Anatomy of Design

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ANATOMY OF DESIGN

During the late 1960s, at the height of the youth culture's psychedelic chromatic

color revolution when, as if overnight, shrill vibrating colors replaced basic

primaries and earth tones, a few mass-market paperback book publishers tried a

new marketing and packaging scheme. They repeated the same typographic or

illustrative cover design in different colors, theorizing that different consumer

demographics—men, women, old, young—would viscerally or intuitively respond

more impulsively to color than content and therefore be more in the mood to

buy books. Anyone who has taken Psych 101 in college knows that color hue

affects behavior. The different color combinations also gave the consumer the

illusion of choice while allowing retailers to make more colorful displays.

Apparently the theory worked, and the strategy of changing colors for the same

edition was ultimately adopted by numerous book and magazine publishers and

is routinely practiced to this day. One of the more recent examples is the mass-

market version of the best-selling novel

Everything Is Illuminated, which did

extremely well in paperback, in no small measure because of the covers.

Appealing to the visceral was at least part of the motivation behind the

German design firm CYAN's ecstatically variegated color system for the series of

posters advertising the fifteenth anniversary in 2002 of the Friends of Music

concerts. Although a poster is not a book, it must nonetheless perform like a

book cover; it must send a message to a prospective audience and capture

their interest. Therefore, the more variety there is in the basic design, the

better the chance a large number of people will be drawn to the message. But

this poster is more than just about color combinations; rather, it derives from a

long-held (though often mixed) interest in ornamentation.

In 1908, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos wrote an essay, “Ornament

and Crime,” that attacked an era in which the bourgeois class was in love with

its accessories. It is now the seminal text in battle against the so-called

aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the twentieth century and an overall

convincing argument against superfluity, but it did not entirely dissuade

designers then or now from forsaking decoration. Despite stylistic ebbs and

flows between ornamental and ascetic aesthetic philosophies, designers

continue to enjoy injecting patterns of historically derived or homegrown

decoration—it is simply in the blood. CYAN's loving employment of optical motifs,

now fashionable, owing a lot to the visual appeal of digital bitmapped detritus,

gives the poster a timely appeal. Whereas Loos argued that ornament locked

designs in their respective time frames, not all designs—and certainly not this

poster for a specific, one-time concert—must be forever.

CYAN's poster is also a clear send-up of an entire genre of clichéd

advertising from the 1950s and 1960s. It is fairly obvious, too, that this is

tongue-in-cheek, given that the stereotypical image of the go-go housewife

preparing dinner has little to do with the music society being promoted.

Here the designers have tapped into the zeitgeist interest in skewering

nostalgia and playing around with clip art once taken seriously but now

seen as kitsch. Modernists long ago rejected these clip-art cuts as formulaic

and sentimental, but with the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and

1980s—and the rejection of modernism—these images continue to have

appeal, if only for their goofy qualities. CSA Archives has made a business

out of reviving and reselling kitsch cuts, and designers prodigiously use

them to give the air of predigested wit. Often these applications are

unimaginative, but sometimes, as in CYAN's case, the effect transcends

pastiche with elegance, exuberance, and wit.

Friends of Good Music

Designer: CYAN

1998 Fifteenth Anniversary of Friends of Good Music, poster series

s: CYAN c: Freunde Guter Musik Berlin E.V.

The “Friends of Good Music” (Freunde Guter Musik) began as a promotional operation over

twenty years ago.

Optical patterns

Same design, different colors

Clip art