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The Decade of Dirty Design

Postnostalgia stress syndrome for the nineties (a curious love/hate relationship with grunge type) is finally ending just as the twenty-first century enters its second decade. Nostalgia is so nineties. It is time for design pundits to start looking back at these past ten years in order to neatly categorize and define the design of the era (assuming this can be labeled an era). Actually, I’m putting my dibs in to be the first to offer some viable categorization. I know it is cheating to do so before 2010 is officially over, but I am looking forward. What’s more, I hold that fairness is not an issue when staking out one’s pundit-turf. So let’s begin . . .

The year 2000 began tumultuously with the contested election of George W. Bush. The nation was in fairly good economic health owing to the surpluses accrued by the Clinton administration, and graphic design was rolling merrily along with plenty of work for everyone. Stylistically, designers had just emerged from a period of hyperexperimentation that pitted old modernist verities, such as order and clarity, against computer-driven chaos, which some called “postmodern” and others (myself included) sarcastically referred to as “ugly.” Yet from a more sympathetic and reasoned perspective, “the early ’90s was an extraordinarily fertile period,” according to Ellen Lupton at printmag.com, “In the U.S., a far-flung vanguard had spread out from Cranbrook and CalArts, where several generations of designers—from Ed Fella to Elliott Earls—had embraced formal experimentation as a mode of critical inquiry. Emigre magazine, edited and art directed by Rudy VanderLans, provided an over-scaled paper canvas for experimental layout, writing, and typeface design.” And let’s not forget David Carson’s stinging jabs at typographic propriety. He significantly influenced a generation to embrace typography as an expressive medium.

No matter which side of the aesthetic or philosophical divide one was on, this was a critically exciting time to be a graphic designer. Although the computer was the dominant medium, during the early nineties designers were transitioning from the hand to the pixel, experiencing all the visual quirks and anomalies that came with technological unease. By the end of the decade and the beginning of the twenty-first century, despite the Y2K-end-of-civilization hoopla, the computer was firmly entrenched in the lives of designers, and not only was there an aesthetic calming down, but a frenetic media migration. Designers were relying on the computer not only for clean, crisp, and flaw-free print work, they were turning from the printed page to video, audio, and other motion and sound formats.

Mastery of the computer’s options meant by the end of the twentieth century a new generation of designers were commanding much more than merely Illustrator, Quark, and Photoshop programs; they had figured out how to wed technique to concept, and produce design that often had an exterior life other than the client’s message. The earlier grungy experimentation gave way to a new clarity and rationalism—even a new minimalism began to take hold with the return to Helvetica and other emblematic sans serif faces.

So arguably neomodernism of the kind practiced in, say, Wallpaper * magazine was the defining style of the decade. But actually that was not the case. Eclecticism was still in force, and while some designers were out-of-the-closet modernists, others followed an expressionist model. (You want names? Just look at the AIGA Graphic Design Archive for the evidence.) But eclecticism is too broad a notion to be a decade-defining style. The nineties was clearly the digital decade with all that that represents: an evolution from embracing digital mistakes to practicing digital precision. Axiomatically, generations challenge one another. If the nineties is devoutly digital then, the 2000s should be the antidigital decade.

Where’s the proof, Mr. Pundit? Anecdotally, I draw the rationales for various students entering the MFA Designer as Author program I co-chair (with Lita Talarico). When asked why the first wave of students entered from the late nineties through mid-2000s, the answer was “to get back to the hand.” Now, this does not mean a total rejection of the computer (for that would be professional suicide), but it does mean that the craft aspect of design was lacking in their formal educations and practices. With the increase of the DIY sensibility, with renewed emphasis on “making things from scratch,” designers were feeling a need to make physical (not virtual) contact with their materials and outcomes. It is no surprise that sewing and scrapbooking emerged as popular hobbies, but it was somewhat novel that they were integrated into the graphic design practice.

Over the past five years I co-authored three books that support this “antidigital” claim: Handwritten (with Mirko Ilić) and New Vintage Type and New Ornamental Type (with Gail Anderson). The first is totally focused on typography done by the original ten digits (although unavoidably it was scanned into a computer). The other two books revisit older styles and eras, and a good amount of the material is generated by hand with a DIY underpinning. Consistent with this assertion, hand typesetting, letterpress printing, and silkscreen techniques are on the rise in schools and workshops. And speaking of workshops, as a thesis, a former MFA Designer as Author student created a workshop titled “Dirty Weekend”, a series of three weekend sessions that focus exclusively on painting, carving, cutting, and printing by hand. The recent turn-outs at the ADC in New York proved that the hand is at least as mighty as the pixel.

Why call this “antidigital”? Isn’t it just an alternative to the dominant medium, but certainly not a substitute for it? Perhaps. But since pundits like to sum up moments, especially decades, for purposes of further debate I will refer to this as “The Decade of Dirty Design” until someone proves otherwise.