Monday, September 22, 2008

1960's Pop Art Movement Coupled with Design (psychedelia)

Beginning in the late 1950's and spanning the years of the 60's, typography and design in the United States and abroad took an auspicious turn of originality. With the new set on popular culture movement affecting art and design around the world, typography began to transcend from legibility and known methods of designs. Many texts were created solely for an aesthetic purpose. The International Style did stay true to many strong held conventions that kept type abroad legible enough for body text use, but the standards for text began to get skewed.
Known as the popular culture age, the 60's embraced new mindsets and accepted new ways of doing things. From the hippies and flower power to the invention of new typefaces for design and computers, this era was a progressive change from the past heading into the new modern ages of the computer's dominance in the 80's and today. The 60's seemed to produce a wide range of new typefaces including typefaces based on computer grids like OCR-A to Eurostile, a text distorting a circular form into an original "tv set" design. Many of the typefaces designed in the 60's were solely created for a simple solution to a problem. Letraset, a type that could be rubbed off a sheet onto artwork or clothing, became popular for its ability to make the common person a designer. The need for applicable type to interact with images in art made letraset an issue that was solved in the popular culture age. Many American texts were invented to follow the hippie movement springing up around the country. Psychedelia, type designed to mimic illegibility and intense colors of drugs, became the staple of flower power and antigovernmental ideals. While many random typefaces sprang up, European typographers were sticking to legibility rules. Often legible fonts would be paired with pop culture fonts. Legible types would make up large sections of text while more illegible yet interestingly different types were used for titles and small text concentrations.
To conclude, the 1960's proved to be a new step in the modern era of typography. Artists and typographers used their personal skills to influence and perpetuate cultural movements. Texts were designed to appease the general "pop" ideals. Many applications of texts were finally designed to aid in specific areas of desperate innovation such as the computers of this time and legibility issues.

Question... Name the two main categories typefaces described in 1960's article above fall into and name and least two of the types created in the 1960's.

www.wikipedia.com (various searches)


1 comment:

Andrea Herstowski said...

prose a test question about the 1960's.