Reading Response #9 | Damani D

Reading Response 9

 80s Design is Alive, Well, and Living in 2019” by Nadja Sayej, published in PRINT, March 6, 2019

Questions/Prompts

• Find 1 example of work from a postmodern graphic designer from the 1980s and 1 example of work from a contemporary graphic designer from the last five years.
• Deconstruct the works and explain which visual and/or ideological elements are associated with Postmodernism of the 1980s and why.

This Emigre magazine poster was published in 1995 well into the post-modernist movement of graphic design and the introduction of the Macintosh. A staple of post-modernism is its embrace of visual revolution & fluid inattention to the functionality of communication. On this magazine cover, we see a close-up photograph of a person’s opened mouth edited into a burnt two-toned color scheme of blue and pink. At the time this type of burnt two-toned styling was not nearly as common as it is today; you can currently recreate this color treatment with the “two-tone” tool in the filter tab on photoshop. The model also appears to have an ice cube on their tongue. At the right margin of the cover, there is a small margin of a strip of grayish black, perhaps to give room for binding. On the center-right side of the page lies the justified title text for the magazine, “Emigre No. 36 Fall 1995, mouthpiece”. The top line of the text is in a sanserif gray typeface with different font weights, which overlapped and intruded into & around the second line of text “mouthpiece”. The second line was in a cream-colored slab-serif font decorated with a slim pink stroke. The integration of photography in graphic design is not a new concept at this point, however, the overlapping san & slab serif text, color treatment of the photograph, & the jarring margin are all monikers of post-modernism, breaking the rules of “good” typography. 

This poster was designed in February 2022 by Russian graphic designer Tamerlan Varziev. This poster is type-centered, using washed-out white oblique san-serif type against a black background. The three largest elements read from top left to bottom right, “SLEEP, WAKE, REPEAT”. The word “Sleep” is segmented by a grayscale image of a reaching hand shooting down from the top left corner of the poster. This arm begins from behind the “SL”, overlaps over the first “E” and goes behind the second “E” creating the illusion of depth & perspective within the type. Another outreached arm comes from the opposite corner and overlaps both the middle & bottom words “Wake” & “Repeat”, establishing its prevalence as part of the foreground. Both arms converge in the middle of the frame leaving just a few inches of space between them. The would-be negative space is occupied with a lower weight of the all-caps sanserif treatment used earlier reading, “I’VE BEEN WAITING ON SOMEBODY TO SAVE ME FROM [illegible]… AND IM UNDER-NEATH”. The illegible portion is covered by a black & white flower stemming from the “E” of the middle text “WAKE”. The negative space underneath “SLEEP” and left of “WAKE” is occupied by a large washed-out white block & the only iteration of lowercase text “nothing, nowhere, barely bleeding”. Filling the last block of negative space is an icon of a digital button commonly seen in the settings app of recent iPhones. This poster has postmodernist elements since it uses the integration of photography with a unique editing treatment, the use of sanserif type & culturally significant iconography. Furthermore, the use of ornamentation in this poster breaks the functionality of the text as communication devices since you can’t read the full sentence. This integration of ornamentation for purely aesthetic purposes & the decreased importance of functionality are both high parts of post-modernist style.