Rick Poyner | No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism

Poyner, R. (2003) No More Rules Graphic Design and Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Laurence King Publishing.

p. 10

"it could be argued that graphic design, as currently practised, is a prime example of a popular, accessible medium exhibiting symptoms of postmodernism."

-  Poyner starts by stating that graphic design is able to display symptoms of postmodernism, and is one of the most accessible and most practised, and so it needs to be looked at why this is.

"Critical introductions to postmodernism and the arts routinely deal with literature, architecture, fine art, photography, pop music, fashion, film and television, but they show little sign of even noticing, still less attempting to 'theorize', any form of design, despite it's obviously central role as a shaper of contemporary life."

"few graphic designers have been eager to define their output as postmodern."

"Those who have laid most positive and even argumentative claim to the label have tended to be American. Many of the designers, American and non-American, who are identified in No More Rules as producing work which relates to postmodernism and it's themes would reject the term vehemently."

- This is one of the problems with postmodernism, as it is negatively associated with the term that was overused during the 1980s. Postmodernism in graphic design is still displayed in a lot of work today, though the designers may not call describe their work this way, and so contacting contemporary designers, and asking them their personal opinions on this subject.

"For other designers, postmodernism is too closely identified with a particular historicist style of architecture current in the 1980s and it is consequently rejected on the grounds of aesthetic taste as much as anything."

p. 11

"many commentators point out that postmodernism is a kind of parasite, dependent on its modernist host and displaying many of the same features - except that the meaning has changed. Where postmodernism differs, above all, is in its loss of faith in the progressive ideals that sustained the modernists, who inherited the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's belief in the possibility of continuous human progress through reason and science."

- Negative connotations towards postmodernism from a modernist point of view. This would suggest a brief look at what made modernist graphic design popular and successful.

"The Enlightenment project, writes David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, 'took it as axiomatic that there was only possible answer to any question. From this it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly. But this presumed a single mode of representation which, if we could uncover it ... would provide the means to enlightenment ends."

"The products of postmodern culture may sometimes bear similarities to modernist works, but their inspiration and purpose is fundamentally different. If modernism sought to create a better world, postmodernism - to the horror of many observers - appears to accept the world as it is."

- Postmodernism does not seek absolute truth, it rides the waves of culture as it fluctuates, and comments on the current climate.

"Where modernism frequently attacked commercial mass culture, claiming from its superior perspective to know what was best for people, postmodernism enters into a complicitious relationship with the dominant culture."

"In postmodernism, modernism's hierarchical distinctions between worthwhile 'high' culture and trashy 'low' culture collapse and the two become equal possibilities on a level field."

p. 12

"The dissolution of authoritative standards creates fluid conditions in which all appeals to universality, expertise, set way of doing things and unbreakable rules look increasingly dubious and untenable, at least in the cultural sphere. As many cultural critics have noted, the products of postmodern culture tend to be distinguished by such characteristics as fragmentation, impurity of form, depthlessness, indeterminacy, intertextuality, pluralism, eclecticism and a return to the vernacular. Originality, in the imperative modernist sense of 'making it new', ceases to be the goal; parody, pastiche, and the ironic recycling of earlier forms proliferate. The postmodern object 'problematizes' meaning, offers multiple points of access and makes itself as open as possible to interpretation."

- postmodernism challenges conventions or rules that were once widely regarded as constituting good practice. Opposing terminology often describes postmodernist characteristics within design and other creative practices.

"the modernist poet T.S. Eliot observed that 'It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them' and the commonly held view that one should master one's discipline before seeking to disrupt it also held true for design."

"In Typography: Basic Principles (1963), John Lewis, a British designer and graphic design teacher, includes a chapter titled 'Rules are Made to be Broken'. 'Before you start breaking rules, 'he writes, 'you should know what they are."

p. 13

"Graphic designers have continued to invoke the need first to absorb, but then to resist and transcend the rules of professional design. 'Rules are good. Break them,' Tibor Kalman urged colleagues, as recently as 1998."

- Kalman suggested that rules were needed in order for them to be broken. Postmodern thinkers would break these 'rules' closely related to the principles of modernism.

p. 14

"The literary critic Fredric Jameson notes how in schizophrenia - a term that he uses as description rather than as diagnosis - as temporal continuities and spoken language breakdown, 'the signifier in isolation becomes ever more material ... As meaning is lost, the materiality of words becomes obsessive, as is the case when children repeat a word over and over again until its sense is lost ... a signifier that has lost its signified has thereby been transformed into an image.'"

- Poyner references Fredric Jameson here, a theorist that will be looked at and applied to graphic design in relation to this dissertation.

p. 18

"When postmodernism first began to be mentioned in connection with graphic design, the search, among commentators, was for a definable style that could be labelled 'postmodern graphic design'. To an extent these observers succeeded in their aim and by the end of the 1980s, when this 'style' has seemingly run its course, it was possible to believe that postmodernism design was over and that other stylistic approaches had taken its place."

- A 'definable term' was wanted or needed to apply to graphic design that could be described as postmodern so that it could be labelled and referenced as this. Culturally, a label may have negative or positive connotations.

"While there was a kind of graphic design that bore some relation to trends in architecture also labelled 'postmodern', the use of postmodern graphic design as a contained stylistic category is misleading because it implies that the design that succeeded it in stylistic terms no longer has a relationship with postmodernism."

p. 19

"In the 1970s, the term 'postmodern' continued to be applied to architecture by various critics and architects, but it was Charles Jencks who did most to establish the idea, with his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). Postmodern architects, he argues, are still partly modern in terms of sensibility and use of technology. Consequently, the postmodern style is 'hybrid, double coded, based on fundamental dualities'."

- Postmodernism as a 'buzzword', now carries baggage with it, often negative connotations. Perhaps people are afraid of something they don't know the definition of? This needs to be investigated - primary research.

"This could entail the juxtaposition of old and new, or the witty inversion of the old, and it nearly always meant the architecture had something strange and paradoxical about it."

"was a seminal figure in the development of the 'new wave' that came in, in time, to be called postmodernist."

p. 20

Weingart speaking:

"It seemed as if everything that made me curious was forbidden."

- Postmodernism as an instinctual creative shift, by designers? This could be looked at by investigating into how designers practice, through sending emails asking them what their thought processes are.

"He was fascinated by the effects of letterspacing and he stretched words and lines until the text came close to being unintelligible."

p. 22

Talks about a Weingart work:

"Weingart's complex pictorial spaces, unprecedented at the time, fused typography, graphic elements and fragments of photographs on equal terms. He exposed sections of the grid, violating its purity with jagged outlines, torn edges, random shapes and imploding sheets of texture"

- Weingart was taught by 'modernist' designers, so it interesting to look at how he made a shift from rules and purity in design to the opposite of that, illegibility and experimentation.

p. 23

"Greiman's covers for the CalArts Viewbook and for an issue of the West Coast magazine Wet in 1979 exemplify many of the characteristics of the new work. Her eclectic visual language draws from Surrealism, Art Deco and ornamental pattern-making."

p. 28

"Memphis objects were most striking for their use of plastic laminates printed with  a wild variety of of colourful patterns. Like roadside neon signs, laminates were identified with ordinary, 'undesigned' environments: coffee shops, ice cream parlours, milk bars, fast-food restaurants, and kitchens and bathrooms in the home."

- The designers at Memphis were inspired by 'undesigned' environments, along with pop art and art deco, simplistic shapes and observations, as a result of these things simply existing. When did the shift from creating new aesthetic change to finding existing? Perhaps when everything was already there, culture and images everywhere resulted in this observation. People see images all the time, they cannot get away from this. American modernism and advertising, along with capitalism as the catalyst would have created this environment.

"Memphis applied this cheap-looking material to luxurious pieces for the living room that were as wilful and bizarre as they were aesthetically compelling."

- Why was this aesthetic appealing, was it it's ugliness? difference? A shock to the senses? The bizarre nature of Memphis has grown and spread like a virus, manifesting in various ways across the graphic design world. How did architecture inspire graphic design so much?

p. 28,30

"The whole Memphis idea is oriented toward a sensory concentration based in instability, on provisional representation of provisional states and of events and signs that fade, blur, fog up and are consumed. ... Communication - true communication - is not simply the transmission of information ... communication always calls for an exchange of fluids and tensions, for a provocation, and a challenge."

p. 30

"Memphis does not claim to know what people "need," but it runs a risk of guessing what people "want".'"

- Another example of instinctual design, following tastes of the time.

"Memphis graphics spoke in the same provisional, polyglot style as the furniture and objects. The cover of the first Memphis catalogue (1981) presents a jagged collision of sheets of pattern and Memphis logos are similarly patterned, angular and block-like"

"It was not surprising then that the startling forms and imagery of postmodern architecture and furniture design should inspire graphic commentary from designers and image-makers."

One example cited that references the influence of Memphis architecture's influence on graphic design is shown in the album cover art for Yello, by Jim Cherry (1981) and is decorated with Memphis like texture.

p. 36

"He was an instinctive rather than theoretical postmodernist who understood the new cultural mood from his first sight, in 1978, of Phillip Johnson's proposals for the AT&T building, a postmodern New York skyscraper with a broken classical pediment for a crown. 'Within 12 months, neo-classicism and the influence of architectural postmodernism were everywhere,' Saville recalls."

- Saville on his inspiration, yet again, another instinctual designer. Saville simply felt and knew this new aesthetic was what people wanted to see. His work may have given across a feeling, as well as a 'style'.

"'People in New York were buying columns to put in their apartments. My contribution was the graphic equivalent."

p. 37

"As the 1980s unfolded, designers began to apply postmodern theory to a more self-conscious deconstruction of design's inbuilt assumptions and of its persuasive power as public communication."

p. 38

"Postmodern theorists have repeatedly questioned the boundaries between high (valuable) and low (inferior) forms of culture, pointing out with ease with which audiences move between different types of cultural experience"

p. 44

"With the tendency termed 'deconstructionist' (and sometimes, confusingly, 'deconstructivist') design, the conventions of professional graphic design, both modernist and eclectic, were subjected to deliberate interrogation, destabilized and repudiated."

- Not to confuse this term with a pre-existing art movement.

p. 73

"throbs with kinetic energy"

about bubbles

p. 79

On Paula Scher

"Paula Scher's understanding of historical form - Futurist, Constructivist, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Art Deco, Pictorial Modernism - and her eclectic ability to reinvent it in the service of her clients made her an influential figure."

- Scher designed by using a method called appropriation, using existing graphic design in order to create something similar to a parody, pastiche, where no mockery is intended, but flattery, in the knowledge of the design that is imitated.

p. 79,80

"In 1990, at a conference on the theme of 'Modernism & Eclecticism' in New York, Tibor Kalman gave a keynote lecture in which he addressed the uses of history in graphic design, good and bad, and a revised version of the text, co-written with J. Abbott Miller and karrie Jacobs, was subsequently printed in Print Magazine. 'Designers abuse history,' they argue, 'when they use it as a shortcut, a way of giving instant legitimacy to their work and making it commercially successful ... historical reference and down and outright copying have been cheap and dependable substitutes for a lack of ideas."

On Scher's poster for Swatch that references Herbert Matter's travel poster from 1934

"Scher's poster is neither parody (it has no obvious satirical intention) nor is it quite pastiche (it isn't a wholly new image in the general style of Matter). It is closer in visual approach to Saville's appropriations, but without the attempt to create a third idea in the imaginative space between image and subject matter."

p. 81

"Kalman's position as a critic was in any case complicated by the use made in his own work of existing source material."

- Kalman used 'the vernacular' and so how was this different? Slightly different in that the vernacular is not designed, or intentionally aesthetically designed, more functional. Perhaps this is not quite pastiche, but parody, as it almost mocks the imagery it uses.

Kalman said -

"'We're interested in vernacular graphics,' he explained, 'because it's the purest and most honest and most direct form of communication. We will unabashedly steal from vernacular work.'"

p. 84

"M&Cos's work was extremely witty, but its relationship to the vernacular was not without its contradictions If it was unacceptable to steal ideas from design history, why was it acceptable, even desirable, to 'unabashedly steal' from vernacular sources?" paraphrased

p. 96

"As some critics were quick to point out, the fragmented and intricately layered designs made possible by the computer often resembled a kind of neo-Futurism or neo-Dada and this was true even when no conscious parody was intended."