- After World War II, many designers made the move
from New York and Europe to the West Coast.
Lou Danziger, Saul Bass, Walter Landor, Ray Eames,
Alvin Lustig, and many others decided
to build practices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
They saw the opportunity to work in new ways
in a less crowded design marketplace.
Isolation created community.
In the early days, there were relatively few
graphic designers working on the West Coast.
And AIGA was a New York based organization.
Designers in Los Angeles and San Francisco
gathered together in informal meetings,
or created groups such as The Design Group.
At these meetings, they shared ideas and techniques.
With less competition, they openly collaborated
and worked as a whole to succeed.
East Coast publications largely ignored
the West Coast as being irrelevant.
California based magazines, like Arts and Architecture
and Communication Arts, focused
on the new work in California.
The ethos of teaching was inherent
in the California design scene since the 1940s.
On the East Coast, teaching was a secondary profession
that a designer might do after retiring,
or something to do if one had extra time.
In California, it was a given that education
was integral to the profession.
Art schools such as Art Center College of Design,
California College of the Arts,
and California Institute of the Arts, followed the practice
of educators being working designers.
The ideas put forward in these schools
were based on Bauhaus Modernism and radical thinking.
This led to a flourishing of work
that was fresh and unexpected.
Walter Landor founded Walter Landor and Associates in 1941.
He initially worked with local clients in San Francisco
and then expanded into a client base
along the entire Pacific coast.
By the late 1950s, Landor was
an international leader in corporate identity.
Landor's client base, beyond the United States, was Asia.
This, and it's location, San Francisco, created a different
atmosphere than the firms in New York.
In 1964, Landor and Associates moved onto a retired ferry
boat, the Klamath, permanently docked in San Francisco Bay.
By the 1960s, designers like John van Hamersveld
and John Severson were designing
posters for the surf culture.
The surf and skate culture influenced designers
with a casual attitude and DIY approach.
These posters introduced concepts that would be used
by the Fillmore posters in San Francisco
and typographic eclecticism in New York a few years later.
Marget Larsen and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
used color in vibrant and bold ways.
They adopted color palettes that were connected
more to Asia and South America than Europe.
They rejected the Swiss approach to color as a purely
functional element and painted with broad strokes.
The entertainment industry provided
an opportunity to work in different media.
Saul Bass's film titles revolutionized movie making.
His graphic and minimal sensibility
created titles that are imitated to today.
The title sequences for North by Northwest,
The Man with the Golden Arm, and Psycho rely
on a reductive set of elements and simple animation.
The results were astounding.
Interestingly, Bass and Alfred Hitchcock
ended their collaboration after Psycho.
Bass and Hitchcock both claimed
they designed the shower sequence.
It's the simple shapes, like this shower head,
and graphic elements like the grid of tiles
that indicate the hand of Bass.
In the 1980s, the New Wave movement
flourished in California.
April Greiman's space and shape concepts
and Deborah Sussman's work for the 1984 Olympics
introduced an international audience to California Design.
In San Francisco, Michael Vanderbyl, Michael Cronan,
Michael Mabry, and Jennifer Morla explored geometric forms
and high energy color combinations.
Their work took post-modern forms and mixed classical
typography, flat shapes, illustration, and photography.
The result was work that might have been done at the Bauhaus
if the Bauhaus had been somewhere sunny.
The 1990s saw the rise of Deconstruction
and the Digital Revolution.
Lorraine Wild, Jeff Keating, and Ed Fella
all taught at Cal Arts.
They worked with ideas of Deconstruction
and Critical Theory.
Their students entered the marketplace
in California and New York.
This influenced experimental work
throughout the United States in the 1990s.
In 1994, our firm, AdamsMorioka, was founded,
and we looked toward minimalism and modernist concepts.
We rejected the complexity of form prevalent at the time,
working with simple shapes and objective imagery.
The difference from strict Modernism being the layering
of multiple concepts into one solution.
These ideas were introduced at an AIGA conference
in New York and then articles in international magazines,
spreading the influence of California Design.
Design in California matched the growth of the economy.
Aerospace, entertainment, culture, and technology industries
expanded throughout the late 20th century.
Today, the largest percentage of designers
in the United States, works on the West Coast.
It was the values of education, exploration,
and freedom that nurtured the industry,
creating an international influence.