DM112 - Graphic Design
Postmodernism

During the 1940s, only a moderate number of American magazines were designed well. These included Fortune, a business magazine whose art directors included Will Burtin and Leo Lionni; Vogue, where Alexander Liberman replaced Dr. Agha as art director in 1943; and Harper's Bazaar, where Alexey Brodovitch continued as art director until his retirement in 1958. One of Dr. Agha's assistants at Vogue during the 1930s, Cipe Pineles, made a major contribution to editorial design during the 1940s and 1950s, first as art director at Glamour, then at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle. Pineles often commissioned illustrations from fine artists, resulting in editorial pages that broke with conventional imagery. Her publication designs were characterized by a lyrical appreciation of color, pattern, and form. Pineles became the first woman admitted to membership in the New York Art Director's Club, breaking the bastion of the male-dominated professional design societies. 
In the late 1960s, broad factors at work in America ended the era of large pages, huge photographs, and design as a significant component of content. A two-decade period of ever-growing affluence was yielding to inflation and economic problems. Television eroded the magazine' advertising revenue and supplanted their traditional role of providing popular fiction entertainment. At the same time, public concerns about the Vietnam War, environmental problems, the rights of minorities and women, and a host of other issues produced a need for different magazines. The public demanded a higher information content, and skyrocketing postal rates, paper shortages, and escalating paper and printing costs shrank the large-format periodicals. 
Soothsayers predicted the death of the magazine as a communications form during the 1960s; however, a smaller-format breed of new periodicals emerged and thrived by addressing the interests of specialized audiences. Advertisers who wished to reach these audiences bought advertising space. The new editorial climate, with more emphasis on content, longer text, and less opportunity for lavish visual treatment, necessitated a new approach to editorial design. Layout became more controlled, and the use of a consistent typographic format and grid--undoubtedly under the influence of the International Typographic Style--became the norm.
A playful direction in the 1950s and 1960s among New York graphic designers involved figurative typography. This took many forms--letterforms became objects; objects became letterforms. Another approach to figurative typography used the visual properties of the words themselves, or their organization in the space, to express an idea. Typography was sometimes scratched, torn, bent, or vibrated to express a concept or introduce the unexpected to the printed page.
Moreover, a new advertising developed during this time. Although the new advertising continued the essential orientation toward persuasive selling techniques and subjective emotional appeals, its methods were more honest, literate, and tasteful; advertising talked intelligently to consumers.
The New York School was born from an excitement about European modernism and fueled by economic and technological expansion; it became a dominant force in graphic design from the 1940s until the 1970s. Many of its practitioners, young revolutionaries who altered the course of American visual communications in the 1940s and 1950s, continued to design in the 1990s, as their design practices reach the half-century mark.