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Cult of the Squiggly

Vines and tendrils recently have been strangling designed surfaces and objects without mercy. Yet, unlike almost all our other earthly woes, it has nothing to do with global warming—unless, of course, graphic designers are instinctively compensating for the depletion of the polar ice caps and degradation of the rainforest ecosystem by planting ornamental graphic vegetation on things. It may be symbolic simpatico for the faltering environment or, as I suspect, a reaction to the dominance of sterile modernism that rears its head from time to time. Arguably, lush forests of typographic and imagistic embellishment are responses to a basic aesthetic need for—and underabundance of—decoration in the overall design diet.

The cult of the squiggly, as we’ll call this manifestation, has evolved gradually with a few innovative form givers, including Marian Bantjes, whose mastery of craft is exceptional. The masters seed scores of exponents until eventually, like fungus, the trend spreads everywhere—from the most appropriate to the most nonsensical uses. We have reached a point where the time has come to prune the invasive squigglies. But this is not the first time.

In the 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos proclaimed that “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” Design was then, as now, in an ornamental quagmire. Many years after the initial blooming of art nouveau (Jugendstil, Vienna Secession, Stile Liberty, etc.), which began in 1896, forests of twisted stems and tendrils—what historians call floriated madness—covered everything from posters and typography to furniture and buildings. Loos’s preference for “smooth and precious surfaces” derived from his belief that functional objects swathed in ornament were guaranteed instantaneous obsolescence. Loos believed that superfluous design was not merely a waste of a designer’s time; it was downright immoral. Obsolescence was, therefore, a venal sin. Yet barely twenty years later, just prior to the first Great Depression, the strategy known as “forced obsolescence” or what the innovative American adman Earnest Elmo Calkins referred to as “styling the goods” was being celebrated for having to some degree brought the United States economy back from stagnation to vibrancy—in large part by adding ornament (in this case art deco) onto products and structures like some sort of camouflage.

Visual austerity might be seen as a denial of aesthetic pleasure, a puritanical notion. For who would argue that an ornamented Persian miniature, with its complex graphic layering, or The Book of Kells, with the interlocking patterns and serpentine filigree that fill its pages, are not among the most beautiful (and in a sense, most functional) of graphic artifacts? How could baroque and rococo motifs in print or on edifices be pilloried for crimes against the eye or society in general, despite what they have come to symbolize?

William Morris, the late-nineteenth-century designer, printer, author, social critic, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, exalted in ornamentation as a high form of expression. His design for The Kelmscott Chaucer, the pinnacle of his career as a craftsman, reintroduced the medieval or gothic approach from its lavish ornamental borders to its decorative capitals and frames. But The Kelmscott Chaucer did more than simply revive an antique style. It was the realization of Morris’s belief that a combination of modern printing techniques and traditional arts and crafts could counteract the corrosive impact of industrialization. Ornament was not merely a veil to hide ugly industrial machines and wares; it was an antidote to the perceived poisons spewing from factory chimneys—a prescient concept at that.

Ornamental embellishment is not inherently evil, even in excessive doses. In fact, sometimes excess is truly divine. Nonetheless, passions are often inflamed when the topic of ornamentation is injected into high-minded matters of design. The Bauhaus masters rejected ornamentation as symptomatic of a bourgeois aesthetic order. Followers of the Bauhaus and adherents of orthodox modernism, even to this day, have maintained the belief that minimalism enables the clearest communication—purity is transcendent. They rail against what advertisers in the twenties and thirties called “froufrou” and fight it in manifestos and essays about less being more. Yet there has long been a desire, indeed a compulsion, to inject graphic complexity and even planned superfluity into certain design.

Ornament’s startling, though predictable, comeback in the late 1990s (see Alice Twemlow in EYE 58 ) is as widespread and popular today as it was in the Victorian, art nouveau, and art deco eras. Decorative patterns, an offshoot of the current ornamental trend, are largely born out of the hip-hop and street-culture aesthetics, rising in various media, from textiles to clothing to web to print. Illustrated letter forms—not calligraphy in the classical sense nor illumination in the Biblical context—have complemented these new decorative tendencies. Lettering in variegated forms—stitching, scrawling, scraping, carving, and more—has added an even more profound ornamental overlay to design of the twenty-first century. Sometime during the early 2000s, well over a decade after the computer became the primary design tool, squiggly, serpentine, floral ornamentation was resurrected with a vengeance from its Gilded Age crypt. Rebellion against the blandness of template-driven computer-generated design has been one motivating factor. But more likely, the practical fact that once-difficult drafting processes are now much simpler with computer programs has spawned a new appreciation for ornament.

The DIY movements of the mid-1990s contributed to the growth of digital foundries that offered scores of “novelty” faces made from countless nontraditional type materials, including such naturalistic ones as twigs, flowers, and trees. The employ of leaves, stamens, and pistils today is flowering throughout the design world. In some instances, the plant is a perfect foil for modernist austerity, but in others it is simply overly fussy. Lettering made from branches and bark has a long history, used both as a sign system for rustic homes and campsites as well as graphically illustrated lettering. One of the most popular nineteenth-century novelty faces was Figgins’s “Rustic” or “Log Cabin,” made from logs. Current use is not much different, albeit more witty in purpose. When done well it can be surrealistically beautiful and comically engaging. When done poorly it is better off as kindling.

This decoflora (my coinage) resurgence also seems to have caught on because it animates so well. In the film Yellow Submarine psychedelic plant life grew wild on the screen, rhythmically choreographed to follow the Beatles music—that was the beginning of the kinetic squigglies as practiced today on TV and computer screens. But like psychedelic art, what began as a novel design approach was quickly co-opted by lesser talents for silly, exploitative purposes, and so doing removed the inimitability from it. There are many examples of that lesser art today, but the English edition book jacket design for Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise, in which squidlike tentacles flail across the image area, is a prime example of inconsequence. The squiggly approach is used not to underscore the content of this fascinating book but to fill up the negative space. And that’s the problem: When ornament is profligate design is made trivial. When ornament is misused it just takes up space. This new floriated madness continues to engulf advertisements, magazine and book covers, textiles, T-shirts, package designs, and animations. Vines and other flora have crept onto pages, packages, and screens like kudzu after a summer’s rain. And like kudzu this new ornament is almost impossible to control without a lot of brush clearing. Prune now before it strangulates everything.