one size fits all: collage medium

by Art Chantry (art@artchantry.com)

to give you an idea of how long and how far this “70′s cheapo graphics’”style lasted and evolved, i show you this dust sleeve for a record released on the “rare earth” label from approximately 1975. this style had been hanging aorund and brewing and stuttering for a dozen years at this point. it got more and more sophisticated as well. however, it stayed exactly the same. the bells and whistles and cleverness improved a great deal since the last example i showed you (from around 1965.) but, it still looks exactly and identifiably as the same crappy style. interesting, eh?

‘rare earth” records was actually a subsidiary label of motown records. it was intended to be the ‘white skin” sister label to allow motown to exploit the white record charts more easily. this is division that STILL EXISTS today (if you ever bother to look.) it’s called “r&b charts”. anyway, motown signed a band called “rare earth” (they had a few minor hits) and they were the very first group of white people signed to motown (sorta. or so i’ve read. anyway, thus the label’s name.) but, if you look at the design here, you can see that there are LOTS of other ‘white’ acts signed to rare earth as well. even a few old school famous bands (the pretty things) and cheezy crooner popsters (r. dean taylor – “indiana wants me”). it was a real crapshoot of a label – ‘throw it against the wall and see what sticks.’

motown (and subsequently rare earth) was also a cheapshit over-managed outfit. they were never known for overspending on creating their product. the design work was always dull at best and cheaply manufactured. i don’t know if there was a single designer, or dozens. but, owner barry gordy called every shot there. HE essentially was the art director form hell. motown covers look classic to us now but, they were really crummy back then. the distance of time changes our persepctive – especially when you get sentimentality and ‘retro’ fads involved.

so, when you look at this sleeve, think like a broken down henpecked brow-beaten young freelance designer trying to survive working for a demanding stingy boss. you are desperate for work becaue the entire economic structure of your market has collapsed (it’s the mid-70′s in detroit). you’ll basically will do dang near anything to feed yourself (or even family). you are pretty talented graphic designer with a large undestanding of the technology involved (printing, paste-up) and you really still care about making your work “GOOD.”

so, what do you do?

well, here we are at the same tried and true “one size fits all’ approach to graphic design. it’s still cheap, stat camera reliant. it takes minimal time and effort and you can still exercise endless aesthetic control of the results. you can still MAKE THE SUCKER LOOK GOOD. everybody is happy and everybody wins. even the client likes it becaue it looks like “white mainstream rock record graphics.” besides (he thinks), it’s really cheap and you have lots and lots of logos in there.

this is my personal training ground in the craft of graphic design. sure, i collected comic books and psych posters and read magazines like MAD and Famous Monsters, etc. etc. but, i was also looking at ‘graphic design’ magazines. what struck me is that if you really studied the way these things all looked (the ‘quality work’ AND the cheezy crap work), they were all made exactly the same way. what differed was the creativity you put into the effort and thinking. and that was my graphic design schooling. from that point on, after i figured that out, i just ran with it.

this particular sleeve is interesting becasue it’s so much more graphically sophisticated than that last example (the 1965 pickwick record). the structure and the forms and even the color (1970′s earth tones – shit brown) were speaking to a different, more sophisticated era of consumer and viewer – people already well versed in a great deal of graphic design languge simply due to the extreme exposure to the new technical counter culture over the previous 10 years.

note all the logos (labels and especially bands.) rock bands actually had LOGOS, now! sure wasn’t true in elvis presley’s day. the beatles had the first REAL band logo. and the way you could manipulate the photostat hi-contrast band photo was much more fexible and clever. basically, this designer was USED to this sort of thing and knew HOW to get great results with the technology at

. he had grown up in the learning curve that this period technology demanded and was mastering it to the point that he could control the quality of the language he produced. still, he was no great author (and totally uncredited). maybe he just dashed it off and ran? dunno. but, it’s got spark and talent. it’s just sloppy and ill-planned.

this is called a COLLAGE. it’s not a MONTAGE. however, this style is so close to the borderline between the two definitions that it almost straddles both. a “montage” is stricktly a collection of photogrpahs placed togather into a larger whole. that’s it. any version of this idea is a “montage.” a COLLAGE is a collection of IMAGES all placed together to make a greater whole. this can include photos and drawings and type and garbage you pick up off the floor. that is what differentiates the two definitions.

strangely, this example is all actually photographs (a ‘photostat’ is actually a form of photograph.) therefore all the pieces you use are actually production PHOTOGRAPHS – even the phototype. in a way, this defines this style as ‘montage’. however, the moment you place an image in the layout that comes form anything but a photo process (say xerox or a piece of presstype), the definition changes to ‘collage’.

i view all of graphic design as a COLLAGE medium. we take stuff from everywhere and put it together into a whole unit with a distinct message and purpose (for somebody who pays us to do so – a client). it is not ‘drawing’ like they tell you in art departments in school. it is not photography or industrial design or architecture or advertising, either. it fits into all of these defintions and none of them simultaneously. in truth it’s closer to being the conductor of a symphony. in the past (particularly) a designer had to take type from typographer, photos from a photographer, illustrations from an illustrator, writing from a copywriter, paste-up from a production person, printing from a printer and ideas from a client. the designer mixes them all together (often with a bunch of his own stuff) to “collage” together a composition – the finished piece. it was the result of an orchestra of individuals, not the private rumblings of an solo artist’s muse.