the cult of the ugly: optimism of a lost language

Homegrown graphic design. The real deal.

Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com):

Take a good look at this thing. this is what real home grown American graphic design looks like. This is what American industry created when it needed ‘graphic design’ for their own use. This is not influenced by the bauhaus or constructivism or modernism or anything else out of Europe. These guys never heard of Milton Glaser or Paul Rand or helvetica or anything out of New York city. The designers who made this sort of graphic design were American workers earning a living and learned how to do this stuff by working in a print shop or a sign painting shop or in the army or taking those mail-order classes advertised in the back of Popular Mechanics. Real unadulterated American graphic design as it was done for generations.

I first encountered this stuff while rummaging around in a junk store in a really small town in a remote corner of Washington state. Part of the in-store stock seems to have the treasure of some hoarder who had accumulated boxes and boxes of ‘paper’ stuff dating back some 70 years. The owner of the shop was shuffling it into the floor stock as they unpacked it. this was almost 30 years ago and this same little shop is still unpacking crap. There was that much crap.

Apparently this hoarder was interested in American industry. He seemed to have subscribed to dozens of trade magazines from across the spectrum of American industry. I found sets (one-year subscriptions) to the trade magazines of various industries like the iron industry (“The Iron Age”), the nuclear industry (“Nucleonics”), the chemical industry (“Chemical Engineering News”), the timber industry (“The Logger”) and even the funeral industry (“Sunnyside & Casket”). All of these magazines were from a period covering the post war years (1945-65).

I was fascinated by these things. I began to collect trade magazines from across the century. What I initially was attracted to was the wonderful images I found (as clip) incredible photographs, charts, logos, layouts, illustrations. but, as I collected this magazines together (along with other advertising brochures and publications) I began to notice something else. Something sort of mind-numbing to a contemporary schooled graphic designer. It didn’t matter which industry, which era or what the subject matter or what the function of the piece, every single one of these publication looked ALIKE! In fact they were identical design ideas and aesthetics. It was as if one single designer designed every single thing I looked at. On top of that, it looked almost nothing like what I had been taught and studied in mainstream design education and readings. Basically, it was as if I had tripped across a forgotten world, a huge American empire of commercial art and design that was completely forgotten. What the heck was going on?

These magazines all had the same primary color schemes, the same geometric layouts, the same typographic stylings, the same sort of images and illustrations. It was scary. there was an abundance of images of their products. If they produced sprockets, there would a beautifully displayed selection of their sprockets layed out and photographed. If they had a new factory, they would reproduce a photo or an etching of their building. If they had a handsome boss, he would be in the advert pointing at the product. Everybody seemed to have the coolest little logos and logotypes. If they made springs, they would do a character of their new mascot “Mr. Springy.” If they were patriotic, they would have an eagle in their logo. Often the product (let’s say, a gear) would be designed into the logo itself. The thinking was the same over all industry in America. Over and over, morticians, nuclear scientists, iron workers, loggers, you name it. All the same. Arrows pointing, ‘hershey bar’ type, cartoons, catalog covers, the works. How was this possible?

I wanted to learn this language. It was a design language lost in time. It was a language that spoke optimistically of the future. One cover story in Nucleonics had to do with what do to if your atomic car had a melt down at the corner of first and main. Logging was going to save America’s wildlife. Plastics were the future. Amazing silly thoughts and ideas, all honest as the day was long. They were NOT lying. They were just optimistic. America and science was going to lead the world into a brighter better future. We still actually thought that way once. Now, we all know that there is no future and what lies ahead is dark and foreboding. It’s like we all turned punk when we weren’t looking.

Sso, learning this language was really like trying to learn a foreign tongue. I began by simply taking a prime example (to my eye) of this style and physically tearing it down, pulling it apart and rebuilding it through my sensibility, my accent. The result was that “night gallery” poster for coca (i call it the ‘tool’ poster). It was a series of performance artists presenting their work as involved with technology and the machine. It was like the first steps of a language education, you tear it into pieces and learn what the pieces are, what they do.

I went to extremes. for example, to echo the “lead type’ feel (which can’t be reproduced with modern techniques) I used two different typefaces that were remarkably similar in appearance to the untrained eye (future and franklin gothic). then I set all the text (copy) twice, once in each typeface. Then I mixed them up as I pasted them into the poster. The result was a ‘clunk/buzz’ that was the result of two similar typefaces clashing. It FELT exactly the same as he “impact̶

f the lead type hitting and squishing into the paper – a “clunk buzz”.

The results were spectacular. The design world recoiled in horror. nobody knew what to do with it. Steve Heller used it as a prime example in his famous essay ‘the cult of the ugly”. It won dozens of design awards and was collected by museums. the critical revues for each of the events advertised on the poster itself would quickly degenerate into a rave about the poster, as if the poster were the only thing worth reviewing. It was embarrassing.

The next step to learning this language was to execute my own designs, but using the elements of old designs (like learning about how Hemingway wrote, but taking his ideas and styles and working them into your own writing). Each event listed on the “Tool” poster got it’s own small (11X17) mailer/flyer/poster. so, I did about 7 or 8 additional little posters that explored all of these elements.

On each poster, I designed a new coca logo and still held onto the old logos from the previous project. I included every cliche I could discover buried in the original source material (including every one i mentioned earlier above). But, it was always shoved through a contemporary darker mindset, a grimmer world view achieved only after what we had witnessed in the 50 years since this style peaked. The art performances sold through this coca series was artists and machines,(technology). It was a naturally darker observance.

After working on all of these smaller projects, I tackled the ‘grand finale’ of the series, the Kustom Kulture exhibit. it was a show toured up from the Laguna Art Museum (which organized it) showcasing the world of American hot rod and underground subculture artwork influenced by it. The custom car /hot rod world was a product of the displaced vet (who also formed most American outsider art genres – the truckers, the beats, the surfers, the hot-rodders, bikers, etc. etc.) The design languages of these subculture were the direct offshoot of the American industrial design language I was fascinated with, but seemed to be the bridge between this “lost” language and American contemporary cultures. Try to imagine teen style without the influence of kustom kulture. It can’t be done.

The poster i produced (featuring von dutch, ed “big daddy” roth and robert williams – the holy trinity of kustom kulture) was based on the idea of speaking like the artists, profiling each major name and then and looking like a Car Craft industry trade magazine – all shoved through 30 years of punk. the best part was that this was the first time I didn’t refer to past period work (outside of the pieces from the artists represented on the poster). I simply used what I had learned and created from scratch. The result of this exercise was another “greatest hit” for myself and a poster that is still collected and published today.

This little exercise in studying the design language of mid-century American industry really taught me how powerful this exercise can be. what i was doing was basically doing a classic ‘deconstruction’ and ‘appropriation’ of another language. It was the classic ‘post modern’ experience.

But, none of this seemed to explain exactly where this language came from, or even why everything I found looked so dang similar. The best explanation I could muster was that one guy did it all – a physical impossibility.

No, the answer was much more simple and human. upon reflection, I realized these guys who did this design style were NOT graphic designers, they were industrial designers. They designed gears and machinery and sprockets. When the boss bought an ad in the industry magazine, he’d walk back to the drafting department and slop it down on the desk and say, “here. I bought an ad in this to support the biz. Make an ad for me.” The designer would say, “me? I make sprockets! I don’t know from adverts!”. The boss would then reply, “here, make it look like these. These are ads. Make it look like this…”

Thus was born a style and a language so powerful it dominated American design language forms for most of the 20th century. Copycatting. non-graphic designers did graphic design by copying other folks examples. After a long time, there was a set of standards that became solidified and adhered to. an “unspoken graphics standards manual” (such as it was). and that’s why everything looked alike.

This was also how I learned this language. I can “speak it” at will. It’s now incorporated into every piece of design design I do. it’s like I analyzed Hemingway so thoroughly that I have absorbed a little of his style into my own. And that’s how we all do things. It’s how we learn to do everything we know. We don’t invent walking, we watch our parents walk and try to walk like them. In time we walk our own way, as we become ourselves. We’re just people, ya know?

It’s the best lesson I ever learned about what we do.