Anatomy of Design

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ANATOMY OF DESIGN

Psychedelic design was one of the first indigenous American graphic design

mannerisms. Born of LSD and marijuana drug crazes in the late 1960s, it was

the language of the alternative rock-and-roll scene. It was also a code

designed to appeal initially to those exponents of the youth culture, but it

quickly spread like a virus into the mainstream of popular culture, where it

lost much of its contraband aura.

Tadanori Yokoo, one of Japan’s leading designers, was smitten by

psychedelia’s vibrating colors, free-form images, and quirky perspectives and

introduced Japan to his own brand of psychedelic style. In turn, he influenced

the postmodern sensibility in America with his blends of controlled anarchy,

brilliant palette, neo-surrealist compositions, and graphic wit. Being immersed in

the chromatic woodcuts and linear virtuosity of Utamaro, Toyohara, Utagawa,

and Hokusai further contributed to Yokoo’s distinctiveness. But he also owes

much to the eclecticism of Push Pin Studios, which itself took influential cues

from Japanese woodcuts and then influenced leading psychedelic designers.

Yokoo’s diverse appropriations of cultural imagery are not typically Japanese, so

in that sense he has made his own niche.

But back to psychedelics. By the 1970s the psychedelic style had been

completely co-opted and, therefore, was on the wane in America, yet Yokoo so

deftly and seamlessly incorporated certain of its underlying traits into his own

personal style that it never went out of fashion in his hands. Despite his

frequent recycling of graphic tropes and conceits, his work has always

expressed his artistic integrity. So as late as 1997, when he designed this

poster for the luminescent violinist, American-born Andre Kohji Taylor, Yokoo

drew on psychedelic color combinations, Indian mandalas, and kaleidoscopic

optical effects to create an image both timely and unmistakably his own. The

poster is both advertisement for Kohji Taylor and timeless art.

Yokoo’s design is the design of illusion and delusion. He roots much of

his work, and this poster in particular, on deceiving the eye while embedding

memorable images on the conscious and subconscious. Here the deception

relates to optical illusions practiced by many contemporaries and ancestors. He

draws on M. C. Escher’s blinkered perspectives as much as on Milton Glaser’s

playful eye/mind exercises. Yokoo’s visual games are spellbinding, and by

placing a demonic-looking Kohji Taylor with hypnotic eyes as the bull’s-eye of

the composition, he hopes to mesmerize his viewer just as the violinist

controls his audience.

Similarly, the kaleidoscopic sensibility is used to great effect by framing

Kohji Taylor while giving the viewer considerably more visual information

designed to allure. In general, kaleidoscopic images are hard to ignore. The

perfectly symmetrical repetitions and circular rhythms have a curiously soothing

emotional and visceral effect on the senses. With this poster, the repetitive

violins framing Kohji Taylor trigger a smile in the eye.

Most of Yokoo’s work is based on the conventions of collage, the

controlled (yet often surprising) juxtaposition of disparate and discordant

pictorial elements creating new and unexpected images. Yokoo has long

perpetuated those collage experiments initiated by cubists, Dadaists, surrealists,

and Pop artists who reconstructed new reality as well as peeled away layers

of visual matter to create new surreality. This poster exemplifies Yokoo’s

mastery of combining fantasy and reality into a single, unique expressive work.

Andrew Kohji Taylor

Designer: Tadanori Yokoo

1997 Andrew Kohji Taylor poster

ad,d: Tadanori Yokoo s: Studio Magic c: Wea International

Poster done in a psychedelic manner for a young violinist.

Central gravity

Mandala spirals

Collage

1960 Liquid Carbonic—Medical Gases

poster

d:Eric Nitsche

c:General Dynamics

1966 #12 Captain Midnight poster

d:Peter Max

BC Ancient Greek Mosaic

National Archeological Museum fo Athens.

late 14th C Raktayamari Mandala

This is a tangka: a painting on cloth that

could be rolled up and transported. It aided

in picturing every detail of Raktayamari's

realm in the most effective way during

meditation. Most likely from the Tsang region

of Tibet.

1938 Untitled collage

a:Karel Teige, Prague

1956 Just What Is It That Makes Today's

Homes So Different, So Appealing? collage

a:Richard Hamilton

1919 Da-Dandy photomontage

d:Hannah Hoch

1934 ”Dr Goebbels, the Faith Healer” 60

Million Fall in to Chant!

magazine cover

a:John Hartfield

Cover for AIZ 13, No. 20, 17 May 1934.

1923 ABCD collage

d:Raoul Hausmann

1939 Fortune magazine cover

d:Antonio Petruccelli

1954 Jonah Jones album cover

d,i:Burt Goldblatt c:Bethlehem Records

1969 Unicef poster

d:Jukka Veistola

1965 Gostomski-Hasior, Galeria

Wspolczesna

gallery poster

d:Roman Cieslewicz

BC Medusa's Head mosaic

Roman mosaic from Tunisia

.

Courtesy of Sousse Museum, Tunisia.

16 C Kalender calendar

d:Jacob Kobel, Oppenheim

Calendar created in circle partly to associate

with the heliocentric model of the solar

system and the heavens.