This story starts on a weekend day in June 1981. I went straight from my University of Washington commencement ceremony, still possessing my cap and gown, and went to a planning meeting in a Wallingford rental house. Also there were Daina Darzin, Maire Masco and Dennis White. We were starting a punk rock zine, to overcome what we all thought was The Rocket’s excessive commercialism. (Yeah, I know.)
The result was called Desperate Times. It lasted for six tabloid issues, before Darzin effectively ended it by returning to New York, where she’d previously lived. (Like so many New Yorkers, she absolutely knew how everyone ought to think and behave — i.e., exactly the way people looked and behaved in New York.)
Darzin became a scribe for Billboard and other high-falutin’ rags. White and Masco started the short-lived Pravda Records label. White now runs another indie music label, dadastic! Sounds.
Masco took a long hiatus from “creative” endeavors. But now she’s back with a book collecting every issue of Desperate Times, from full-size, high-quality digital scans. Masco is selling the book online and at a few select local shops.
Some thoughts on looking at these pages nearly 3.5 decades later: The music discussed — well, a large part of it, anyway — still stands up. The writing and the graphic design are of their time and of the milieu. That is to say, they’re brash, un-slick and occasionally immature. But that was part of the whole aesthetic of the period.
This was before desktop publishing. The text was created on typewriters. The headlines were created with press-type lettering. It was DIY-or-die, and it expresses the emotional states of its content better than anything in Adobe InDesign ever could.
A different history
Masco’s been living in Tacoma in recent years, with a guy who knows a thing or two about graphic design. Art Chantry helped bring punk rock graphics and poster art beyond the deliberately “amateur” style seen in Desperate Times and toward something professional but not corporate. He took his obsessive research into design schticks high and lowbrow, industrial and “artistic,” and created a whole new visual vocabulary.
Chantry’s been spreading his sharp opinions about the design profession (actually, he thinks of it as more of a trade) on his Facebook feed. Now, he’s collected some 50 of these essays in the book “Art Chantry Speaks: A Heretic’s History of 20th-Century Graphic Design.”
He finds inspiration in everything from monster-movie magazines to industrial-supply catalogs, from trade magazines to Broadway show posters, from hot-rod customizers to girlie magazines. Unlike the late Andy Warhol (to whom he dedicates a praise-filled chapter), Chantry appreciates commercial design without feeling the need to dress it up in fine art trappings.
Chantry also upends the official history of graphic design, a history dominated by Manhattan designers and ad agencies. Instead, he sees it as a bottom-up, working-stiffs’ trade, originating with sign painters, printers and other craftspeople. It’s both populist and commercial at once. It expresses social and individual values, even as it overtly tries to sell stuff.
And just as American pop/rock music absorbed and mutated everything that came before it, Chantry’s personal aesthetic absorbed and mutated everything he’d learned to love in visual/verbal persuasion. (Only one of Chantry’s own works is shown in “Art Chantry Speaks.” For more of his own posters, Rocket covers record covers and record-label logos, look up “Some People Can’t Surf: The Graphic Design of Art Chantry,” written in 2001 by Julie Lasky.)
Many of the techniques Chantry’s essays discuss have become lost to time, from the lead-cast hot type of letterpress to the photo-strip cold type of manual paste-up pages. And much printed ephemera itself (magazines, newspapers, cheap paperbacks, recorded music on physical media, etc.) has declined or disappeared in the digital age.
But Chantry’s observations are still important. Typography, illustration, color theory and layout are part of the visual vocabulary of our world. And just as many young adults have discovered the great music of the 1980s and ‘90s, Chantry’s views about these can teach timeless principles about how things look — or ought to look.
CLARK HUMPHREY is the author of “Walking Seattle” and “Vanishing Seattle.” He also writes a blog at miscmedia.com. To comment on this column, write to QAMagNews@nwlink.com.