The Blues Projectposter defined a Moscoso style. Other leading
contemporary poster artists, including Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and the
team of Mouse and Kelly, had distinct visual personalities, but Moscoso’s
use of vibrating color was the most emblematic of the group. His brand of
chromatic vibration was surprisingly derived from strict modern principles.
Moscoso was schooled at Cooper Union in New York and Yale in New
Haven before migrating west, and he credited his Yale professor Joseph
Albers, a master of modernism, for this key discovery. Likening Albers’s
famous Color Aid paper exercises to the futility of learning algebra in high
school, Moscoso admitted that color theory drove him crazy, but ultimately
proved to be an invaluable resource. “Albers’s impact really didn’t show until
the psychedelic poster... when I found myself in a situation where all I
had to do was reach back to my dusty shelf, so to speak, and pull out what
I had learned.”
Compared to rock posters by Rick Griffin and Mouse and Kelly,
each of whom practiced an obsessively precisionist, macabre comic style,
Moscoso was a master of simplicity. Despite what appeared to be layers of
graphic complexity, his visuals were strategically composed and purposefully
designed. While being stoned may have added to the enjoyment of theBlues
Projectposter, the design was not drug-induced chaos. Moscoso was a highly
disciplined rebel. He consciously rejected all the rules he learned during his
time at college when he admired Paul Rand, won a cash prize for designing
a roman alphabet based on the Trajan inscription, and rendered Chancery
Cursive and Caslon from memory just for kicks. But the Blues Projectposter
was indicative of a complete understanding of balance, proportion, and
color. The poster may not directly conform to any modernist theory, but it
was influenced by contemporary design thinking.
Moscoso’s first rock poster for The Family Dog dance hall, a
picture of a gargoyle on the top of Notre Dame with psychedelic type
overprinting the image, was an admitted flop. “I had seven years of college—
I could have been a doctor,” he said about the process of self-reevaluation
that resulted in a creative epiphany. He realized that none of the self-taught
poster artists were encumbered by the rules of good design, so Moscoso
reversed everything he had formally learned. The rule that a poster should
transmit a message simply and quickly became how long can you engage the
viewer in reading the poster? Five, ten, twenty minutes? “Don’t use vibrating
colors” became “use them whenever you can and irritate the eyes as much as
you can.” “Lettering should always be legible” was changed to “disguise the
lettering as much as possible and make it as difficult as possible to read.”
Moscoso called this “a world turned upside down.” But by acting on these
ideas he created a body of work that altered the language of a generation.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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