French Paper^379
Charles Spencer AndersonSome call the current trend in revivalist
design postmodern, vernacular, or retro;
Charles Spencer Anderson (b. 1958 ) once
called it bonehead,a word that conjures up
goofy cartoon characters and self-
mockingly describes a design mannerism
that draws heavily on 1930 s and 1940 s
stock commercial art. But Anderson’s
design is anything but goofy. Sentimental?
Maybe. Nostalgic? Possibly. Silly? At
times. But ironicis more to the point. His
is a highly polished graphic style that has
evolved into a distinct dialect rooted in
American vernacularism. Rather than a
trendy trope intended to exploit a popular
fashion for quaint pastiche, this is a
consistent formal vocabulary, featuring a
lexicon of repeatedly used images,
typefaces, and dingbats, which signifies
both an attitude in contemporary design
and this designer’s particular obsession with pop visual culture. What began
as parody is raised to the level of art, much in the same way that pop artists
of the 1960 s elevated the artifacts of commercial culture to icon status.
Anderson’s long-running campaign for the French Paper Company
borrowed the iconography of early commercial printing and incorporated it
into witty rebus-like compositions that critiqued the mindless ubiquity of
these once anonymous materials by placing them in a comic light. If
postmodernism is a reappreciation of passé forms as a critical commentary
of modernism, then Anderson’s approach is the humorous arm of this
graphic design movement. His quotation of common visual advertising
clichés and sampling of gothic commercial typography uncovered a lost
aesthetic that had been dismissed as artless by the masters of orthodox
modern visual communications. By the 1960 s the cartoony printer’s cuts and
trade characters that would later form the corpus of Anderson’s work had
sunk to the nadir of graphic achievement and were repudiated by modern
formalists whose mission was to raise the level of visual beauty and literacy.