Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design

Clean New World is a somewhat disjointed collection of essays that promises a fresh take on an old dilemma: graphic designers provide the glossy public face of big corporations but are not permitted (or motivated) to reveal the messier realities that underpin public power. Beginning with the exception that proves the rule--the leftist photomontages made by John Heartfield in Weimar Germany--Maud Lavin segues to such contemporary themes as corporate identity work, political art coalitions, and the role of advertising in the U.S. abortion debate. Along the way, the author spotlights women in graphic design who balance bread-and-butter clients with more personally meaningful work and discusses how Web design can make users feel "controlled or in control." The final chapter deals with the cathartic effect a Web-based "soap opera" had on its creators, an eight-writer team that included the author, a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maxims pronounced by the gurus of graphic design tend to go unchallenged by practitioners in the field, so you want to cheer Lavin when she butts heads with received wisdom, including Paul Rand's belief that simplicity in design is inherently "truthful." As she points out, the striated logo Rand designed for IBM in 1956 does not reflect some indisputable fact about this corporate behemoth. The reality is just the reverse--corporations seek to cloak themselves in the clean, bright look of good design. But the author's arguments can lack rigor. For example, she discusses how former CBS creative director William Golden teamed up in the '50s with artist Ben Shahn to develop advertisements for a documentary program. Lavin lauds these ads as "humanistic" without stopping to consider the inherent qualities of illustrations in graphic design and the preconceptions evoked by Shahn's well-known style. Several of these essays were originally given as lectures, which might account for their underwhelming effect on the printed page. But why not stretch out and delve deeper when you have a whole book to play with? --Cathy Curtis