Introduction

Because graphic design, in the end, deals with the spectator, and because it is the goal of the designer to be persuasive or at least informative, it follows that the designer's problems are twofold to anticipate the spectator’s reactions and to meet his own aesthetic needs (Paul Rand, A Designer’s Art, 1985).

More than any other form of visual culture, graphic design is inescapable. In the course of any day, we negotiate a huge quantity of graphic images, sometimes consciously and sometimes not – in public, from the plethora of periodicals and newspapers on sale at the local newsagents to the overwhelming number of enticingly packaged products on sale at the supermarket; from the more mundane train or bus timetable to the eye-catching advertising hoardings which beckon us as we walk along any high street; and in the space of our own home, in the form of personal possessions such as books and records which come wrapped in seductive graphic and photographic images, or in the form of the opening credits of the television programmes we watch. In this daily encounter with so much visual material, more often than not our experience of graphic design appears seamless and the myriad of images we confront so impenetrable that we scarcely take time to consider the ways in which they can signify the meaning of our own existence. Indeed, the very ubiquity and often ephemerality of graphic design militates against most of us actually reflecting on its presence in our lives. Somehow, graphic design just is. Yet even though we do not need to visit a gallery or museum to see works by graphic designers (indeed, today most producers of graphic design remain anonymous – how many contemporary advertisements or posters, for example, carry the name(s) of their creator(s)?), this does not mean that magazines and advertisements take less thought, time and creativity to produce than paintings, or that as spectators and consumers we should not take them seriously. Instead, the task before us is to examine what graphic design is both in terms of what it reproduces and what it represents.

The term graphic design itself first came into currency in the twentieth century, although its origins are open to dispute and confusion. In 1922, for example, we find it being used in America to refer to certain areas of practice such as advertising, although the term ‘commercial art’ was more widely used during the 1920s to connote much, if not all, of what would be described these days as graphic design.¹ More than thirty years later the use of both terms was still open to debate and Masaru Katsumie, writing in the Japanese magazine Graphic Design in 1959, underscored the distinction between graphic design, which he regarded as an industrial process, and commercial art, which he associated with hand-drawn illustration.² Questions of attribution and attempts to trace the definition of the term ‘graphic design’ to an exact source or date, however, often tend to state the conclusion without admitting the argument that is, graphic design is a complex matrix of different sign systems and media, embracing both high and low or popular cultural artefacts, which existed long before either it or the appellation ‘graphic designer’ were identified as such. This, for example, is how the designer and art director behind Benetton’s Colors, Tibor Kalman, sums up the nature and scope of the subject:

Graphic design isn’t so easily defined or limited. (At least, it shouldn’t be.) Graphic design is the use of words and images on more or less everything, more or less everywhere. Japanese erotic engravings from the fourteenth century are graphic design, as are twentieth-century American publications like Hooters and Wild Vixens… Graphic design isn’t so rarefied or special. It’s not a profession, but a medium, a mode of address, a means of communication.³

As much as for the historian of graphic design as for the graphic designer, the issue at stake, therefore, is one more of how to make sense of so much visual and verbal information. Clearly, given that the subject area incorporates such a disparate and complex range of processes and imagery, in constructing a cohesive and meaningful history of graphic design issues concerning periodisation, place and nationality, representation style and technologies must be addressed. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a standard or definitive history of so much activity does not exist, or that it ever could. This is not to say, however, that there have not been any serious attempts to investigate the history of graphic design or that there is not any serious literature on the subject. In fact, broken down into areas of specialisation such as photography, advertising, printmaking or typography, there are many scholarly texts which have investigated the field from different perspectives, and graphic design has consequently been the province of design and art history, cultural and media studies alike.

In addition, there have been several worthwhile attempts to synthesise a wider range of areas and practices such as Michael Twyman’s Printing 1770-1970, Philip Meggs’s A History of Graphic Design, and more recently, Richard Hollis’ Graphic Design – A Concise History. Each of these authors, however, has his own distinctive approach to the subject. Whilst both Meggs and Hollis, for example, share a similar methodology with regard to biography and issues of style, they write within different temporal and geographical parameters. The former begins his survey in prehistoric times and concludes with the impact of computer technologies in the late twentieth century, taking in Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, European and American material in the course of his discussion; the latter similarly terminates his study with an assessment of electronically generated graphics but begins with the Art Nouveau period and concentrates on American and European practices. As both of these approaches demonstrate, there is huge latitude not just in what can be legitimately categorised as graphic design but also how far back in time the subject can be traced.

Although it is not our intention to dismiss the contribution of such authors, the methodology we have taken in constructing this evaluation of graphic design emanates from more particular historical guidelines and different ideological and aesthetic concerns. In order to attain a sense of focus and depth of analysis in this book, we decided at the outset to concentrate on European material which is the primary area of our research interests and through which we could argue our points more cogently. We appreciate that this overlooks the important traditions and practices of graphic design in other countries, however, not least American graphic design in the twentieth century (there is, nonetheless, an assessment of the latter whenever it impinges on Europe). Furthermore, whilst we would not wish to be overly prescriptive in determining what does and does not constitute graphic design, in general terms we would regard the three following interdependent factors as quintessential in circumscribing the field – namely, that all images are mass-reproduced; that they are affordable and/or made accessible to a wide audience; and that graphic design is not just a question of presenting pictures in isolation but more a means of conveying ideas through the juxtaposition or integration of word and image into a holistic entity. It follows, therefore, that chronologically we take our starting-point in the period after the Industrial Revolution and more particularly the early nineteenth century, when patterns of both production and consumption were greatly altered by the shift towards a mass, commercial culture. As we argue, by this time graphic techniques such as wood engraving and lithography had a significant part to play in generating cheap and widely circulated media such as catchpenny prints and illustrated weeklies, and market demand for them had also been greatly bolstered by a burgeoning urban population and improvements in literacy and earnings that applied to all strata of society including, albeit on a limited basis, the working classes. In turn, this approach helped us to alight upon which designers and which areas of graphic design we should include in this study. Goya’s series of prints Los Caprichos (1799) or the book production of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late nineteenth century, for instance, whilst qualifying in terms of reproducibility and the intertextuality of word/image have been excluded, since they were both issued in limited editions and cannot be seen as directly contributing to the development of a more democratic and commercial identity for graphic design. In contrast, the caricatures of Daumier have been included in so far as they were more widely circulated in the context of periodicals like Le Charivari, La Caricature and Le Journal Amusant, and as such can be seen to satisfy all three criteria mentioned above.

Nonetheless, this study encompasses a diverse range of processes (printmaking, photography, photomontage, typography, digital technologies) and media (advertising, posters, periodicals, propaganda, record sleeves), but we have tried to look at both in fresh ways by incorporating much new visual material alongside more familiar images and by placing them into a more discursive framework around thematic contexts. It is not our intention to present a neat and hermetic narrative history of graphic design from the nineteenth century to the present time, based exclusively on a succession of period styles or a series of technical innovations, nor to prioritise the careers of individual, well-known designers, although there is history, discussion of style and technique, and biographical detail to be found in each of the respective chapters. Toulouse-Lautrec, for example, appears in the chapter discussing the codification of pleasure and gender in fin-de-siecle poster design, and Herbert Bayer in the chapter on modernist graphic design. Moreover, the inclusion of so many male practitioners in the text would appear both to suggest a paucity of female designers within the field and to relegate whatever contribution women have had to make to graphic design as second rate. There are, indeed, only a handful of female designers discussed in the following chapters – Clementine-Helene Dufau with regard to fin-de-siecle poster production, for example, or Fiona Adams in the context of commercial photography during the 1960s – but it would be myopic to dismiss the role of female practitioners in graphic design purely on the basis of head-counting and, as we argue, the contribution of these women was every bit as significant as their male counterparts. In terms of representation, the situation is clearly reversed and the objectification of women in all forms of graphic imagery is hard to overlook. Thus gender is one of the central issues addressed in this book and it fits well with our general aim to explore graphic design on an ideological level by placing it into its artistic, social and political contexts – a methodology which we feel is crucial to a full and richer understanding of the field other important issues which are discussed in the following chapters include the representation of pleasure, class, generation and ethnicity; period style and taste; the censorship and official policing of graphic texts; the impact of new consumers and readers on the production and circulation of graphic images and symbols; and the role of new technologies in the evolution of graphic languages or what William lvins jun. refers to in Prints And Visual Communication as ‘nets of rationality.’

Perhaps the most persistent and overarching theme to emerge in this book is the way in which meaning is constructed through an analysis of word and image relationships, and it is worth underlining this point since the more one explores different areas of graphic design from posters to photojournalism, advertising to record sleeves, and corporate identity to cartoons, the more they seem to be predicated on such a formal symbiosis. Hence, in the following chapters we are clearly not involved in discussing type-forms and illustrations as distinct from each other, but instead have expressed the interplay of visual and verbal elements in any given piece or area of graphic design. This is a point which many graphic designers have also sought to emphasise; Tibor Kalman as quoted above, for instance, and the poster artist A. M. Cassandre, who argued before him that ‘The design must revolve around the text and not the other way around.’⁴ Of course, the intertextuality of word and image is not always such a straightforward or harmoniously balanced concept, and whereas many designers have been consciously involved in integrating the two elements, many critics since the middle of the nineteenth century onwards have commented on the insidious nature of the image in taking control of the spectator’s understanding of events Charles Knight, the founder of Penny Magazine discussed in chapter 1, remarked in his memoirs that pictures were ‘true eye-knowledge’ which were also ‘sometimes more instructive than words’, while Guy Debord contested more critically in The Society of the Spectacle (1967) that ‘For one to whom the real world becomes images, mere images are transformed into real beings’.⁵ At the same time, the mass circulation of graphic images has often been viewed with suspicion and the moral implications of some forms of representation and spectatorship, namely those dealing with murders, sex and sensational events, have been regularly impugned. In the wake of the murders perpetrated in the East End of London by Jack the Ripper in 1888, for example, Punch struck a more cautionary note, printing a satirical cartoon entitled Horrible London: Or, The Pandemonium of Posters, accompanied with the following rhyming doggerel:

These mural monstrosities, reeking of crime, Flaring horridly forth amidst squalor and grime, Must have an effect which will tell in good time, Upon legions of dull-witted toilers!⁶

In organising the material included in the book, the chapters have been arranged both chronologically and thematically as distinct critical essays, starting with a discussion of wood engraving and the evolution of the popular illustrated weekly in the nineteenth century, and closing with an evaluation of postmodern practice and the implications of the new digital technologies on the nature of graphic design and the role of the graphic designer. Thus respective chapters may be read either out of sequence and in isolation or adductively and in toto. In each case, we have treated the material paradigmatically and it is in this sense that we make no claim to have written a definitive history of graphic design. The chief aim of our project has been to interrogate a subject area which is, both in terms of form and content, in constant flux. Consequently, this book has been conceived and written in the spirit of what sociologist Karl Mannheim would call a hermeneutic circle – not only to stimulate the reader into his/her own fields of further enquiry, both through the line of argument pursued in and the suggested reading cited at the end of each chapter, but also to encourage the idea that graphic design has unlimited potential for study with regard to methods of reproduction and codes of representation.