Graphic design in the 20th century

Early developments

In the first decade of the 20th century, the experiments with pure form begun in the 1890s continued and evolved. Although the Glasgow group received a cool reception in the British Isles, designers in Austria and Germany were inspired by their move toward geometric structure and simplicity of form. In Austria, a group of young artists led by Gustav Klimt broke with the Künstlerhaus in 1897 and formed the Vienna Secession. These artists and architects rejected academic traditions and sought new modes of expression. In their exhibition posters and layouts and illustrations for the Secession magazine, Ver Sacrum, members pushed graphic design in uncharted aesthetic directions. Koloman Moser’s poster for the 13th Secession exhibition (1902) blends three figures, lettering, and geometric ornament into a modular whole. The work is composed of horizontal, vertical, and circular lines that define flat shapes of red, blue, and white. Moser and architect Josef Hoffmann were instrumental in establishing the Wiener Werkstätte (“Vienna Workshops”), which produced furniture and design objects.

The German school of poster design called Plakatstil (“Poster Style”) similarly continued the exploration of pure form. Initiated by Lucian Bernhard with his first poster in 1905, Plakatstil was characterized by a simple visual language of sign and shape. Designers reduced images of products to elemental, symbolic shapes that were placed over a flat background colour, and they lettered the product name in bold shapes. Plakatstil gained numerous adherents, including Hans Rudi Erdt, Julius Gipkens, and Julius Klinger.

Concurrent with these developments, in Germany Peter Behrens played an important role in graphic design. Behrens helped to develop a philosophy of Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) in design, which emphasized technology, manufacturing processes, and function, with style subordinated to purpose. In 1907 Emil Rathenau, head of the AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, a vast electrical manufacturing firm), appointed Behrens as artistic adviser for all of AEG’s activities. Rathenau, a farsighted industrialist, believed industry needed the visual order and consistency that could only be provided by design. For AEG, Behrens developed what may be considered the first cohesive “visual identity system”; he consistently used the same logo, roman typeface styles, and geometric grids to create product catalogs, magazines, posters, other printed matter, and architectural graphics. Behrens’s work for AEG was a harbinger of a major area of graphic design in the second half of the 20th century: the creation of a corporate identity through a program using trademarks, typefaces, formats, and colour in a consistent, controlled manner.

In addition to such aesthetic, commercial, and corporate purposes, graphic design also played an important political role in the early 20th century, as seen in posters and other graphic propaganda produced during World War I. Colour printing had advanced to a high level, and governments used poster designs to raise funds for the war effort, encourage productivity at home, present negative images of the enemy, encourage enlistment in the armed forces, and shore up citizens’ morale. Plakatstil was used for many Axis posters, while the Allies primarily used magazine illustrators versed in realistic narrative images for their own propaganda posters. The contrast between these two approaches can be seen in a comparison of German designer Gipkens’s poster for an exhibition of captured Allied aircraft with American illustrator James Montgomery Flagg’s army recruiting poster (both 1917). Gipkens expressed his subject through signs and symbols reduced to flat colour planes within a unified visual composition. In contrast, Flagg used bold lettering and naturalistic portraiture of an allegorical person appealing directly to the potential recruit. The difference between these two posters signifies the larger contrast between graphic design on the two continents at the time.

Modernist experiments between the world wars

Building upon the formal design experiments from the beginning of the century, between the world wars, European graphic designers utilized the new forms, organization of visual space, and expressive approaches to colour of such avant-garde movements as Cubism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Futurism, Suprematism, and Surrealism. Inspired by these movements, graphic designers increasingly pursued the most elemental forms of design. Such a concern with the essential formal elements of a medium characterizes the Modernist experiments prevalent in all the arts of the period.

One pioneer of this approach was an American working in England, E. McKnight Kauffer, who was one of the first designers to understand how the elemental symbolic forms of Cubist and Futurist painting could be applied to the communicative medium of graphic design. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, his posters, book jackets, and other graphics achieved an immediacy and vitality well-suited to the fast-paced urban environment in which his visual communications were experienced.

Cassandre (the pseudonym of Adolphe-Jean-Marie Mouron) used figurative geometry and modulated planes of colour, derived from Cubism, to revitalize postwar French poster design. From 1923 until 1936, Cassandre designed posters in which he reduced his subject matter to bold shapes and flat, modulated icons. He emphasized two-dimensional pattern, and he integrated lettering with his imagery to make a unified overall composition. Cassandre also utilized airbrushed blends and grading to soften rigid geometry. His clients included steamship lines, railways, and clothing, food, and beverage companies.

The austere visual language developed by artistic movements such as De Stijl in the Netherlands and by Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia influenced a Modernist approach to page layout. Suprematism, founded by Kazimir Malevich, inspired a young generation of designers to move toward a design based on the construction of simple geometric forms and elemental colour. Attributes of this approach in design included an underlying structure of geometric alignments, asymmetrical composition, elemental sans-serif typefaces, and simple geometric elements. Ornament was rejected, and open areas of white space were used as compositional elements. Works by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky exemplify this design approach. He developed design programs that utilized consistent type elements and placements. For example, his 1923 book design for Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Dlya golosa (For the Voice) is a seminal work of graphic design. The title spread for each poem is constructed into a dynamic visual composition, with geometric elements having symbolic meaning. In the title page to one poem, Lissitzky used a large red circle to signify the sun, the subject of the poem.

The Bauhaus, a German design school founded in 1919 with architect Walter Gropius as its director, became a crucible where the myriad ideas of modern art movements were examined and synthesized into a cohesive design movement. In its initial years, the Bauhaus held an Expressionist and utopian view of design, but it later moved toward a functionalist approach. Bauhaus artists and designers sought to achieve a new unity between art and technology and to create functional designs—often utilizing the pure forms of Modernism—that expressed the mechanization of the machine age. In 1923 the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty. Among his numerous contributions, Moholy-Nagy introduced a theoretical approach to visual communications. Important in his theory was the use of photomontage (a composite photographic image made by pasting or superimposing together different elements) as an illustrative medium. He also promoted the integration of words and images into one unified composition and the use of functional typography.

Herbert Bayer was appointed first master of the newly founded Druck und Reklame (“Printing and Advertising”) workshop at the Bauhaus in 1925. Bayer’s poster for Wassily Kandinsky’s 60th-birthday exhibition (1926) incorporates Constructivist and De Stijl influences. It clearly embodies the Bauhaus design philosophy: elemental forms are shorn of ornament, and forms are selected and arranged in order to serve a functional purpose (“clarity of information”), with a visual hierarchy of size and placement in descending prominence from the most important to secondary facts. The elements are masterfully balanced and aligned to create a cohesive composition, and the tilting at a diagonal angle energizes the space.

The unprecedented graphic designs produced during this period were explained and demonstrated to printers and designers through writings and designs by Jan Tschichold, a young German designer. As a result, many designers in Europe and throughout the world embraced this new approach to graphic design. An announcement for Tschichold’s book Die neue Typographie (1928; “The New Typography”) typifies his own philosophy. Tschichold advocated functional design that uses the most direct means possible. His systematic methodology emphasized contrast of type sizes, widths, and weights, and he used white space and spatial intervals as design elements to separate and organize material. He included only elements that were essential to the content and page structure.

Many designers sought other ways to use geometry to evoke a modern spirit for the machine age. Art Deco, streamline, and moderne are terms used to denote the loosely defined trend in art, architecture, and design from the 1920s to the 1940s that utilized decorative, geometric designs. Everything from skyscrapers to furniture to—in the case of graphic design—cosmetics packaging, posters, and typefaces used zigzag forms, sunbursts, and sleek geometric lines to project a feeling of a new technological era.

At the same time, a number of Dutch designers, including Piet Zwart, drew upon the Modernist vocabulary of form and colour to develop unique personal approaches to graphic design, applying their vision to the needs of clients. While working at an architectural firm in the early 1920s, Zwart received commissions for graphic-design projects by happenstance. In his work from the 1920s and ’30s, he rejected the conventional norms of typography and instead approached the layout of an ad or brochure as a spatial field upon which he created dynamic movements and arresting forms. An example of this can be seen in his dynamic advertisement for NKF cable factory (1924), which proclaims, “Normaal cable is the best cable for the price.” Zwart believed the fast pace of 20th-century life meant viewers had little time for lengthy advertising copy. He used brief telegraphic text, bold typefaces placed at an angle, and bright colours to attract attention and to convey his client’s message quickly and effectively.

Swiss designers also brought tremendous vitality to graphic design during this period. After studying in Paris with Fernand Léger and assisting Cassandre on poster projects, Herbert Matter returned to his native Switzerland, where from 1932 to 1936 he designed posters for the Swiss Tourist Board, using his own photographs as source material. He employed the techniques of photomontage and collage in his posters, as well as dynamic scale changes, large close-up images, extreme high and low viewpoints, and very tight cropping of images. Matter carefully integrated type and photographs into a total design.

When the Nazis rose to power in Europe during the 1930s, Modernist experiments were denounced, and many artists, architects, and designers immigrated to the United States. This migration, along with their professional and teaching activities, would play a major role in shaping postwar American art and design. During World War II, posters were used once again as a major form of political propaganda, although they then functioned alongside radio broadcasts and propaganda films in governmental war efforts.