Page 30 - Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals

18 Chapter 1. Design History
changed the viewer’s response to the visual information. Instead of a simple fast reading, the reader now
faced dynamic complexity free of any rules or hierarchies. The viewer was now compelled to spend
more time with a design piece to understand its message and parse the meaning of its symbolism.

One of his American students, April Greiman, brought this new design language back to California with
her and heavily influenced the youth culture there. David Carson, a self-taught designer working in the
surf magazine world, took the ideas of the style and adopted them to his own typographic experiments in
the surfing magazines he designed. For Carson, Post Modern design reflected the free spirit of the surf
community.

Post Modernism is actually an umbrella term for many visual styles that came about after the 1980s.
They are unified by their reaction to Modernism’s guiding principles — particularly that of objectivity.
A key feature of Post Modern design is the subjective bias and individual style of the designers
that practise it. Additional defining stylistic characteristics can be summarized in the idea of ‘de-
construction.’ The style often incorporates many different typefaces breaking every traditional rule
of hierarchy and composition. Visual organization becomes more varied and complicated with the
use of layers and overlapping. The use of image appropriation and culture jamming is a key feature.
Dramatic layouts that do not conform to traditional compositions are another common characteristic. A
traditional grid is not used to organize the layout of the elements, making composition look ‘free-style.’
Other organizational systems for the elements developed — axial, dilatational, modular, and transitional
systems created a fresh way to organize the information. The combination of multiple geometric shapes
layered with photographs created depth that worked well on the computer monitor — now a component
of contemporary society.

Post Modernism is still in use today, though selectively. The chaos created by our technological
advancements needs to be balanced with the ease of accessing information. The Apple brand is a good
example of a contemporary design approach that feels fresh and current, while delivering massive
amounts of information in a clean and simple way. The Post Modern methods of built-in visual difficulty
are less welcome in our data-saturated culture.