Through the Past Knowingly?

Every designer has begged, borrowed or stolen graphic forms and ideas that originated elsewhere, past and present. There’s no reason to deny or even be ashamed of it. Since graphic design is rooted in common visual idioms, shared and altered tropes quickly become vernacular. Originality is secondary when messages must be quickly and efficiently communicated to a mass audience, therefore sampling is not only convention, it is a bona fide mannerism that includes pastiche as its defining characteristic.

Pastiche
a. A dramatic, literary or musical piece openly imitating the previous works of other artists, often with satirical intent. b. A pasticcio of incongruous parts; a hodgepodge.

While thumbing through recent issues of the New Yorker, I noticed two full-page advertisements done in a late 30s and 40s American Streamline pastiche; each is heavily airbrushed and reminiscent of work by modernistic designers Joseph Binder, Otis Shepard, and Sacha Maurer, known for their stylized travel, transportation and ski posters. Although this is not the first time their respective styles have been reprised and composited for contemporary purposes, nonetheless it is perplexing that retro is necessary at all.

Retro
a. Involving, relating to, or reminiscent of things past; retrospective: b. A fashion, decor, design or style reminiscent of things past.

Why would a designer use or, for that matter, a client, accept retro pastiche? Retro certainly frees the designer from starting at zero. Borrowing existing mannerisms provides familiar codes with limited risk. And both these New Yorker ads appear as though they were torn from vintage poster books. One for Amtrak’s online reservation service (Fig. 2) and the other for Redwood Creek wine (Fig. 3) have logical, albeit superficial, conceptual links to their products, but neither service or product screams out to be treated as passé.

So, are these branding strategies designed to tap into some ersatz nostalgia for sensibilities popular long before the target audience was even born? Is there a primal sensation that only the power of retro can evoke in the viewer?

“All brands need to appear new yet familiar,” explains Brian Collins, creative director of Ogilvy’s Brand Integration Group (which did not produce either of these ads). “Retro design reconciles this paradox quickly if handled with care. Retro can give new brands instant heritage and old brands a chance to flag their origins and authenticity.” Nonetheless, he warns, “If you are not careful you can set the time machine too far back and become Daddy's dusty brand.” He also notes that “Advertising is storytelling raised to the flashpoint,” so getting the audience to immediately read familiar visual cues is imperative to selling an idea.

Retro is one of the more a dependable tools for sparking a certain kind of consumer interest–in certain products. The ad for Amtrak suggests that even in an age of high-speed travel (the campaign was launched before the Acela trains were ignominiously suspended) one can still enjoy a luxurious train ride, just like grandma and grandpa did. The ad for Redwood Creek transports the consumer back to the rustic elegance of old California mountain lodges seen in some late 30s noir films. These ads exude a sense of history and tradition, even if one no longer exists or never existed. And if nothing else, the look is a stylistic diversion from the contemporary.

But Charles Spencer Anderson, who has created a body of work using vintage icons and cultural kitsch, finds this particular graphic time-travel cynical and manipulative. “Retro is not a design style [at all]; it's not a descriptor, an approach, or historical period of design. It is a marketing term invented by retailers, a catchall used to label stuff inspired by the past (100 years ago or 10 years ago) that they presume people will want to buy.” And this need of marketers to inveigle their products into the consumers’ consciousness accounts for the increase of retro pastiche in mass-market packaging.

Various top brands have developed limited edition boxes and tins that look like vintage packages. Procter & Gamble’s vintage Ivory soap package and Band-Aid’s collector’s edition set of tins featuring graphics from the 50s and 60s touch an emotional chord. “In the case of Ivory soap,” notes Debbie Millman, brand expert and director of the Sterling Group, “I think that the brand is suffering from ‘no new-news’ situation, and thus management is trying to drum up any reason possible for consumers–and/or the media–to take notice. While the packaging had a certain charm to it, there was no real ‘reason’ for doing it other than to (potentially) tug at older consumers heartstrings waxing for anything nostalgic.” Nonetheless, in this excessively high-tech age consumers seem to carry a special fondness for retro facsimiles–everything from PT Cruisers to Jukebox CD players–and the past is a safe haven for “creatives” afraid to test the boundaries. Or put another way “I think simply it is a lack of original ideas, courage, inspiration or ingenuity,” says Millman.

Bankruptcy or influence
Yet bankrupt creative is not the only reason for quoting the distant or recent past. Graphic design, like art itself, is assembled upon layers of history, sometimes a synthesis of, or even a reaction against previous methods and styles. And many designers who draw from historical references object to the retro label as shallow and pejorative. Rather than rob tombs to create indulgent novelties these designers are sincerely influenced by various historical forms, which are integrated into their respective styles.

“I don't view my own design work as ‘retro,’” Anderson insists. “I have always been interested in history, art and design. It's not nostalgia or a wish to live in some fuzzy, happy memory of the past. If anything, I rip on, mess with, or completely ignore those notions when I use visual elements from the past. It's the visuals that I find so compelling; both the high and the low, the cream and the crap. If I could go ahead in time and pick up ephemera from the future, I would try to incorporate it into my work. It's more of an approach and a way of working rather than a style.”

While Anderson quotes (and messes with) historical artifacts as raw material, this does not mitigate the fact that historical styles are also perfect for telegraphing specific codes that are deliberately used to manipulate perception and trigger consumer response. Some examples include:

Victorian = Historic
Russian Constructivism = Revolutionary
Bauhaus = Progressive
Art Deco = Elegant
Streamline = Speed
American Socialist Realism = Optimism
Psychedelic = Drugs
’50s Atomic and ’70s Disco = Goofy
’80s = Hipster

Sometimes the tropes of stylistic periods are applied more or less in the actual spirit of the original, other times as strained reinterpretations. Sometimes they are used without a shred of irony, other times seeped in it.

A fairly recent campaign for Bacardi Rum goofily quotes ’70s blacksploitation movie poster art to attract a young demographic that had considered the venerable Caribbean rum to be too establishment. In fact, subsequent Bacardi campaigns have further pushed the ironic envelope making its market perception decidedly more hip. And its not alone: Campy twists on 50s, 60s, 70s, and now even 90s styles have quantifiably positive impact on youth markets, because poking fun at preceding generations somehow elevates the status of the new generation. Which does not account for why, despite its onerous connotations, National Socialist (or Nazi) Realism has been reprised in certain campaigns, not as anti-Semitism per se, but to suggest heroic values. Whether Nazi, Soviet, Communist Chinese or even Depression-era American Social Realism, this pseudo-heroic style is frequently and ignorantly used.

Ingenious reprise or slavish copy
For the past two decades or so, around the same time that graphic design history courses began being taught in design schools, there has been an increase of Bauhaus-inspired and Russian Constructivist “New Typography” on ads, book jackets, posters and CD covers (where relationships are tangential at best) and have even been awarded medals in design competitions. Sometimes the only explanation is that the designer, recently introduced to the respective styles, has an uncontrollable urge to copy them. Occasionally these styles are cleverly reprised as in the music video for Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out,” which pays loving homage to Dada, Surrealist, and Constructivist styles through ingenious animation of the most iconic graphic tropes in sync with the music, which goes beyond the clichéd reprises to a new inventive level.

As retro tropes go, one of the most successful began over two decades ago when Banana Republic opened its first retail stores with an original identity based on a sardonic pastiche of Central American colonialism. Their skillful branding (i.e., the de-contextualization of truly exploitative colonialism into a fun style) created a mainstream, fashion-conscious demand for cheap Army-Navy surplus that had long been the sole province of do-it-yourselfers like Hippies and Punks. Banana Republic’s retro-looking stores (replete with old jeeps), labels and advertisements underscored this strategic positioning for about a decade until the novelty wore thin. Then such acolytes as Fossil watches entered the retro accessories market. In fact, once Banana Republic moved away from kitsch, the baton was passed to its sister company, Old Navy, which derived its own visual identity from vintage ’40s and ’50s commercial art that Charles Spencer Anderson had popularized with his pasticcio of passé printer’s cuts and “sho-card” advertising graphics–incidentally he dubbed this approach “Bonehead Design.”

A motherlode of reprise
But pastiche did not begin with Anderson. It is possible to go back to antiquity to find one culture borrowing ornament and architecture from another. More recently, late 19th century Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement dug up the Gothic past for inspiration, just as the mid-20th century Push Pin-ites returned to Victoriana, Art Nouveau and Art Deco for aesthetic nourishment. One needn’t be a devout nostalgist to reprise the past; designers known for their unequivocal Modernism have built graphic styles on historical form. Take, for instance, Alvin Lustig’s early-’50s book covers for Noonday Publishers, composed almost entirely of Victorian slab serif and script wood typefaces–his interest in these letterforms derived from an appreciation of typographic history and access to a trove of these fonts. Look also at his early metal type compositions where he constructed a series of abstract designs out of printer’s furniture–a kind of retro perhaps? It could also be called historicist–the difference being the former is stylistically exploitative while the latter is a more honest appreciation (or homage) of historical form.

Actually, designs made from metal type case and printing materials were common avant-garde tropes during the teens and ’20s used by Futurist, Constructivist and Bauhaus typographers as the modern alternative to ornamental fleurons. In 1940, Lustig was proprietor of his own metal type shop in California and took metal furniture from his type cases to design abstract cover and chapter divider pages for the book Ghost in the Underblows for the Ward Ritchie Press (Fig. 4 - Fig. 7). Lustig gave up this approach when he decided to experiment with photomontage, but recently the book and magazine designer Barbara deWilde, a Lustig fan, paid homage to Ghost in her design for the “Call for Entries” to the 365: AIGA Annual Design Competition (Fig. 8 - Fig. 9). The slogan of the competition is “Enter Your Best Work, Contribute to a Legacy” and “I was trying to focus on the idea of legacy,” says deWilde. “I looked through Ghost and thought of Lustig arranging these machinist elements [by hand] in such a lovely way. The shapes are actually very similar to a lot of the preset tools in Quark, the frames, the lines the circles, step-and-repeat. I thought it would be fun to make those designs again.” She added the standard Wingding computer symbols so as not to look too slavishly retro. And like Lustig’s design, she used only two colors, “but not the exact two colors.” DeWilde's work recalls Lustig’s graphic spirit, while having a contemporary one of its own. The only problem: There was no mention of Lustig as inspiration. When a familiar graphic form, particularly identified with another designer is used even as parody, homage or pastiche, it is necessary to somehow acknowledge its origin.

Whether one hundred or ten years old, retro is an official design methodology. Why, however, a particular style is brought back to life rather than another is a decision that shouldn’t be left to whim. Simply sampling willy-nilly from any of the stylistic reference books because a particular manner is appealing is not a good enough reason. Styles developed in their own historical contexts for particular reasons. The early 1900s, for example, saw a throwback to nature and organic forms in stark contrast to the geometric shapes of the modern industrial revolution that was changing the world at the time. Art Deco was a means of bridging the bourgeois need for ornament with the Modern disdain for it. “Perhaps 2005 is like 1905, the technology revolution instead of the industrial revolution,” adds Charles Spencer Anderson, “The difficulty is that ubiquitous embedded technology has no look and no form (and perhaps no politics) to inspire a visual movement. This lack leads to the perpetual question that designers from all disciplines constantly deal with: What should it look like?” And it is in a stylistic vacuum like this that retro pastiche tends to be frequently used, and all too often abused.