GRAPHIC DESIGN STYLES IN A NUTSHELL

Victorian: 1840-1900

The Victorian era was a time of strong moral and religious beliefs.

The Victorian love for ornate complexity and fussiness was applied to architecture, furniture, interiors, fashion as well as typography and commercial art.

Sentimentality, nostalgia and idealized beauty are clearly visible in the images from this era.

The Victorian look was heavily influenced by nostalgia for objects of the past.

Look for symmetrical layout and type, and use of “cloth” banners as a design motif.

Look for curved typography, hand-engraved with the pictures.

Architectural motifs frame images, acting like borders.

Outer decorative borders.

Printers often used whatever typefaces that happened to be available; the result was often a smorgasbord of fonts.

Note the elaborate typography, decorative borders, framed image and symmetrical layout.

Victorian style almost always tries to fill every corner of the entire page with type and pictures.

Look for hand-crafted, well-drawn type.

Look for framed illustration (mock frames around an illustration)

Later Victorian style used borders less, but ornate type and idealized beauty still dominated.

Campbell’s Soup

Budweiser

Levi’s

Arts and Crafts: 1850-1900

The Movement was a reaction against the poor aesthetic quality of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

It was a socialist reform movement (NOT a commercial movement), which embraced artists, architects, desginers, writers and crafts workers of all types. In retrospect, the Arts and Crafts Movement is recognized as the bridge between traditional Victorian values and the modern movement.

Arts and Crafts was about rediscovering the traditional standards that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution: it was about fighting ugliness and mass production.

The dominant decorative motif is natural forms, usually inspired by plants.

The illuminated manuscripts of the 15^th century a huge influence on Arts and Crafts.

Caxton, and Goudy is an Arts and Crafts font, widely used today.

Art Nouveau: 1890-1910

Art Nouveau is a direct descendent of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

It was the first style of commercial art used consistently to enhance the beauty of industrial products and graphic design.

Like Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau was a rebellion against Victorian sensibilities.

Visual motifs: energetic and organic plant-like line and vine tendrils; birds and peacocks.

Japanese block prints and Impressionist painting (Monet, Van Gogh, etc) were huge influences to Art Nouveau. Other artistic influences: Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Another motif: self-assured and happy women, often drinking and even smoking in public.

Also, exotic, sensuous women and stylized hair patterns.

Dynamic spatial relationships and flat colors.

Art Nouveau favors simpler drawing style, usually outlines with black and filled with flat colors.

Often a single image of an idealized woman shown in profile.

Influenced Psychadelic artists.

Early Modernism: 1910-1935

Modern is the opposite of antiquated, old-fashioned, outdated.

Early Modern artists, who determined to “break from tradition,” were also described as “avant garde” (new or experimental). Even though most artists were on the fringe, their ideas permeated commercial art.

The Bauhaus tenet: form must follow function.

A common thread of Early Modernism: dissatisfaction with the past, a need for radical change in society.

Modernists were in love with geometry and despised ornament.

They also loved primary colors: a “reductionist” approach.

Influences: Picasso; cubist art

Visual motifs: thick, raw strokes, loose brushwork, bold contour; finger pointing hand, photomontage

Inspired by woodblock prints, children’s art, unschooled artists, tribal arts.

Themes: alienation, anxiety, despair.

Proportion was often exaggerated; figures distorted. Extreme contrast in scale (often huge, photographic cutouts of faces that dominate a design.)

Reductive, flat colors; reducing objects to their simplest shape and forms.

Rebelled against the horrors of WWI; used shock, protest and nonsense to mock an “insane” society.

Constructivists developed photomontage techniques: photography used widely.

Dominant color schemes: red and black.

Idealized scenes of leaders in monumental, heroic poses.

Tilted axis, sans-serif type.

Art Deco: 1925-1940

Art deco was an “early modern” style, but with no political ideology associated with it.

Visual motifs: geometric shapes, curves, Egyptian zigzags, sunbursts, lightning bolts, airbrushed ray bands, motion lines, aerodynamic and streamlined forms, parallel lines, strong vertical lines.

Represented luxury, extravagance, glamour, glory of the machine age culture, speed, consumerism.

Art Deco depicted streamlined shapes: cars, trains, toasters…luxurious lifestyles…women with fur coats, men in top hats; sophisticated elegance.

People looking like robots; reduced to geometric shapes.

Integrating type and image.

Romanticizing the motor car as “heroic”…speedy…a nostalgic and romantic view of the travel industry.

Promoting the illusion of progress for progress’ sake.

Promoting status and luxury as incredibly desirable.

If Early Modern images celebrated the heroic individual, Art Deco celebrated the heroic machine.

Font: Futura; DesDeMona; FONT, also type with geometric shapes and long lines.

Pro-consumerism; pro-consumption

American Kitsch: 1940-1960

Kitsch means “bad taste” in German; so American Kitsch is purposefully vulgar, pretentious, overly sentimental,

Visual motifs: the casual script of neon signs; exaggerated curves (think Barbie); anything atomic was considered sexy; kidney shape,

Diner signs

Sexy sensual shapes: electric guitars

Everything round, curvy; exaggerated, provocative poses.

Dramatic facial expressions

Norman Rockwell

Comic books, popular crime magazines, B-movie posters, pulp fiction

Exaggerated overstatement in ad copy: “Here is the story they DARED us to print!”

Casual and informal hand-drawn type; scripted type

Element of parody in the images: parodying, for example, the heroic realism of Early Modernism

Bright and loud colors

Caricatured cartoon drawings

Use of celebrities to sell products

Late Modern: 1945-1970

Applied the non-decorative approach of the modernists but rejected the dogma…producing designs with a new simplicity.

Wit and simplicity. TO simplify, clarify, modify, dramatize, persude, amuse….

Integration of text and image.

Art directors started cutting up type and images and gluing them down on “mechanical boards.”

Experimented with words, making them playful combined with images.

Pictorial collage elements and overlapping shapes.

Mix of illustration and photography.

Simple typography (e.g., one word)

Font: Sabon

Ads had a clean look with intelligent illustration or photography, which shifted the hard sell to the “smart sell.”

Conceptual typography became a popular form of expression.

Lots of Early Modern influences, but with a witty twist.

Swiss/International: 1945-1985

The Swiss’ attitude toward design is to make it socially useful, universal and scientific.

The ideal is “objective clarity.”

Visual result: extreme abstraction, often based on pure geometry.

Use of a grid.

VERY simple, very neutral (Helvetica) typeface.

Visual motifs: Tilted axis; Repetition and transformation (one shape into another shape)

Geometric abstraction is a message unto itself.

The Swiss approach can make the most mundane material look clean and organized.

Psychedelia: 1960-1975

Born within the hippie subculture of Haight-Ashbury; the name Psychedelia relates directly to psychedelic drugs.

Flamboyant, colorful, clashing colors, loud textures, vibrating graphic lines and textures (intense optical vibration) ; color discord

Recalling the curvilinear shapes of Art Nouveau, but more crazy and colorful.

Reducing a photo into its most essential shapes by Xeroxing it over and over, converting all the grays into black and white.

Illegible hand-drawn type

Postmodernism, 1975-1990

Postmodernism re-established interest in ornamentation, symbolism, and visual wit.

Designers of this era challenged the modernists’ obsession with progress and deliberately violated the Bauhaus tenet that form must follow function.

Playful, happy, funny-looking; designers looked for unconventional ways to break the rules.

Odd color combinations, random textures

Visual motif: stair-stepping.

Playfully decorative; overlapping shapes

Breaking the rules of traditional typography became a common postmodern convention.

Digital: 1985-Present

The digital style is not a historical movement since it’s happening right now (digital is a temporary label).

The digital look doesn’t look digital: it’s messy, chaotic, extreme, absurd, layered, illegible, unstable, expressive, poetic, and a bit grungy.

Digital is a rebellion against clean, pure abstraction, which led to a renewed interest in messy decoration.

Graffiti art is a big influence.

Crude and messy and primitive and disjointed, but charming.

The loosening of the “rules” of modernism and the “permission” granted to allow decoration again during the postmodern era eventually led to the wholesale destruction of any and all convention during this period.

Experimental typefaces, stressed typefaces. Type became a decorative element used to create texture.

Arbitrary and poetic layout approach; lots of layering

Use of nostalgic and retro imagery