Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

French industrial exposition. The French pioneered a variety of formats for
advertising fans that ranged from the classic folded and gathered form to a
splayed peacock-like version called a “Jenny Lind” and the coccardaprinted
on very thin vellum and glued to two sticks, which when pulled apart and
joined in a 360 -degree turn revealed a brilliant circle of color. Other
classically based formats included the fontage,a folded half oval, and the
palmette,a smallish boxy-shaped pleated type; both were attached to
foldable spokes. Conversely, the poor-man’s fan was usually either a piece of
cardboard pasted on a stick or a single piece of die-cut cardboard that
formed a handle and paddle.
In France, fans were the premium of choice for manufacturers and
businesses, notably the department store Galleries Lafayette, which
complemented each seasonal merchandise campaign with a new fan much
the way Bloomingdales does with its thematic shopping bags. Most of the
store’s fan designs from the 1920 s and 1930 s were rendered in the elegant
modernestyle popularized in Paris at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des
Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.The liquor industry regularly
employed advertising fans to complement its various other means of
product promotion. Fans for Amer Picon, St. Raphaël, Cognac Sorin,
Amourette, and other well-known brands and distilleries were distributed,
usually during the summertime, to customers at myriad French cafés. A
profusion of colorful fluttering was often seen along the boulevards on the
hottest days of the year.
While some mimicked famous posters, notably A. M. Cassandre’s
well-known Dubonnet sequence,Dubo, Dobon, Dubonnet,most fans were
custom designed for a specific purpose. Some were quite painterly, showing
an elegant vignette or highly stylized characterizations. Usually the fronts
had a strong image while the backs were reserved for selling copy; some
fans had different images on front and back. Common visual themes
included romantic and nostalgic scenes from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, but the most common, indeed the most beautiful images were
rendered in the contemporary art modernestyle. The rays of the unfolded
fan provided the ideal canvas for art moderne,which used radiant lighting
patterns borrowed from cubism as the basis for many decorative motifs.