#vanderlans

Week 10 – Graphic Design

 Amateur Hour and the Perils of Absolutism

The reading for week 10 has required a lot of mental processing, but a few themes emerged for me. One is the cycle wherein an emerging technology is initially restrictive due to its expense or a scarcity of necessary components or skills but then becomes gradually more accessible until there are few barriers or gatekeepers.  Everyone and anyone is free to try their hand regardless of knowledge or skill. Eskilson (2007) describes this phenomenon as early as page 26 when he writes of the proliferation of printing during the Victorian era as “unskilled jobbing printers polluting the urban landscape with tasteless playbills, posters and other printed ephemera.”  Yet, at the same time, the energy and experimentation that can come from contributors unrestrained by traditions and rules should also be recognized and appreciated.  The cycle repeats as told in the story of Rudy VanderLans (p 359). VanderLans was trained as a graphic designer in the International Style in the Netherlands and came to work at the San Francisco Chronical in 1981.  There he was appalled to discover that the editors lacked either knowledge of or regard for basic design principals, the considerations about “legibility and good and bad type were swept aside.”  VanderLans could have dug in and insisted on reform, but instead he came to recognize and appreciate what Eskilson calls the “vernacular culture” of his new surroundings.  He began to advocate for an expanded conception of graphic design that allowed for the intuitive expressions of the designer and rejecting the “artist as engineer” foundations of International Style.  

 VanderLans’ evolution of ideology reminded me of Jan Tschichold introduced on page 233 as a calligrapher and typographer who became engaged with the New Typography movement after attending an exhibition at the Bauhaus in 1923.  Tschichold was instrumental in outlining the theory and practice of progressive typography, literally writing the book on the subject in 1928 when he published Die neue Typographie a handbook for designers that codified his own principles including asymmetry, engineering over artistry and the superiority of sans serif text.  At the time of this publication, Tschichold was an absolutist, countenancing no compromise or experimentation, asserting that axial symmetry was not just undesirable, but “dishonest” and photos could only be complemented by sans serif type.  There was also an underlying commitment to socialist ideals woven into the new typography movement, though it is unclear how fervently Tschichold supported them. (Eskilson, 2007, p. 237).  

 Like VanderLans, Tschichold eventually relaxed his fervid ideological views.  The text is not specific about his reasons but tells us it occurred around 1933 following his arrest and subsequent escape from Germany, then firmly in the control of the Nazi party.  One is left to imagine how that experience might have reshaped his worldview, but as early as 1935 he wrote that asymmetry might not be the only acceptable design structure, and by 1946 he was repudiating his own New Typography principals.  What struck me was his suggestion that the absolutist terms of the New Typography were not unlike the dictates of the Nazis (Eskilson, 2007 p. 288).  This, to me, is unquestionably true and a cycle we seem doomed to repeat culturally, politically and artistically.  Arthur M. Schlessinger Jr. and Arthur M. Schlessinger Sr. have advanced a “Cyclical Theory” model of political movements that identifies phases through which society vacillates between liberal and conservative values (Brown, 1992) which equally elucidates the rise and fall the various design movements with social reformist goals from Art Nouveau to New Typography.  The new movement rises in response to what has come before, and adherents are often uncompromising in their both their devotion and their definitions of what is acceptable within the new framework.  Those not immediately marginalized are likely to become dissatisfied as time passes.  We are left to conclude that resistance to the introduction of new design ideas and the relaxing of the standards we once defined and defended is quite simply futile.  We would be better served to follow the example of Rudy VanderLans who so quickly understood the value of the vernacular.

 Resources:

Brown, Jerald (June 1992), The Wave Theory Of American Social Movements