Designers and critics alike reject style as shallow and meaningless. But they overlook the complex ways in which its codes are used by different social groups.
A surprising consensus about style is emerging within contemporary graphic design. Its proponents include cultural critics eager to expose consumerist trickery, conservative critics who lambast entire genres for being mere followers of fashion, and progressive critics who bemoan the popular dilution of innovative graphics. Although the agendas and targets are different, these factions share a distrust of style as false, shallow and meaningless.
The proliferation of design since the 1980s has been blamed for transforming graphic design from a problem-solving process into a style-conscious cog in the fashion system. Recent work has been dismissed as empty formalism whose excesses mask a poverty of content.
Such opinions often rest on a rejection of the work’s aesthetics, or on a misfit between the aesthetic preferences of the critic and the values embodied in the work.
The idea that style is meaningless goes back to Modern functionalism. The Modernist notion of deceptive forms (style) on the surface and essential contents (substance) at the core is outmoded for contemporary graphic design, which must respond to fragmented audiences. Dismissals of style ignore the complex ways in which it circulates as a communicative code.
Debates about style usually invoke dualisms such as form/content and style/substance
These artificial dichotomies divorce the terms from one another, giving the mistaken impression that there is form independent of content, or style in lieu of substance. In fact, since each term is married to the other, a relationship must be established and the terms negotiated. So form is legitimised on the basis of content – form is truthful or aesthetically valid when it faithfully represents content. This coupling is offered as a unified whole in which the ‘problem’ (content) is inseparable from the ‘solution’ (form). From the depths of the problem comes the essential truth of the solution, which bypasses style altogether. As Alvin Lustig wrote in his attempt to reconcile the counter claims of traditional and Modern design in the US during the 1940s and 1950s, ‘We will simply solve each problem within its own terms, without conscious thought concerning “styles,” modern or traditional.’
The twentieth century has been characterised by a near constant rejection of form which is empty or meaningless, gratuitous or extraneous.Often such form is dismissed as mere style – something that is added rather than being an integral part of the solution.
Style has also been criticised as an appeal to popular tastes – a pandering to the masses which turned Modernism into the ‘modernistic’. The issues of style and taste are ignored in most theoretical accounts of Modern design;
[Style and Taste] are simply placed outside the brackets of the problem-solving equation.
The definitions of style, form and content which inform contemporary debates in graphic design were cast in a specific historical period, the Modern, against the background of the design profession’s modernisation. Their usage within a different period – the post-industrial, late capitalist post-modern – is problematic. Although the context has changed, the original definitions persist. The purity of the problem-solution equation leaves no room for issues such as form not attributable to an internal content, taste as an aesthetic value in society and designers who add their own ‘statements’. Though style is banished to the hinterlands of non-meaning, it can nevertheless be found in the work of most designers who reach not inward to the problem but outward to the ‘masses’.
While functionalism evaded the issue of style by locating it outside design, contemporary critics tend to see design as nothing but style. Stuart Ewen, in his book All Consuming Images, sums up the sense that the proliferation of style since the 1980s is at odds with substantive concerns and values: ‘Style, more and more, has become the official idiom of the marketplace. In advertising, packaging, product design, and corporate identity,
The power of provocative surfaces speaks to the eye’s mind, overshadowing matters of quality or substance.’
In this scenario, style deludes as it seduces:
style with its seductive surface diverts us from the truth.
This notion is expressed not only by cultural critics but also by designers, sometimes in surprising ways. In The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, Jon Wozencroftcontemporary British ‘style culture’: ‘Once made public, the ideas, let alone the simple techniques that were used to give form to them, were often smothered by the success of the style culture in England with which Brody had been associated. Here, style is used as an ointment to seal in any “difficult” material that might interfere with the gloss finish.’ Wozencroft describes the use of style to mask ulterior motives or politicised agendas. Style is false, purposefully misleading. But rather than seeing this as a possibility for all design styles, he confines his comments to the way style blurs the distinction between an ‘original’ design and an imposter: ‘The more successful The Face became, the more it was looked upon as a “Style Bible,” which provided a monthly graphics phrase book that enabled imitators to make the right visual noises. Such was the business demand for “style culture” to exploit new patterns of consumer behaviour, few took the time to reflect or even care whether or not they were getting the genuine article.’ Progressive critics use style to prop up the cult of originality while bemoaning the commodification of innovative work.
Conservative critics invoke style to dismiss ‘new’ work, particularly that which they regard as fashionable kitsch. Here, graphic design has been diverted from its problem-solving imperatives to become aberrant form and hence style, as Pearce Marchbank stated in a review of The Graphic Edge: ‘The “designs” here (with the exception of items such as record covers, which can be treated as stylistic art objects) show that concise messages, let alone briefs, seem to have been often ignored in favour of creating a fashionable vehicle for style.’
Such blanket rejections are often simply a result of a mismatch of aesthetic values between the critic and the work, giving rise to a misrecognition of style as dysfunctional form.
Style is not governed by functionalism’s desire to reflect an internal truth. Style engages us on the surface – it is about appearance – but this surface is neither the glossy reflection of adoring consumers seduced by their own image nor a layer of camouflage hiding the truth. Rather,
style is an outward sign of difference that gains its uniqueness in relation to other styles.
Style’s seductiveness lies in its ability to transform signs and manipulate codes, through mimicry and parody for instance. Parody imitates the stylistic features of the original while undercutting its foundation. Spy magazine, renowned for its satirical humour, parodies in its February 1995 issue the American sportswear catalogue J. Crew. The white middle classes in the great outdoors are replaced by an inner-city underclass, substituting the original’s wardrobe of polo shirts, parkas and pre-ripped jeans with streetwear such as the ‘Flak Jacket’ (‘For casual drive-bys’) and the ‘Felony Tee’ (‘Gangsta. Nothing quite says it like a bold horizontal stripe’). The careful duplication of the catalogue’s design style lends the air of authenticity necessary to carry the humour.
Parody can be based on a type rather than a specific original, as in John Bielenberg’s 1993 ‘Virtual Telemetrix’ annual report. This report for a fictitious company is intended as a commentary on graphic design’s relationship with corporate culture. Bielenberg wanted to disseminate the project through design annuals and so had to incorporate enough elements of corporate communications to make it convincing for the designers judging the competitions. Since his design does not copy a particular corporation but an entire genre, it must synthesise a core set of values and styles in order to pass itself off as authentic – familiar enough to be recognisable as corporate literature, competent enough to be deemed professional, and different enough to be judged innovative.
Pastiche is another form stylistic mimicry, but one which lacks the humour of parody. While parody works by means of reference to a specific style, pastiche, as a hodge-podge of styles gathered from disparate sources, is a particularly post-modern phenomenon. The fragments assembled in such compositions – well suited to the current vogue for layering –retain a residue of their previous existence and bring traces of their origins to the new context. The introductory pages of Wired magazine, designed by John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr, incorporate a multitude of fragments in a densely layered, fluid composition. The background to a quote from an article on ‘immersive’ technologies is constructed from a wiring diagram, a photograph of auditorium seating, a first-aid illustration, snatches of technical information and assorted digital textures. That such images are created using computer imaging programs, together with their presence in a magazine of ‘new media’, contributes to the notion that this is a ‘digital style’.
The stylistic mimicry by professional graphic designers of the anonymously designed vernacular – flyers, supermarket circulars, clip-art – is another instance of pastiche. Art Chantry’s CD packaging for the Liquor Giants’s You’re Always Welcome is typical of this strategy. Here a newspaper circular provides the stylistic vehicle, while the band acknowledges the impossibility of ‘original’ form through its appropriation of a pre-existing style. Also classifiable as pastiche are the crop of ‘new’ styles which look familiar but whose ‘original’ source cannot be definitively located. The straightforward treatment of text and images in Frankfurt Balkind Partners’1992 annual report for science and technology conglomerate EG&G was likened by I.D. magazine to a Barbara Kruger exhibition. A more perceptive Jeffery Keedy at the American Center for Design’s 100 Show pointed out: ‘I really wanted to select Details, but since they didn’t submit, I selected this pale imitation. It’s the next best thing to the original. In graphic design, it’s not important who did it first, but who got the most use out of it.’ The need to find an origin for design styles seems futile when the appropriators are themselves appropriated.
To gain a broader understanding of graphic design’s social status, we must look at how it is perceived by others. To evaluate visual language only in terms of the correspondence between form and content is too insular in an age when audiences must negotiate a wide variety of styles in the many objects that surround them.
Style carries valuable information about how the codes of communication operate in society, and many graphic designers already use a range of styles to address different audiences.
understanding of style must be adjusted to face the introduction of new technology that expands the availability of graphic design and hastens the dispersal of styles. Such strategies will place renewed attention on the materiality of graphic design – its articulation on the very surface we try to dismiss but cannot because this, after all, is our only representational space.