Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Generic Design^269

There’s an old garment center
joke that goes like this: Moe, a
coat manufacturer suffering from
a steep decline in business, is so
consumed by despair that he
jumps from his twentieth-floor
ledge. Plummeting to the ground,
he chances to look into the
window of his competitor a few
floors below, and shouts up to his
partner, “cut velvet!”
One does not have to be
a coat-maker to know that the fashion industry is predicated on mimicry.
What a hot designer originates today is invariably “knocked off ” tomorrow.
In fact, all mass-market, ready-to-wear manufacturers dutifully follow styles
and colors that have been deemed au currant in the fashion press. Moe
realized a tad too late that velvet was the next big fashion code.
Similarly, most mass-market product packages are graphically
designed to conform to specific codes or “trade dress” established by leading
companies and then copied by all others within that genre until the next
big thing emerges. All cereal boxes look like cereal boxes; all pain relievers
look like pain relievers; all laundry detergents look like laundry detergents,
and all lottery tickets look like lottery tickets, because producers agree that
Pavlov was right—dogs and consumers are behaviorally conditioned to
respond to recurring stimuli. Woof, woof.
Therefore, major alterations to mass-market packages are as
cautiously watched as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, since new
and novel tropes could easily disrupt consumers’ mass buying habits. This
means that we should not underestimate the power of graphic design and
typography in moving the masses, yet it also underscores that originality is
not always welcome in consumer culture.
Most consumer products are market-tested to the hilt before being
released into the nation’s malls. In the 1950 s, the Container Corporation
of America, duly celebrated for producing some of the most progressively
modernist institutional advertising in the country, was also largely responsible
for establishing some of the mass graphic codes still used today. Its