Visible Language

context of post-war American consumer culture. Funny Face offers a prescient glimpse into the ways women understood the fashion magazine and, consequently, modernist form language, as a purveyor of fantasy, cultural capital and a restrictive, mass-mediated femininity. Approaching modern design from this vantage suggests the female boss as a primary site of modernist experimentation.

The article argues that the practice and influence of design history can benefit from new forms of visual and chronological analysis. To this end, a unique phenomenon, the “historical visual narrative,” is identified and discussed. Special instances of this phenomenon in twentieth-century design and visual culture, which are tied to the theme of the embodiment of human identity, are examined in depth.

The absorption of subcultural graphic ephemera into mainstream culture warrants careful consideration within academic study as it challenges conventional methodologies used in design history, research and writing. Fanzines represent one form of subcultural communication which embrace specific visual and textual languages — elements often appropriated from mainstream cultural and media sources. Found within the realm of amateur publishing, fanzines offer “alternative critical spaces” for dialogues between like-minded individuals who share a passion for a chosen subject. In Britain, the growth of fanzine production has grown steadily over the last twenty years while maintaining consistent language paradigms with well-considered historical precedents.

During the last fifteen years the nature of the cognitive practices needed for rapid access into information and for creative thought has changed. Linear thought is now too slow. In the effort to devise short cuts, so that disparate information widely separated can be joined by metaphoric juxtaposition, or lateral thinking, designers of type and image are searching for ways with which to represent the fluid fields of type and image that will induce reverie, often a precondition for metaphoric, non-linear thought. One of the paths taken in the search for a new mnemonics of free visualization, the fusing of the “widely separated” typical of lateral thinking, is the reinvestigation of syntactic devices used before printing with movable type or codified punctuation, including many devices once in use among quasi-literate populations. This reinvestigation of the origins of punctuation, including indices, in the search for ideational guidance and creativity within new technology parallels research in medicine or nutrition, where reinvestigation of original plant and animal species, rather than their later hybrids, has proved useful.