Postmodernism

With the controversy of the Vietnam war conflict and with the new expanding technology rose the era of postmodernism. This movement had significant visual elements.

It set the tone for experimentation, with many artists using photographs, typography and offset angles to express their art in a different manner. It’s main influences date back to the Futurists and Dadaists.

Postmodernism rejects order, thus demanding to represent change and expression. Many postmodernism design groups emerged and brought vernacular and retro design into the spotlight.

Retro design representing older design and usually demonstrated with use of color, type and line angles.

Vernacular design adopted commercial and clip art and used it to connect content with context. Vernacular incorporated many mediums for inspiration, anything from baseball cars, advertisements to matchbooks. These media were mostly recycled ideas that eventually were later found in magazine centerfolds and in annual reports.

Retro and vernacular design of postmodernism both took the main ideologies of movements of art deco and futurism. This new design theory was more pleasing to the eye than the past and demanded order.

Soon after, extreme postmodernism emerged and contained an alternative edge and involved a more playful approach than the past. Many publications that followed this movement were controversial in its approach. Three publications from the past that exlemplified the respectability of challenging readers were Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and Time magazine.

Now, since the postmodernism design era, design has changed drastically and is constantly in flux.