"Psychedelic Language" continued

And these next pieces were designed by Kathy while working for Detroit’s main industry, applying the language to car advertising.

Kathy admits that they’re very “Yellow Submarine.”

For me, this is the most interesting piece of Kathy’s Psychedelic collection because it’s so particular to graphic design. It a “Psychedelic logo,” designed for the Birmingham-Bloomfield Teen Center.

This is from my personal library. The jacket’s type The Love Bug is from 1968. I’m glad I kept it for all these years because it’s a great example of how Hollywood digested
Psychedelia and made it palatable for a nine-year-old kid.
I think the movie did have an affinity with the times in the sense that the idea of being different was becoming
acceptable. The book’s introduction states “Of the many
millions of small cars that rolled off the assembly lines, it happened that one was different from all the others.”

Psychedelia was digested by east coast graphic designers too, especially in the work of the Pushpin Group of New York City. The illustrators and designers at Pushpin had been playing with alternative colors, typefaces, and an eclectic approach to style even before the Psychedelia. But they weren’t challenging the social culture as much as they were the modernist design culture. The preceding generation’s rules on how to make graphic design were being questioned.

As Psychedelia became more and more ubiquitous, Psychedelic typefaces were becoming available to
the advertising and design fields. It’s been said that this Photolettering catalog from 1968 contributed to Psychedelia’s demise because it made it possible for
anyone and everyone to set type in a Psychedelic style.

This is one of the pages from the catalog.

Psychedelia, as a style, began experiencing a general overload and burn out.

This was one of the last posters of the genre by David Singer, commissioned for the unfortunate closing of the Fillmore. It metaphorically interprets the Psychedelic era as a dream state. The white cat in the center symbolizes a light and playful mind, batting the globe of Saturn, while a black cat sits in the background as the mysterious unconscious. This poster really signaled a growth within the language, becoming more sophisticated with the next generation of designers getting involved. But the posters couldn’t exist without the Fillmore to stay relevant, and by 1971, Psychedelia itself was over.

Since I titled this lecture “Psychedelic Language,” I had to ask the question, “Is the Psychedelic language a dead language today for a graphic designer to speak?”
There’s no denying that it’s part of history now; part of the visual continuity within our society and culture. So as a graphic designer, it’s impossible for me to use the Psychedelic style of flowing type and vibrating colors in my work without ironically referencing that time period. A design solution in that style would seem empty, mostly because Vietnam is over, and many of the political issues are gone.

But there’s another reason why I say that it’s a dead language to speak today. It has to do more with critical issues within the design community. This slide might help explain my point.

This is a slide of two framed posters in my studio—been there for a few years. On the left, a Fillmore poster, and on the right, an announcement for a beer party from my graduate school days, created by a student from the sculpture department.

I kept this hand-brushed poster not just for nostalgic reasons, but also because it was strangely inspiring. It was so naive and outside of the accepted design aesthetic, yet it was completely spontaneous and energized, powerfully handled—filling the page with information, and used verbal language that was knowingly stupid. All this made the piece especially brilliant to me.

Both posters used visual languages that appealed to the audiences that understood them, almost as if it were a code that signaled that,
a) “you want to find out more” or, b) “you aren’t going to go to this event, so don’t even bother reading this.” In this sense they were similar.

But I had a fellow graphic designer, Ed Fella, in my studio while I was researching this lecture, and when I pointed to these pieces, Ed felt that if anything, they were more dissimilar to one another. His reasoning was that the naive poster from the late 80s still had some relevance today, whereas the Psychedelic poster and language was only relevant historically.

Naive visual languages became interesting to graphic designers in the early 80s when design entered its deconstructionist phase of evolution. Just as those who worked in and studied philosophy were critically examining the constructs of society, culture and language, graphic design began questioning its own set of aesthetic and conceptual constructs.

Design created by people untrained in the field became increasingly important to notice, talk about, and include. These David Carson layouts are probably the most famously applied examples of this approach within graphic design. Referencing naive languages gave designers the means to challenge the rules within their field.

The Psychedelic language rebelled against objectivity, rationality, and an obedience to “the system,” but that territory, today, is thoroughly explored and absorbed into our cultural vision. Critically speaking, it’s covered territory. On the other hand, the naive, when brought into the context of design, questions the entire notion of what beautiful or ugly is, and even what the right and wrong way is. Thus, the naive became relative within the context of the Post-Modern condition and its subset, deconstruction.

Kathy McCoy explained to me that the resistance within Psychedelia was about being ‘out of your head,’ dropping out and tuning into one’s senses and inner life. What was in your head was beautiful, so it was consistent for posters to be beautiful. She said that people used to say, "Beautiful, man..." all the time. And there was a big craft revival—macrame, hand embroidery on levis, pottery, craft fairs, etc. signaling that no one was rebelling against craftsmanship.”

Twenty years later, as a student of Kathy’s, I remember when a group of us design grad students got all excited about what we named “tape type,” which were numbers created on the motel doors that we were staying at during a trip to Los Angeles. The numbers were made from ripped black tape, and we just “ooed” and “ahed” and photographed this font of numbers because it was completely outside of the rules of how it was supposed to have been done.

Since pop music is the cause for all this poster work, I should explain that Punk rock occurred as a reaction to the highly crafted and structured 70s music. Punk’s raw energy, and the will to play, became more important than perfectionism, and Punk posters reflected that attitude in that they were deliberately uncrafted and anti-aesthetic. You didn’t need to be artistic to create them, in much the same way that you didn’t need to be a trained musician to play Punk.

Now before I end my lecture, I’d like to say that I mean no disrespect to Psychedelia by referring to it as a dead language. It was an incredibly important part of America’s social and cultural history, and continues to inspire people in finding their own way. What I find wonderful about the posters in particular is that they were in tune with the times they reflected, challenging the status quo, and played an integral role in the evolution of our visual culture and hence graphic design, which I’m thankful for.

And thank you for looking and listening (and reading).