle. The "L" is also matched symmetrically by the descender of the "G." This clean corporate shape is colored with a muted green. Overall, this logo is nearly invisible, as the designer went to great lengths to create something that could serve equally for a television network or an automobile parts company. Because of the nature of the Logo network, and the possibility that it might attract negative publicity, it would seem that Viacom has opted for the least expressive style imaginable.
 

10.13 Fred Seibert, MTV Logo. 1985. Courtesy MTV.
10.14 Stacy Drummond, MTV2 Logo, 2004. Look Here, Inc. Courtesy MTV.
10.15 Nancy Mazzei, MTV Logo channel, 2005. Courtesy MTV.

MTV Logo

The Comic Book Aesthetic

The designers at MTV have created a lot of buzz in recent years with the program books that are printed to accompany the net­work's annual Video Music Awards (VMA). The 2004 version of this publication showed how effectively the network picks up on current trends, in this case the popular resurgence of comic books and especially their longer, more sophisticated cousin, the graphic novel (fig. 10.16a,b,c). In a clever send-up of the long-winded, pontificating speeches sometimes made by characters in these "novels," as well as their plain, textureless style, MTV's version featured Bob, a fictional music lover turned record label owner. Today, this sort of appropriation of vernacular culture, which has radical roots in the postmodern work of the 1970s, is just another amusing way of designing corporate publications.

10.16a,b,c MTV, Video Music Awards (VMA) Program Book, Communication Arts, Mav/June 2005, p. 77.

Chip Kidd

Book cover design in the United States has been influenced by the work of one graphic designer more than any other, Chip Kidd (b. 1964). Kidd's reputation as a wunderkind owes partly to his immediate success in the 1980s, when he landed a prestigious position at the Knopf Publishing Group directly after completing his B.A in graphic design. Working in concert with another Knopf designer, Carol Carson, Kidd proceeded to revolutionize the design of the covers of fiction books, giving photography a more prominent role. Although not the originator of the use of photographic, as opposed to illustrative, covers of fiction books, Kidd proved to have a sophisticated eye for choosing an image that was both visually and conceptually intriguing. Often utilizing Futura, of which he is something of a devotee, as well as his trade­mark composition made up of two vertically-stacked rectangular elements, Kidd has produced over 1,000 book covers during the last decade and a half. As Veronique Vienne explained in her monograph on Kidd, his selection of photographs is so effective because they create a conceptual gap between text and cover for readers and viewers, allowing them to sort out this ambiguous terrain for themselves.

Considering his penchant for innovative photographic solutions for his covers, Kidd's other professional persona, as an editor of graphic novels—the more complex cousins of comics that feature sophisticated characters and narratives—for Knopfs Pantheon division comes as a surprise to many people. In fact, the art of the comic, with its carnivalesque aesthetic and tendency to devour and regurgitate aspects of popular culture, is in many ways at the heart of Kidd's photographic work. A childhood love of Batman initially drove Kidd's work in this area, and over the last few years he has produced more and more designs related to comics and graphic narratives. He has edited the works of both Ben Katchor and Chris Ware, while also overseeing the produc­tion of a number of cormc anthologies.

    Kidd's cover for George Saunders's Pastoralia (2000; fig. 10.17), a collection of short stories, represents a fine example of his more recent comic-based aesthetic. It displays his fascination with odd, ambiguous imagery, as the bewigged monkey is suggestive of playful silliness while the cropped face of a glaring man floats above the horizontal rule, bringing up issues of surveillance, judg­ment, and even the threat of violence. In this example, Kidd used comic-based imagery in the same manner that he used photogra­phy on hundreds of earlier covers, as a vaguely poetic device that challenges the reader to investigate how the cover and the text relate. For some viewers, there is an additional layer of meaning as the oversized Benday dots will recall for them the Pop Art paintings of Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), many of which were made before Kidd was even born. In typical postmodern fashion, Kidd devised a rectangular, geometric scheme for Pastoralia that recalls the elegant use of rules that was a defining part of the international style—while subverting the sense of clarity, order, and even seriousness of purpose with his employment of images that have an obvious lowbrow, pop culture pedigree. Likewise, his use of type involves a carefully calibrated mixture of sizes and weights, cropped letters like the E at the end of George, and an S in the title that drops perilously into the yellow rule. In a way, Kidd's use of ostensibly hand-drawn comic art brings the design of fiction book covers back full circle to where he began, as Kidd had played a significant role in the rejection of illustration that had rocked the field twenty years before.

10.17 George Saunders, Pastoralia, 2000.
Book cover. Courtesy Bloomsbury Publishing, London.

Work for Hire

Kidd's career has benefited from a relationship with his employer that is unique to the book cover design niche; he is allowed to offer his services on a freelance basis to anyone willing to hire him, including Knopfs major competitors in the fiction market.

     Kidd's fame as one of the cadre of iconic, celebrity designers that have dominated the pages of design books and periodicals in recent years, as well as the relatively unrestrictive terms of his employment at Knopf, contrasts starkly with the other, darker side of contemporary freelance graphic design, the controversial "work-for-hire" policies of many corporate design clients. Traditionally, staff designers for a company employed under what is called a "work-for-hire" basis have no economic or artistic rights over their creations, which are the sole property of the company that employs them. In recent years, it has become more common for clients also to insist on "work-for-hire" agreements, which state that the client will be the exclusive owner of all rights to the work. A work-for-hire agreement essentially grants to the client copyright control over every aspect of a design, including prelimi­nary ideas that do not form part of the final work. Under this form of agreement, the client can, for example, alter the work in such a way that the original artist feels it has been ruined, or can sell the work or use it in a new format without paying royalties, and can prevent the artist from creating something else that shares a similar design. Many freelance graphic designers object to the loss of artistic control that this imposes on them, especially as one of the joys of their independent practice is the presumed autonomy that they have in contrast to staff designers. The argument can be made that work-for-hire agreements sometimes stifle the creative process, as designers worry about irrevocably losing an original idea.

Illustration in a Digital Age

The pervasiveness of digital technology in graphic design has hastened the decline of illustration, which began in the immediate postwar era. The New York-based designer and illustrator Laurie Rosenwald (b. 1955) summarized this situation in 2002 in an arti­cle, "Illustration: Graphic Design's Poor Relation," published in Communication Arts. This article points out how illustrators have been increasingly marginalized in the graphic design profession, where the digital collaging of text and photo has become the standard, and drawing skills are viewed as quaint and passe. Illustrators are rarely seen in positions of authority, and most have been relegated to doing piecework for magazines and advertising agencies. Gender seems to have played a role in this situation, as the majority of illustrators today are women. Despite these challenges, Rosenwald and other illustrators have managed to carve a reliable niche out of the commercial market. In the last few years, in fact, there has been a resurgence in the popularity of illustration in graphic design as part of the postmodern nostalgia for past styles. For example, Rosenwald's advertisements for Neiman Marcus, which combine a delicate line with spare compositions, have been widely acclaimed.

Another trend in contemporary graphic design that has helped to keep the art of illustration alive has been the absorption of the comic book aesthetic into other aspects of visual culture. This resurgence has partly been fueled by a series of blockbuster movies that feature comic heroes, as well as by the American fascination with Japanese Manga. "Comic book style" refers to the glossy hyperrealism, vivid colors, and strong contours that are a staple of the genre. For example, the popular comic book illustrator Greg Horn has garnered a great deal of corporate work the last few years, including the creation early in 2004 of a three-story billboard in New York City that shows basketball star Lebron James (fig. 10.18). With its airbrushed smoothness and hand-drawn lettering, which replicates the verve and energy of comics, the billboard makes James into a larger-than-life hero, his arms a blur of superhuman motion. Horn emphasized the comic book angle even more in a small poster of the same image, but with the addition of a silhouette of the basketball player that Horn drew as a homage to 1970s comic classics such as The Avengers.

10.18 Greg Horn, The Chosen One, 2004. Billboard. Courtesy Greg Horn.

Graffiti

Graffiti is another example of a popular, anti- authoritarian culture that has been widely co-opted by corporations in order to give their advertisements a raw, authentic look—one that has an element of much sought-after "street credibility." The modern era of graffiti began in Neiv York City during the early 1970s, when the introduction of aerosol spray paint in cans combined with a burgeoning hip bop culture to create a critical mass of new artists and aficionados. Centered mainly in the outlying boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, graffiti artists tended to be self-taught young men with limited access to formal artistic education; their work was often both an outlet for creative expression as well as a form of social protest.

The most famous graffiti works from this pioneering era were painted in the expressionist, free-form mode known as "wildstyle," and the compositions often covered the entire side of a subway car. The New York City transit system was an intrinsic part of the movement; artists sought to have their images shown to a wide public as the cars traveled throughout the city on elevated tracks. Talented graffiti artists such as Lee Quinones (b. 1960) and Fab Five Freddie (an alias for Fred Brathwaite, b. 1959) actually entered the mainstream art world for a number of years as their work, caught the broader publics imagination. A debate ensued as to whether graffiti represented a legitimate form of art or was merely a kind of vandalism. Eventually, the city government declared graffiti art to be a public nuisance that promoted an image of lawlessness, and by the middle of the 1980s a crackdown had essentially eliminated the presence of graffiti in the transit system.

In the 1990s, graffiti experienced something of a revival, celebrated as a prime example of what is now called "outsider art". Although graffiti artists had broken into the fine art mainstream in the 1980s, only quite recently have designers expressed interest in graffiti and, just as importantly, so have their clients. Nowadays some companies, in their unending quest for an advertising strategy that will reflect popular culture and appear non-com