Designing with Type: Grunge, Punk, and Futurism

In this age of Apple-inspired minimalism where white space is king, do you ever find yourself looking at all that luxurious space, those cool sans serifs, that carefully constructed grid—and want to mess it up? Ever wish that more, rather than less, was actually more? Want to put on some flannel, crank up the Pearl Jam, and get down ’n’ dirty with the type, explode that grid into a thousand tiny pieces?

Let’s take this simple piece of way-finding typography as our case study. In the hands of the gridmeisters it might look something like Figure 1. Everything that is needed and nothing more.

But what if we were to step back in time—to, say, the mid ’90s, when grunge typography was all the rage. Maybe it would look something like Figure 2.

I made this in Photoshop—compulsive repetition, multiple layers, blending modes and transparency, and of course a distressed texture (courtesy of Texture Palace). Not to mention a Jonathan Barnbrook typeface, Exocet, that graced many a magazine and CD cover during that era (Figure 3).

Cynics might say that part of grunge’s appeal was that you didn’t need to worry about getting things “right.” Around this time I taught graphic design at a large college in San Francisco where the work of the students was heavily influenced by grunge. It wasn’t always good to discern the good from

the bad. At its best, grunge designers were (consciously or instinctively) challenging the rules of what had come before. At its worst, they were trying to pass off their sloppiness as rule bending. By the late ’90s the style had filtered down to anyone with a computer (and a few dodgy fonts) and was being used to sell anything from beer to lottery scratch tickets. Grunge, once so anti-formula, started to look formulaic, expected, and safe.

Grunge was a backlash to the perceived stodginess and rule-bound typography of modernism, which had ruled the roost since the end of the Second World War (Figure 4). Self-indulgence was something to be celebrated, not dampened. Rather than subsume your personality in the neutrality of the type, you were free to be as expressive and as interpretative as your imagination allowed. Having a bad day?—let your type reflect that. Gone was the orthodoxy that typography should be a Crystal Goblet to hold the language (taken from the title of Beatrice Warde’s 1930 essay on typography), meaning unobtrusive and elegant. With grunge you got to blow your own goblet, and decorate it with spray paint, marker pens, and stickers. The medium was the message.

One Step Back

But grunge wasn’t exactly new. It had its precursor in the punk design of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Inspired by the punk music from which it took its name, punk design is less about a unifying style and more about an attitude and sensibility. In the shorthand of our memories, when we think punk, we think Sex Pistols, and when we think Sex Pistols, we think Jamie Reid, the influential designer of the iconic covers for Never Mind The Bollocks and the single that scandalized polite society in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee—God Save The Queen (Figure 5). Reid wasn’t the first to use ransom note graphics, but his work has become synonymous with them. If Jamie Reid were designing our simple way-finding informational message, perhaps it would look something like Figure 6. In this blatant ripoff of the Bollocks back cover, I’ve used Illustrator’s new Touch Type tool, which, combined with mixing a few typefaces popular during the ’70s, makes it a breeze to create ransom note text.

Even Further Back

Tracing things back further, punk in turn owes a debt to the Futurist typography of the early twentieth century. Every bit as aesthetically challenging as punk or grunge, the Futurists too called for the destruction of outdated modes of communication. This was the age of the manifesto, and none of these was wider in scope than Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909) (Figure 7). Painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, theatre, cinema, and music were all part of the package. Typography—until then a minor player in the arts—was integral to Marinetti’s program. Though the term had yet to be coined, Marinetti wouldn’t have had any use for crystal goblets. He was profoundly against elegance and typographic harmony, wanting instead to set the words “free” and hurl them in the reader’s face.

If Marinetti had been working on this project, it might have looked something like Figure 8: sans serif types of different sizes and weights, the perennial pointing finger, and—radical and very hard to do with the technology of the day—rotated text and type around an arc. Part of the reason the Futurists were not more widely imitated was that the limited technology of the time made it so hard to do so. With punk, imitation and homage was a lot easier—Letraset type, marker pens, scissors and paste were all accessible—but design in a wider sense still remained the domain of the art school kids. It took another generation for the “have a go” ethos of punk to filter down to a wider user group and audience. Desktop publishing made grunge an easy style to imitate—or at least an easy style to imitate badly. For the music, all you’d needed was a guitar and three chords; now for the design all you needed was a computer and basic knowledge of PageMaker, QuarkXPress, or Ventura Publisher. So was grunge just a momentary blip in the continuum (The title of Robin Williams’ book on the subject)? Did grunge die, or did it mutate into something else? After nearly a decade of making things broken, by the end of the last century, the pendulum had swung back to Teutonic, grid-based design. After working so long without rules, the constraints of time-honored conventions felt liberating. Concepts like readability and rules for kerning and leading were considered once again useful things to know. Today, handmade type and design that incorporates elements of predigital craft is increasingly popular, and it is perhaps in this fascination for the less-than-perfect that the spirit of grunge and its forebears lives on. Strictly speaking, lettering is not typography and typography is not lettering, but the two fields are related and overlapping, perhaps now more than ever. We find ourselves in the craft-inspired, steampunk- flavored, Art Nouveau-influenced Age of the Squiggly—a term coined by graphic design historian Steven Heller. Today our type is frequently decorated with florid embellishments and swirls (Figure 9). Designed in such a style, our signage might look something like Figure 10. Here I’ve used various customized instances of an Illustrator Symbol from the Florid Vector pack that comes in the standard install. To combine this with the type (Coquette from Typekit), I used the Eraser and the Pathfinder commands. My attempts at emulating these styles are second-rate pastiches, but all the same there’s something to be learned from emulating historical design styles. With the power of modern creative apps at our fingertips, it’s both enlightening and humbling to see how easy it is to get the mechanics—but how hard to really get the style. No doubt the cool-headed, quiet and clear visual missives from Apple, Google, and so many other minimalist messengers are influential in their effort to sell another fill-in-the-blank. But perhaps the wide, blank spaces they leave are even today inviting another generation of bedlam typographers, just itching to draw in the margins and kick out the jams.