Postmodernism was kind of my baby food. If it started with Psychedelia, I can say my mom was pregnant with me driving by the Summer of Love at Woodstock with her minister uncle who lived nearby, and was shocked by all the hippies. I was Woodstock-adjacent. That’s pretty postmodern. 

Rejecting modernism’s organizing principles, like Woodstock’s hippy invasion rejecting my minister uncle’s ideals, all those grids and nice, clean typefaces go out the window. Postmodernism takes the action and angst of futurism and makes it ironic, personal, political, subjective. There is plenty of style and authorship, and by the 1980s, computers were in the hands of designers everywhere, revolutionizing what was possible. M/M Paris was a typography and design house famous for working with performer Bjork, and the By Redo perfume branding. 

Design took a leap without requiring typographers and printers to do the work. Design it yourself, or DIY became a motto. I like the chaos of postmodernism, the order in chaos. I do not like when it becomes abject, but that line is different for everyone. One irritating fact of postmodernism is it’s insistence there are many truths. It is a child of semiotics in every way.

 

My presentation was inspired by postmodernism. It borrows (very postmodern) elements of mid-century design and does them “wrong”, creating something not quite 1950s, not quite 1980s, collage-like, and “breaking” rules of modernist design ideals. 

Postmodernism is a little bit Punk, which is also a postmodern movement. It’s extremely self-referential, and is criticized for it. It’s also fun, when it’s not ugly, lol.

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