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A Stylist's View On Design

Edo Smitshuijzen | 23 March 2010

An article about graphic design on the cover of the New York Times? It sounds far fetched but it happens nowadays. Well, it happens on the internet version of the NYT. And it doesn't stay there for long, a few hours or so. But it grabs maximum attention for a while. I do not know of any other quality newspaper that pays so much attention to (graphic) design. Also the internet site itself of the NYT is a high quality example of today's possibilities of presenting news on the internet.

Olympic Icons

The article I saw prominently presented was an entertaining graphic animation about the history of pictograms for the Olympic Games. The author is Steven Heller. Steven is a typical American phenomena. His name is connected to over 100 book titles about - or related to - graphic design. Sometimes, he only writes the introduction of a book but his name appears more prominently on the cover of that book as the name of the author. Successful occupations in the US tend to end up in some form of industrial activity. Seen from this side of the ocean I always had the feeling that Steven was nominated by all graphic designers working in the US as their official ‘chroniqueur’. His name seemed almost invariably connected to all publications about graphic design over there. He also (co)authored many books about style. During my training as a graphic designer 'style' was an alien concept. Stylists were doing windows of shops, they were not considered to be designers. Seen with today's eyes, such a division is bizarrely rigid.

The first time I saw a book about style in art was in the library of the American consulate in Amsterdam. It was during my time as an art student, the two buildings were located not far away from each other and their art library was impressive. In a book I took from their shelves I saw a still life picture that was copied many times next to each other, but each copy had a different style, as if each still life was painted by one of the great masters. So there was a van Gogh style still life, next to an identical one in the Morandi style, and so on and so forth. I was both perplexed as I was intrigued by these images. I had never seen anything like this, this was against everything my teachers were trying to teach me. Style was not a thing you could isolate from a work and use it to dress up something else, that was utterly kitsch. It was like cursing in church. A designer should never be really interested in visual style, let alone look for one to adopt, a style was by definition something personal like a fingerprint, it was inseparably connected to one's work. Separating style from the rest was what made decorators different from designers. Decorators employed existing visual styles, designers may develop a personal style of their own over the years just like everyone has a distinctive handwriting. A decorator was capable of creating a particular atmosphere by combining existing elements that are known to create a specific effect. Like putting a fake snowman or a colour copy of a Rembrandt painting in a shop window to encourage Christmas sales. Designers do not have primarily the task to create a specific atmosphere, they have the duty to develop an interesting personal view on everything related to their design specialisation in a progressive manner —and obviously find an intelligent, professional answer to a brief. The two professions had little in common.

There is another typical aspect of styling. The result is intended to make things more attractive in a bourgeois sense. When copying the van Gogh style the 'crazy obsessiveness' of van Gogh has to be eliminated, the result has to emphasise on the attractive aspects of his work, the bright colours and the vividness of his brush strokes. A soft-focus version of van Gogh. Commercial styling is by definition an activity to make things look pretty, valuable, chic, expressing wealth. It is the instrument to create the preppy look, to make it posh, plush or 'bon chic bon genre'. Or by contrast, to make it look cheaper in a bargain sense. Styling, or decorating is the most used visual tool to help sell stuff. Decorating performed on its highest level can be an impressive activity.

When I entered the profession of graphic design there were two clubs of graphic designers in the Low Lands, one who's members were doing the traditional commercial work like advertising and one that brought together designers occupied with the rest of graphic design activities from designing books to corporate identities. In the beginning, they considered each other as two different pencil pushing species but after some time the two clubs merged. Both had started to enter each other's professional fields and the differences withered somewhat away.

Left, Lillehammer 1994, right Athens 2004

 

 

Visual styling has always played a far bigger role in the US than in continental Europe, because most graphic design in the US was closely linked to promotional activities, it is primarily seen as an activity that could help sales. The designer in the role of author is an unfamiliar concept. Moreover, visual styling is much more important in all big societies than it is in small ones, because it creates order in large and diverse communities. Americans see style as a sort of dressing you can put over a salad to create an Italian or a French flavour, for instance. Style is a sort of visual sauce and an instrument for social order.

I was thinking about the importance of style in an attempt to comprehend the preferences of Steven Heller in his commentary about the different pictogram series designed over the years. What particularly puzzled me was the large difference in his appreciation for the series of the Lillehammer Winter Games (Norway) pictograms and those of the Athens Olympic Games. The series for Lillehammer were groundbreaking at the time because it was the first time that the visual identity of the organising country was given full priority when choosing the design concept for the pictograms, which is today the norm. It was the first time the Olympic pictograms were purposely 'styled' (ancient Norwegian cave drawings were taken as a starting point for the designs) to create an atmosphere linked to the identity of the organising nation. Hardly surprising, the pictograms were designed by an American living in Norway (AGI member Sarah Rosenbaum). The Greek series were heavily influenced by the Norwegian concept. The Greek designers took their famous ancient vase paintings as a starting point. Steven dismisses the Norwegian series using a bogus argument of lack of functionality while he puts the Greek series high on his Olympic platform of pictogram design.

I failed to understand why. The Lillehammer series are very strong graphic symbols that successfully radiate the same mystic power of the original cave drawing, while the Athens series are more a marshmallow version of the original vase drawings, pleasant, easy chewable but not having the same impressive pictorial strength of the original examples. I came to the conclusion that Steven dislikes the Norwegian series because they're not pretty. They do not have a preppy look, while the Athens series do possess that quality.

Steven Heller looks at graphic design with the eyes of a decorator, a stylist.