Blues Project^251
Victor MoscosoVictor Moscoso’s psychedelic Blues Projectposter
is as illegible today as it was in 1967 when it, and
scores of other vibrating rock posters advertising
the San Francisco rock scene, first appeared. It is
also as electrifying. Moscoso’s posters did for
graphic design what bands like the Grateful
Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and
the Holding Company did for rock music:
turned up the juice and broke all the rules.
During the mid- 1960 s San Francisco
was the vortex of the counterculture. The hippies
prevailed, hallucinogenic drugs were plentiful,
and rock and roll knew no bounds. Brooklyn-
raised, Spanish-born Victor Moscoso (b. 1939 )
stumbled into this milieu and became a defining
force in the distinctly American design genre
known as the psychedelic poster. Characterized
by illegible typefaces, vibrating colors,and antique illustrations, psychedelia
was a rebellious visual language created to communicate with an exclusive
community. Within a year, however, it was usurped by entrepreneurs who
turned it into a trendy commercial style that appealed to a new market of
youthful consumers. Before ceding the field to the so-called culture vultures,
Moscoso created some of the most emblematic images of the 1960 s, of
which the Blues Projectposter is one classic.
Most of the more than sixty posters Moscoso designed during a
frenetic eight months in 1967 rejected publicity photos in favor of found
images. For the Blues Projectposter he used a vintage photograph of a nude
Salomé. Following her contour, he hand-lettered the concert information in
a typeface that Moscoso called Psychedelic Playbill (an adaptation of a
Victorian woodtype). Because he drew the letters out of negative space
(whiting out all the areas between the bodies of the letterforms rather than
drawing them directly), they look as if they have been carved onto the page.
The figure was printed in bright orange against an acid green background;
the lettering was printed in process blue. The slightly off-register trapping
gave the letters a three-dimensional look in addition to the vibrating
sensation produced by the juxtaposition of similar chromatic values.