Reading Response 9 – RR

By the mid-’70s modernism seems to have run its course. The philosophy of rationale, objective, and design didn’t answer the needs of a generation interested in self-expression and intuition. Graphics designers began exploring ideas such as decoration, pop culture, and historical classical forms. The term applied to this is postmodernism. Rejecting the tenets of modernism, form does not follow function, design can be expressive and ignore the function, and we can appropriate elements from anywhere. Typography can be self-referential and have alternative meanings. Postmodernism is an approach that attempts to define how society has progressed to an era beyond modernity. It has developed from a provocative architectural movement in the early 1970s and rapidly influenced all areas of popular culture, including art, film, music, graphics, and fashion. The overthrowing of purity and simplicity in favor of exuberant color, bold patterns, artificial-looking surfaces, historical quotation, parody, and wit, and above all, newfound freedom in the design of modernism existed within postmodernism during the 1970s-1990s. Many modernists considered style to be a mere sideshow to their utopian visions; but for the postmodernists, the style was everything. Open the doors to a wide variety of design movements to follow, rejecting functionalism, embracing personal expressions, mixing media, and appropriating forms from different time periods became components of the postmodern movement and dominated design in the 1980s.