Americanizing Utopia
The movement toward progressive design in American book covers was a product of greater self-awareness on the part of both designers and publishers. In February of 1947 a group of American designers formed the Book Jacket Designers Guild “for the purpose
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AMERICANIZING UTOPIA PROGRESSIVE DESIGN IN AMERICAN HANDS
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AMERICANIZING UTOPIA PROGRESSIVE DESIGN IN AMERICAN HANDS
The movement toward progressive design in American book covers was a product of greater self-awareness on the part of both designers and publishers. In February of 1947 a group of American designers formed the Book Jacket Designers Guild “for the purpose of promoting and stimulating interest in the art of book jacket design.” With the intention of elevating the artistic level of jacket design, the group aimed to foster a collegial atmosphere and organized annual exhibitions. Their exhibitions included a broad range of styles and theoretical approaches to design. Their first show in 1949 traveled extensively throughout the United States and included relatively conservative illustrative covers by designers such as Dwiggins and Kauffer as well as more progressive work by Paul Rand and Alvin Lustig. The mélange of styles was fully intended by the committee of guild members, who chose works for the exhibition that transcended the highly popular style of bawdy pulp fiction of the day.
The American publishing world began to recognize the possibility of bold and effective visual communication as a means to orchestrate its identity and inform its audience. Thus the designer became an essential link between the corporate entity and its market, creating the visual vocabulary of American consumer culture. Good design meant good business. Modernism served that commercial language well, providing the means for articulate design that was functional yet neither simplistic nor obvious. Progressive publishing companies appreciated modernist graphic design’s marriage of type and image and were among the most important sponsors of groundbreaking American graphic work. They employed designers who could exploit the clarity and logic of modernism to develop visual systems that shaped the identities of the presses and created thematic threads from one publication to the next.
INTEGRATING ART AND DESIGN
The role of graphic designer was being defined by the American postwar publishing world, which was finding a place for graphic design in its realm. The growing significance of the modernist approach to the making of book covers was evidence of the increasing responsibility and creative sovereignty of the graphic designer within corporate America. Alvin Lustig was among the most rigorous of the American graphic designers who strove to adapt both the forms and philosophy of European modernism to the realm of design, creating complex metaphors with formal and conceptual comparisons in striking compositions. Lustig’s work was characterized by his use of uniquely cropped and arranged photographs, biomorphic shapes, and sophisticated, often poetic, typography.
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Educated in Los Angeles, Lustig worked for three months in 1934 with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin East in Spring Green, Wisconsin. While the experence proved less than pleasant, Lustig recalled that it helped him to refine his design philosophy. Upon retur
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