Lubalin had a tremendous impact on the practice of American
and European graphic design for a generation. His hothouses were Eros
and Avant Garde, which he art directed and designed. The former was
America’s first unexpurgated celebration of erotica, the quintessence of
magazine pacing and composition at the time (despite its high design
merits, its publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, was convicted and imprisoned for
pandering through the U.S. Mail). The latter was a slightly more acceptable
expression of the social and cultural flux within American society as
influenced by the antiwar movement, civil rights, and the alternative New
Left and youth cultures. A hybrid that crossed a magazine with a literary
journal,Avant Gardelived up to its name. It was square (the size of a record
album) in shape not in content, and featured illustration and photographs
that busted the verities of 1950 s sentimental and romantic commercial art.
Both publications were alternatives to mainstream design conventions, but
not in the raucous and anarchic sense, like the underground and
psychedelic graphics of the same era.
Although Lubalin was soft-spoken, almost painfully shy when
addressing people, he spoke loudly through design. His headlines for
articles and advertisements were signs that forced the reader to halt, read,
and experience. Story titles were tweaked and manipulated to give Lubalin
just the right amount of words or letters to make an effective composition.
The graphic strength of “No More War” (originally an advertisement for
Avant Garde’s antiwar poster competition), which featured block letters
forming the pattern of an American flag with a bold black exclamation
point at the end, became an icon of the Vietnam war epoch. Lubalin rarely
missed the opportunity to make his own variant of concrete poetry. Making
words into sculptural forms was one of his typical mannerisms.
Some of the smashing and overlapping was contrived, and the
conceit ultimately became self-conscious. But since Lubalin was its
inventor, even the excesses must be viewed in the light of one who was
testing the limits of form. For example, the Avant Garde typeface has been
misused by a generation of designers who could not master Lubalin’s
distinctive ligatures. Lubalin played with and modernized these historic
letter forms, but releasing the family of ligatures to the public as the key
characteristic of the font was a mistake. In most other hands, Avant Garde
became a silly novelty face; in Lubalin’s, it was a signature.
Lubalin pushed design sometimes beyond the ken of his
contemporaries. With few exceptions his experiments were conducted
under marketplace conditions, which at once provided certain safeguards
and made taking liberties all the more difficult. Lubalin’s was not design for
design, but design for communication.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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