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The 1990s: Cold War Exits
Graphic design is a true companion to sociocultural life. It is a way to communicate culture, business and political contexts, to provide information and comment. The great changes in international society during the 20th century have demanded and created a real avalanche of visual communication. With it has come a great variety of often entirely new media.
The young design profession has had little time to create proper education for its members and little time to grow up. It is a profession that has had to be invented and developed often simply by way of unexpected challenges initiated by society.
The Mother of Arts works overtime
Acknowledging the theory that architecture is the mother of the (applied) arts, my predecessor FHK Henrion (who wrote a similar book in the 80s) always referred, in his introductory texts to the decades, to the architectural scene. Looking at the built environment, one cannot evade the feeling that the economic peaks of the nineties have led to tremendous changes in urban landscapes, not only in the Western world, but also in Asia, from the Emirates to the cities of Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai (to mention just a few metropolises). New and often extravagant palaces of capitalism were built all over the globe, demonstrating extreme levels of luxury and scale. Astonishing new concepts, fabulous technical and aesthetic structures.
In Alpbach (Austria) the boxes were opened and Henrion personally handed out his AGI history books to the members attending the 1989 Congress. Just a few months later we witnessed a true political spring. Prague, Warsaw, Budapest and East Berlin staged massive demonstrations for freedom and democracy. On 10 November, the Berlin Wall was demolished. Gorbachev visited the Pope and met with the US president George Bush Sr. on a cruise ship in Malta harbour, proclaiming that the time for peace, after all those years of Cold War, was here to stay. Revolutions swept across large parts of the Communist areas of Eastern Europe. We witnessed dramatic changes in the world’s political climate, causing huge waves of optimism and new prosperity. Nelson Mandela was set free, the Germanies reunited. The fragments of the Berlin Wall seemed to be the raw material for a new world of positivity. The palace of the megalomaniac Romanian leader was deserted. New palaces were built elsewhere, for the mighty leaders of the economic world.
The skylines of many important capitals changed dramatically in the early nineties. The Sheikh of Dubai transformed his small capital in the Arabian desert into a futuristic, super-luxurious, and even green New Manhattan of the Near East. He began extending his territory by creating artificial islands in the Gulf. Only a handful of decades ago, Dubai was a sleepy desert town with a population of a few hundred thousand people. It is now on its way to 3.5 million inhabitants. Among the developments are the plans to build the Palm Jebel Ali, a centre of commerce and tourism with golden towers, in the shape of a huge palm tree. Royal Haskoning is the architectural group that submitted the winning pitch for this marvel.
A confession: the eternal, old-fashioned modernist in me is heaving a sigh. ‘Isn’t more less?’ A great deal of the glamour of many structures in the oil-state capitals looks a lot like a blown-up set for a TV song festival. We can only hope that some of these architectural works will yield a few valuable laboratory results. The vast majority of the world’s building cranes seem to be found in that area and in Shanghai.
Corporate headquarters and government centres top the bill in the irrepressible growth of the industrial world. Numerous new art museums have been built all over the globe. Frank O. Gehry first demonstrated his own, individual style in the Vitra Design Museum in Weil (Germany) and enhanced it in the design of the Bilbao Guggenheim. To some extent, Mendini’s Groningen Museum also followed a kind of ‘chaotic’ approach, but this was in fact a belated product of the 1980 Memphis concept. Everywhere, large vacated industrial buildings and whole harbour districts have been put to new purposes. Berlin, the capital that made its comeback, built a new centre and reputation.
Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & De Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Richard Meyer, Norman Foster, Steven Holl, Ben van Berkel, Richard Rogers, Alonso Balaguer, Santiago Calatrava, Henning Larsen are just a few of the architects leading the dance.
Architects hate to be compared with fashion designers, as fashion is something that is quickly superseded, whereas buildings are meant to last for several decades, at least. Looking at many recently erected buildings, however, one cannot escape the impression that the liberated drawing boards (replaced by computers) are a source of oblique lines, recesses and curves. We see buildings ending in sharp, uninhabitable angles. The vertical facade is no longer axiomatic; nowadays so many buildings are leaning over that ‘fashion’ would seem, indeed, to be evident. A new kind of town was created: the intercontinental airport. These not only accommodate airlines, but are also shopping malls, with all the visual glamour that goes along with the insatiable urge to consume luxury goods. The big airports have hotels, conference facilities, banks and other offices, warehouses and maintenance halls. Ten thousands of commuters are finding employment in these daytime towns.
Rick Poynor, the design critic who founded Eye magazine, observed of a chic shopping mall in Kent that it was, in fact, almost a small town for ‘the happy many’ who share one passion, shopping, ‘retail therapy’. Poynor writes and lectures on the designer’s responsibility in our ‘spectacular society’. Wise words.
The Cold War ends
The euphoric emotions caused by the end of the Cold War were not to last for long. Peace was soon disrupted by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the reaction of the US and its allies in 1991. The Middle East, Afghanistan, Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo and the Balkan countries remained explosive political areas, which denied any immediate hope for real world peace. Many countries in South America remained also a permanent battleground in an internal cocaine war.
Parts of the former USSR got into serious conflicts with each other or with Moscow. Peace was frequently at stake at the Kashmir borders of India and Pakistan; Sri Lanka is confronted with its Tamils.
Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1993, however, and a year later Nelson Mandela became its first black president. In the former USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev made way for Boris Yeltsin.
The computer in charge
Computers have caused an unrivalled revolution in design. Drawing boards and slide rules disappeared rapidly after the mid-nineties. Screens, keyboards, scanners and printers took their place. Precision at pixel level meant the end of such traditional instruments and tools as the Rotring pen and rubber cement. External type shops and type catalogues were soon out of the picture. Many designers, starting with the young ones, took control of the total pre-press process. This new equipment speeded up the design process tremendously. Clients with their own computers for office work wanted quicker results and more alternatives. Naturally, fast equipment does not help reduce the time needed for analysis, inspiration and creation. Machines only help to produce rapid visualizations almost as perfect as a final printed result.
The majority of the (older) AGI designers present at the Amalfi congress of 1995 confessed that they, themselves, did not yet work with a computer.
They either did not have one, or they left that work to their assistants or specialized operators.
Computer software opened the gates wide to graphic media. For many designers, this meant they could broaden their field of activity, entering the market for websites and film (also aided by the video camera). Old-fashioned, static slide presentations could be replaced by much more effective Powerpoint shows. Designers have replaced traditional typesetters. They can now work with their own selection of numerous fonts.
The Internet, the original concept of which was developed in the early 1960s, had already become reality in December 1969, when the four host computers of universities in California and Utah were interconnected. During the 1990s, the Internet gained momentum. In 1991, NSFNet was opened for commercial purposes. Online shopping arrived in 1994 and online banking via the Internet in 1999. In 1993 the Lycos search engine had some 800,000 webpages, by May 2005 Google had more than 8,000,000,000. These days, which designer or communicator can manage without frequently consulting the Internet and without those fast and frequent email contacts?
The stunning technological innovations have also dramatically affected the entire graphic industry. The complete content and design of books can now be transferred by CD-Rom or simply via the Internet. Printed matter can also be produced straight from computer to press.
Today’s clients are very different from those of the mid-20th century. In those days, management could be design-conscious and even idealistic. The new generation is university-educated, often in marketing or communication sciences, and target and profit-driven. For many young designers with an art school background, these clients are sometimes of too high an intellectual level.
Do more designers necessarily mean greater quality?
The number of people leaving art schools to attempt to earn their living in our profession has seen unprecedented growth. It may be another side effect of the handy design tool, the computer, that so many youngsters were lured by the charms of design. They work for the arts world, for commercial clients, for authorities, but less often for political, social or ideological purposes. If you compare the developments in graphic design with those I mentioned in architecture, you will see a great similarity. The huge population of graphic designers lives under the pressure of harsh competition and – since the persistent economic depression in the early years of this century – is often faced with a real battle for professional survival. A world of more designers does not necessarily mean that standards have risen.
We are seeing many desperate attempts to come up with original design solutions, which unfortunately fail to communicate properly.Typography is now sometimes used as a kind of wallpaper pattern that is not really meant to be read at all. The results may look attractive and intriguing but have, in my humble opinion, little to do with the fundamental tasks of graphic design. They are of solely decorative value; it is fine art, with the shape of letters as a motif. Illegible, ‘dyslexic’ texts in an apparently non-existent language are the results.
I know that many people are intrigued by this approach, but it is simply not my cup of tea. It would be quite wrong to compare that approach to graphic design with the projects of Dada, the Futurists, the Constructivists and De Stijl. Those movements were strongly connected with and part of contemporary, heated social revolutions. Yet many works that were produced under those umbrellas also often suffered from illegibility. While the technical limitations and material shortages of the 1920s played a role in those designs, the opposite seems to have happened in the late 1990s: the computer strongly facilitated the development of what I referred to as ‘dyslexic’ typography. There was no longer any idealism, no higher objective to be served. We had left behind all the constraints of the old typographical tools. The computer assured total freedom. That also explains why that same computer serves as the perfect tool for enabling hordes of people to instantly develop useless alphabets: typefaces that seem to serve no purpose other than giving brief satisfaction to their creator.
Ben Bos, Amsterdam, 2006
Essay taken from 'AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950' by Ben & Elly Bos