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The short history of a language There is no culture without history. Culture does not simply occur — it grows. Our communication culture has gradually matured over several millennia of developments in language, visual expression, writing, typography, printing, photography, cinema, television and recently the internet. Today’s pictograms have a history that goes back to cave painters who left their signs for animals and people on hidden stony canvases some 40,000 years ago. Our typography harks back to Roman lettering of 2000 years ago. Still, what we now call communication design has a history of only slightly more than a century. Its visual language grew out of the arts, who at the end of the 19th century were confronted by new challenges from new media: mass scale printing and photography. The moment books, newspapers and magazines could be produced cheaply on a massive scale, communication culture changed radically. Photography and photo montage added new visual potential to the written word and new technologies of printing made the combination of words and images seamless. All of this gave rise to a new profession: graphic design. In the first decades of the 20th century the arts took a radical new turn. Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Constructivism and De Stijl invented a new visual vocabulary that still marks today’s visual languages. Modern advertising, with its sophisticated interplay of text and photographic imagery and its bold compositions has its roots in experiments by the likes of Piet Zwart, Paul Schuitema, El Lissitzki, Kurt Schwitters and Rodschenko in the Netherlands, Germany and revolutionary Russia. This, the 1910s and 1920s, was the era of ‘parole in libertà’, free roaming words as Futurist poet and theorist Marinetti wrote. For design, it meant a liberation of age-old formulas and formats for arranging texts and images. The printed page — still the main carrier of information and communication — became a ‘dynamic construction’, as ‘typotekt’ Piet Zwart stated. Zwart’s work for a Dutch manufacturer of cables, NKF, is now an international icon of communication design. His use of typography, combining legibility, decoration and illustration in the same typographic construction, was an applied and structured version of Marinetti’s anarchical typographic play of free words. And his use of photography to not simply illustrate the product, but more importantly to enhance and dynamize the composition, became a model for later generations of graphic and advertisement designers.
Apart from the concern for a new more rational visual language expressing modernity and fit for the ‘machine age’, the aesthetics of the 1920s avant-gardes also reflected a political attitude. Without exception, the new ‘style’ was developed in revolutionary circles, often connected to communist, socialist or at least social-democrat political ideologies. The moral implications of these ideologies become apparent in the shift from the ‘autonomous arts’, often seen as decadent and narcissistic, to design, which is seen to serve the community. Architecture, industrial, exhibition and communication design became the focus for the arts in the 1920s and even in painting an artist like Piet Mondriaan strove to eliminate “petty individualism” from the arts in favor of a reflection of ‘absolute’ truth and harmony — an application of universal principles. From the late 1930s onwards, and especially after the Second World War, these pioneering works became the standard of modernist design and architecture, also known as ‘the International Style’. Radical liberation settled down to normality, and the ‘free words’ were pinned down within the strict margins of the grid. The visual language that had been developed in the earlier period had deeply established itself in the practices of design. Asymmetrical balancing of texts and images, the use of line and color in combination with cropped photographs, all guided by the invisible hand of the grid, were standard procedures for graphic design in Europe from the late 1940s until the mid 1960s. In America, meanwhile, there developed a parallel and new popular culture, mainly within the entertainment industry and the new medium of television. The graphic language of this visual culture was based more on the exuberant aesthetics of earlier theatre and circus posters, on cinema billboards and vernacular design than on the rigid order of the European main stream. The two traditions came together at the end of the 1950s and the start of the 1960s, for instance in work by Milton Glazer’s and Seymour Chwast’s Push Pin studio in the States, or Anthon Beeke and Swip Stolk in the Netherlands. They were the heralds of a new, more informal, approach to communication, combining the European avant-garde tradition with pop culture and vernacular design. Activists of the 1960s and 1970s student and protest movements took this informality to new heights and were the first ‘counter culture’ since the 1920s to visually ‘brand’ their statements. Hand drawn, machine typed and stenciled lettering with crude grainy photographs, photo copies and bold color bands became the trademark signs of activist communications. With the onset of post-modernism in the 1980s, the awareness matured that not only texts were part of the ‘language games’ through which we enact our culture, but images as well. This gave rise to a new sensibility for the ‘outside’ of words and images even if at the surface they looked quite unequivocal. The meaning of a text, be it a verbal or visual ‘text’, is not fixed but is generated each time it is interpreted by someone in a specific context. Crucial to a message’s meaning, then, is the way it connects itself to an ‘intertext’ of references which are both embedded in it by the author and designer, and projected onto it by the reader and recipient. Seen in this light, any message is interactive and any design becomes interface design; a game which only becomes meaningful if its designer succeeds in engaging and activating the player. Through this history of radical change and professional establishment, of new forms and deepening insights, communication design has become a visual language in its own right. It has evolved into a graphic system of combined words and images, spanning a wide range of media — a cross-cultural language which by now has established its own meaning which is understood globally. Communication design today uses lay-out and the interplay of verbal, visual and interactive elements to convey more than the literal meaning of a message, much like traditional art uses composition and visual references to communicate more than the literal meaning of what is depicted on the canvas. As in art, in design you rarely just “see what you see”, to paraphrase Frank Stella; much of a design’s message resides in the way it’s told. A design may say ‘buy this product’, or ‘go to this theatre play’, but it also says ‘this is our culture, share it!’. |
