approaching perfection: little spots of hurried slop

Cher and design of the times: utterly awful and utterly perfect.

Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com):

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of Time Magazine covers being displayed in the Facebook™ thread I’ve been reading. A lot of my old pals are displaying their collections and interests on Facebook™ and there seems to be an unhealthy fascination with Time Magazine.

These faddish fascinations seem to go through phases. For instance, there was an obsession with Fortune Magazine covers that seemed to go on endlessly. Every single day somebody would decide to post an old Fortune Magazine cover and wax poetically about it’s merits. There was also a brief flirtation with old Rocket Magazine covers and also (of course) cheezy detective rags and the ignoble TV guide (it’s so retro!).

My theory is that there are websites that have these collections easily available to peruse and people simply look, like and take for themselves. So, it ends up here in these threads under discussion. Thank god my friends don’t care much about Life magazine, or I’d have to get nasty. You don’t want me to get nasty, do ya?

AC:not many people ever seem to notice the copycat parrallels that happen ins design. like hippies using art nouveau. and disco 70's using cassandre. and punks using dada. we just keep re-using the soma old stuff over and over - but maybe i...n new ways a little bit. we copycat with real intelligence, too. ever notice that? like the punks didn't go for beaux arts look. that's about language and meaning and it shows how well this stuff really works. it's been going on sine the caveman days.

So as not to feel all alone out there, I’m posting a second time magazine cover. The other day I posted that Lee Harvey Oswald cover with the fortuitous rubber stamp. But, I consider that more of an “object d’art” than a Time Magazine cover. This time, I’m posting an honest-to-gawd TIME MAGAZINE COVER.

Now, this is one of my all time favorite magazine covers. If you’re going to talk about great mag covers, this one really should be up there with anything ever done on Rolling Stone or Fortune or even Playboy. This is what magazine covers should all be like. It’s what’s it’s all about.

To begin with, it’s Cher at her physical PEAK, before the surgery and age and living had taken her down to human status. This is “cher as goddess”. It is really the best possible explanation of her celebrity – she was like some sort of physical pop personification of female “talent”. All of the contemporary divas (including Madonna) are weak imitations of Cher. There is no contest. She set the mold. If she didn’t, she stole it fair and square away from Mae West and then improved upon it. And I’m not even gay!

Read More:http://classickicks.com/?cat=196

Look at the design of this. The pose, the layout, the TYPOGRAPHY. It’s so utterly and completely 70’s. It’s at the height of disco art deco chrome decadence that we now define as “retro” (it sure wasn’t back then!) That choice of letter style is so utterly awful and so utterly perfect. Is that the A.M. Cassandre typeface? If it is, then it’s absolutely exquisitely referenced. He was the most f

s art deco graphic designer of all time. He’s too cool. He even committed suicide!

I also love the crummy technological efforts of that era. The 1970’s in graphic design were dominated by high sophistication and enormous style, but lousy technological production standards. That was that funny period of time between the hippies taking away the design world from the good old boys of the old world and just before the hippies became yuppies and became good old boys themselves. They had all the confidence in the world, thought they were re-inventing that world and ended up with a modern imitation of the old world.

---Original cover of Harper's Bazaar magazine, with artwork by A. M. Cassandre. He was famed for his Art Deco advertising and travel posters, but was an important graphics designer as well. These spectacular Art Deco magazine covers are surprisingly rare today.---Read More:http://www.rare-posters.com/p1814.html

As an example of what I’m talking about, look at that point of contact between the primary headline (“cher”) and the secondary headline type. Look at the point where they actually bang into each other. That work would get a production designer fired today.

This stuff was all done by hand. Now, I’m a noted promoter of hand work. I firmly believe it looks better than work done with a computer. However, it’s these little clumsy moments of incompetence that points to what I’m specifically talking about. It’s where real humanity enters the picture. Without these little spots of hurried slop, the utter perfection of a well executed design becomes overwhelming. We need these little errors, we need the human fukup™ to make near perfection even approachable.

Cassandre. Read More:http://ramage.tumblr.com/post/392964681/a-m-cassandre

If everything on this cover were absolutely perfect, then perfection would finally have been attained. There would be absolutely no place for thousands of industry-leading graphic designers to go except backward. It would become an existential dead end! like A.M. Cassandre decades before them, the suicide phenom among graphic designers would be a dreadful thing to see.

So, a tip of my hat to whomever did this (slightly incompetent) perfect cover. He saved the lives of thousands of 1970’s graphic designers. Think of the humanity!

ADDENDUM:

AC:sonny was brilliant. he learend his craft fom phil spector (he was part of the ‘wall of sound). then he went onto become a producer and songwriter (needles & pins, for instance). go find old s&c 45’s and listen to the b-sides. they’ll total…ly blow you away.

s&c are that great missing link between folk music/rock/psychedleia and pop. without them, none of that stuff may (i use the word ‘may’ intentionally) have never quite happened the way it did. they took it mainstream and sonny’s hustle and business savvy did that. he ‘built’ cher from the ground up. a great svengali and impressario.

---http://thesilverliningblog.com/2010/02/23/a-m-cassandre-for-fortune/-----

when the riots happened on sunset strip back in ’65, he was front and center in the middle of it. i believe he even marched with MLK. the guy was a force of nature. that bumbling tone deaf boob image he create for himself was just a role he played. when he became a conservative politician, it was nothing personal – strictly business. he was a fiscal conservative and social liberal.

amazing career. i’m a fan…..

….a. m. cassandre also design the yves st. laurant logo. the ‘ysl’ monogram.

his most famous piece is that art deco poster of that ocean liner coming straight at you. the bow of the ship fills most of the entire poster area. beautiful thing….

i have about twenty mid-30’s harper bizarre magazines a, all with cassandre covers. he was very busy guy. he would make a terrific book subject. one of those extremely famous designer/illustrators where everybody seems to know his work, but everybody is very familiar with HIM.

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