Post-Modernism and New Wave Typography

• Grand narrative - A "myth" or faith-based statement that encompasses how we got here, why we are here and how we should live. "Storytelling in the interest of the powerful." - Drucher
• Post-Modernism was marked by a rejection of totalizing, essentialist, and foundationalist concepts. "Reality" was fragmented, diverse, tenuous and culture-specific, more so than structuralism did.
  
• Myths legitimize themselves by weaving beliefs together that defines culture.
• Postmodernism examines various cultural codes that govern our understanding of ourselves, our place; and all our procedures that are socially, culturally or politically motivated.
• A confluence of external forces created a cacophony of new images and lifestyles being represented and depicted within graphic design.
• Communities of option and belief readers identified with each other through style — graphic, music, fashion; a new pluralism emerged from the "ME" generation.
• Graphic novels and edgy adult literature formed a sort of hybrid -- interest in artist books and menageries of alternative publications to shock while disregarding standards of decency.
• There seemed to be two factions of designers, during this period, especially in the times of Milton Glaser with Push Pin Studios in the 1960s. New designers could turn their back on stale, corporate design — and since it was corporations that were supporting the Vietnam war, these designers believed that corporate design was fascism.
  
• Postmodernism was not a style, but a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings, not all of which will necessarily be shared by ever practitioner. It wasn't a theory, but a set of theoretical positions, which have at their core a self-reflexive awareness of the tentativeness, the slipperiness, the ambiguity, and complex interrelations of culture and meaning.
• Rejections of the International style began in Basel through the teaching of Wolfgang Weingart. Young designers seemed to be pardoying their modern teachers. Weigart rejected the right angle -- he believe in intuitive design and the richness of visual effect.
• New Wave Typography — Weingart advocated complete freedom and richness, using different arrangements for type; something textured and more fragmented than some of his Swiss counterparts. The inventory of this New Wave thinking included wide letter spacing, bold stair-stepped rules, rule lines punctuating space, diagonal type, mixing typefaces or weight changes within words, and type reversed from a series of bars.
• Willi Kuntz — Controlled quality; rectangular Swiss-inspired images were boring and would no longer suffice in corporate design. Everything was more architectonic, relating the shape of the text boxes and creating a more visually dynamic composition.
• SEGD - Typographic strategies close to architecture. It was a very short step from New Wave Typography and into space — it was something to experience, not just to look at.
• April Grieman, Rosmarie Tissi, and Siegfried Odermatt each have their own contribution to Postmodernism.