Anatomy of Design

11

ANATOMY OF DESIGN

It may be shocking that shock is stylish in advertising, but it is not surprising.

After busting so many taboos against nudity and sexual congress, what is left

to grab an audience's attention, advertisingwise? Where once the prevailing

hook was implicit allure and suggestive titillation-sensuousness that appealed to

the eye and maybe the groin—currently an atavistic interest in the grotesque

(and physically gross) is being tapped. Market tests are not necessary to

understand that people really do like watching train wrecks, as long as they

are not in them. Sure, they may be disturbed, and they may even avert their

eyes to some extent, yet rubbernecking is a human frailty and gawking is a

sport. So media hawkers increasingly rely on shock bait to reel the

rubberneckers into the store.

“The media environment in the last decade has become tolerant of much

stronger and controversial content,” wrote Lazar Dzamic in VO

ICE: The AIGA

Journal of Design. “New television formats (especially the advent of reality TV),

the obsession with celebrity culture, the behavior of celebrities themselves,

computer games, closely covered wars and crime chronicles all make our world

less, not more prudish. The taboos of old are quaint today.” So is it no longer

shocking, in a quaintm squeamish way, to stumble on an ad for the opening of

a Ljubljana shoe store, Obuvalnica Butanoga, that features a couple (Borut Kajbic,

the owner/designer of the company and his girlfriend) in the Garden of Eden,

fully nude except for their chic shoes. Oh, one other thing. The shoe designer's

right leg is amputated below the knee, though his right shoe is positioned

exactly where his foot ought to be. From the heroic pose against an outdoor

backdrop, even without knowing the backstory, the irony is clear. Moreover, if

nudity is acceptable, an amputated leg is just natural. However, in truth, the

image is shocking insofar as amputation is anomalous in life as it is in

advertising, and the only logical justification for creating an ad like this is to

play on the voyeuristic by shocking the senses.

The Obuvalnica Butanoga advertisement is not, however, as gratuitously

shocking as those that employ medical waste, human organs and body parts,

stitched eyelids, dead animals, or other unmentionables (mentioned here). Yet

using this distastefully blistering imagery is arguably not always gratuitous.

Sometimes it underscores a point of view, as when the British government

mandates that all cigarette packages in Canada and England show photographs

of diseased tissue to hammer home the effects of smoking, or the way anti-

abortionists show mutilated fetuses to press their position, or the way animal

rights advocates regale viewers with pictures of tortured animals to make them

stop and think. But sometimes grotesquery, when combined with sexual

imagery, is more than gratuitous: It is so offensive it sparks protests that

beget media interest, which increases publicity—a useful advertising tactic.

Returning to irony, Obuvalnica Butanoga is replete with it, not simply in

the staged photograph but also in the typography. Cutting the letterforms, as

though with a knife, is an appropriate fit for the amputation theme. Cut type is

a timeworn method of straining legibility to force attention. Or, as in the case

of Mesa, it is a visual pun on the word itself. In addition to Butanoga seconding

as a fig leaf, the cropped form helps redirect the eye from the figures to the

shoe company brand.

Obuvalnica Butanoga

Designer: Borut Kajbic

2001 Obuvalnica Butanoga poster

ad,d,s: Borut Kajbic i: Marjolein Spronk, Martine Eelman c: TDS drukwerken

Promotional poster for the opening of Butanoga, a shoe store of original and unique

design by Matjaz Vlah.

Shock of sexuality

Medical shock

Chopped logos