The 1960's; the decade of colour TV, the moon landing and some good graphic design.
The post-war baby boom generation were now in their teens and were witnessing countless social injustices on newly popular TV screens which bubbled up a resistance and a demand for the reconsideration of old values. This counter-culturalism moulded graphic design movements of the 60's.
Art movements in the 1960's were fairly weird and wonderful, looking back on them now but they produced iconic pieces of work and designers that are still inpacting graphics today.
Pop Art: pop artists were on a quest to reimagine fine art, discarding the idea that art had to be about higher things like morality, or mythology, and used everyday objects in their work to elevate them to the place of "fine art". Roy Lichtenstein used "low art" such as comic books and illustration and used this method of elevation and now remains one of the most recognisable artists of the 20th century.
Many art movements of the 1960's produced famous male figures but Fluxus was one of the few groups with an unusually high number of female artists. Following the counter-cultural consensus of the time, Fluxus' aim was anti-art. They challenged the definition of art and actively fought against it. Fluxus artists used mainly photography, sculpture and performance to communicate their message and were influences by the civil rights movement against the discrimination of women and for funded child care and equal pay.
Drug culture had its influence on graphics in Op Art and Psychedelia. Op artists created optical illusions, often monochrome, to create the illusion of movement or to reveal hidden imagery and pattern. Basically, it gave you the visual sensation of being on LSD without taking anything...
The Psychedelia movement also originated from drug culture, mimicking the effect of hallucinatory drugs. Commercial designers like Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson used colours opposite from each other on the colour wheel to make the colours 'vibrate' and move on the page. Moscoso's work is recognised for using swirls and abstract collage to enhance this psychedelic effect even further.
After soaking in as much 60's graphic design as I could, I went on to try and mimic the trends and styles in infographic form. Graphic designers love an infographic apparently so I should probably start making them! The gallery above to this post in actually in reverse order - I made the full, sparkly infographics first...then got carried away with clipping masks and Roy Lichtenstein and made the rest. I hope you'll agree that they made things pretty cool back in the 1960's.