Supermannerism and supergraphics

Supermannerism. American style of interior decoration dating from the 1960s employing odd optical tricks, synthetic materials that were either shiny and mirror-like, or transparent, and over-sized elements, so it was referred to as ‘mega-decoration’, and owed more to images in ‘Superman’ comics than to Mannerism. The term was applied in the 1970s to some large buildings falling into the category of Post-Modernism.

Supergraphics - as the name hints - are graphics on a big scale. Which is fitting since they were also a big - even revolutionary - concept, cooked up by some of the most radical post-modern architects of the 1960s. The idea? To apply paint and graphics to both the interior and exterior of buildings in a defiant act that would 'remove solidity, gravity, even history' - and certainly cause some alarm to those more reverential modernists. According to architect Robert Venturi: 'One does not paint on Mies.' The only thing small about the architectural movement was its time frame; supergraphics abided by the decade's mantra to 'live fast, die young'.

But, although the term - coined by writer C Ray Smith - first applied to the postmodern architects he called the Supermannerists, their ideology has survived and today supergraphics have been resurrected in the realm of special effects. Building facades can now magically shift and change with embedded LEDs, while those sacrosanct modernist glass walls are the perfect backdrop for computing and projection systems.

MTV Logo -exercise 2

Once upon a time, in a very tiny room in the back of a loft near the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street in Greenwich Village was Manhattan Design. Although this design studio had a very established-sounding name (you could just imagine seeing it listed in the Yellow Pages) it was kind of a joke. They were just starting out and chose the name to fool potential clients into thinking they had been around for a while. Crammed into this tiny room were three desks and chairs, a stat machine, flat files, some telephones, art supplies and three young graphic designers; Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky and Patti Rogoff. They didn’t have much experience or money, but they sure made up for it with spirit and creativity. This was BC – before computers – and everything they designed was done with very simple tools: markers, ink, xerox copies, and photostats. They weren’t famous and they didn’t know anyone famous, but somehow they managed to earn a living.
One day, Fred Seibert a friend of Frank’s from early childhood – when they used to hang out at the school bus stop and look at comic books, etc. – called him about a project. Fred was working for a big corporation, Warner Amex, who was planning a 24-hour music cable television station. He said they didn’t know what they would be showing but they were going to have to fill 24 hours, 7 days a week with it. In those days there weren’t any rock videos as we have come to know them, mostly short performance films. They were entering uncharted waters without a compass.
Fred said they needed a logo designed for the station. He said that some top established designers had already been hired but he had squeezed some additional money out of the corporation to give these young upstarts a shot. Pat, Frank and Patti began doing many sketches. Lots and lots of them. Their earliest ideas featured notes and other obvious music symbols. These were quickly dismissed. What happened next is a bit blurry but some specific details have survived.
They made some sketches featuring the letters “M”, “T”, and “V”. Some of these sketches included Mickey Mouse-like hands squeezing the notes. At some point an outline drawing of a bold sans serif “M” appeared on a piece of paper. One of the three designers then drew dimensional sides to the “M”. After that a variety of groupings of the letters “TV” were added. Everything seemed too normal-looking. Frank suggested that the logo needed to be less corporate somehow, de-faced or graffitied.
Frank used to watch Winky Dink when he was a child. Winky Dink was actually the first interactive TV. During the cartoon episodes of this, various parts of things were left undrawn and the main character Winky Dink, who was a cute little fellow with a star-shaped head, would run into trouble and crayon-wielding viewers were asked to help him out at key moments by filling in the missing parts on a special clear plastic film that was placed over their TV screens. Frank was oftentimes so excited about all this that he forgot to put the special film on his parents TV screen thus leaving waxy evidence.
He took an enlarged copy the fat “M” drawing and went into the narrow stairwell with a piece of acetate and a can of black spray paint. The next thing you knew the now famous “TV” lettering appeared. The three designers then played around with the scale and proportion and after some tweaking arrived at the MTV logo pretty much the way it appears today. The sketches were sent up to Fred and he presented them to the various “suits” involved in choosing the logo. (Pat, Frank and Patti never attended these meetings so they could only speculate what went on.) The story goes that the sketches actually ended up in a Warner Amex wastebasket several times and was reconsidered. Now is that rock’n’roll, or what?
Fred sent the sketches back to Manhattan Design for refinement. Things like putting MUSIC TELEVISION under the big “M”. Soon after the logo was approved. The next, and probably most revolutionary part of the story came when they were asked to come up with the “corporate colors” for the logo. The decision was made that there weren’t any, and that the logo should always change. Knowing that many animators, designers, ad agencies, etc. were going to be working with the logo made them think how, just like rock music always changes, the logo should also. This was a concept that had never been used on a logo before. The “M” and the “TV” could be made of any colors and/or materials.
The rest is history. Sometimes Frank thinks about those days and it seems like another lifetime.

Corporate Identity & Visual Systems:

Identity of large organization can be created or redefined by design
-Design was seen as a major way to shape a reputation for quality and reliability
Design at CBS
-Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) of NYC moved to the forefront of corporate
identity design as a result of 2 vital assets: CBS president Frank Stanton & William
Golden
-Golden designed one of the most successful trademarks of the 20th century for CBS
(the CBS eye) which also represented to larger management community that a
contemporary graphic mark could compete successfully with more traditional illustrative
or alphabetic trademarks.
-CBS’ philosophy was that design was to be managed and that the corporate design be
able to shift with the company’s needs and evolving sensibilities.
Corporate Identification
-Paul Rand believed that trademark should be reduced to elementary shapes that are
universal, visually unique & stylistically timeless
-Rand created trademark for IBM & later Rand updated the logo to include stripes to
unify the letterforms and evoke scan lines on video terminals
-IBM design was flexible enough to avoid stifling of creativity of designers
-Rand was further commissioned for Westinghouse Corporation, and developed a
typeface for them & worked for ABC and created their trademark
-Chermayeff & Geismar Associates responsible for visual image program for the
Chase Manhattan Bank of New York where sans-serif type was used and where
consistency & uniformity in the application of both logo and letterform enabled
redundancy to become third element
- C&G Associates produced more than one hundred corporate design programs
-Saul Bass created trademark for Minolta & redesigned Bell trademark
-*Muriel Cooper designed more than 500 books (i.e. Bauhaus by Hans Wingler) and
worked as a print designer for MIT publications
-Cooper was able to use powerful beta site computers at MIT which made her the first
graphic designer to use new media and 3-D text
-Cooper’s ultimate goal was to move graphic design from form to content; to be able to
create clear, compelling communication for Internet & was founder of MIT Media Lab
(the most advanced new graduate research program on new media in the world)
Unigrid: unified informational folders used at national park locations and is based on
simple basic elements: ten format sizes, broadside or full-sheet presentation of the
folders, master grid, etc. and typography was limited to Helvetica & Times Roman
Olympics
-1968, 72 & 84 games started evolution of trademark
-The theme was “The young of the world united in friendship through understanding”
-The trademark five rings were created by American Lance Wyman and was based on
Mexican art but was meant to create a completely unified design system that could be
understood from anyone
-Scores of designers and design firms produced Olympic graphics & environments
conforming to the design guide developed by the principal design firms
MTV
-Logo was commissioned to Manhattan Design, a NYC studio known for independent
risk taking and was comprised of Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky & Patti Rogoff
-All had fine arts background and each influenced by comic book art.
-Gorman wrote the TV and Olinsky created the 3D “M”
-Because the trademark was versatile, the group created 100 different versions to pitch
-Gorman believed that MTV logo “changed the face, the idea, & the speed of graphic
design”
-MTV logo was one of the first to introduce motion graphics on TV and animated graphic
messages