That thing looks eerily similar to the cover of my high school yearbook.
You gotta give it to Steven Heller. Aside from being the most prolific design writer out there, he really does have a knack for mining history and coming up with some seriously mind-fucking artifacts.
We sometimes forget that a lot of the conventions in contemporary graphic design has roots in Modernist thinking which, despite a seemingly positive rationale of making the world a better place, can also be attributed to some of the worst things about our world. Granted, the Nazis simply used apparatuses already in place; The Germans, after all, were at the forefront of early modernist design. But, consider how well they employed their graphic identity. That taken with Goebbels propaganda machine and you might say The Nazis are looking a lot like, say, Apple, Inc. This isn’t to draw comparison to the two but to point out that both Apple and The Nazi’s are utilizing the same techniques of persuasion and communication devised in the early twentieth century. I guess what it points to is the fact that graphic design history, unlike world history or even art history, is relatively tidy and linear. Also, that the efficacy of graphic identity systems can be used for evil.
I’m wondering if there’s a link between the kind of thinking that brought about Third Reich style eugenics and the kind of thinking that brought about The Bauhaus. The Jedi and The Dark Side were essentially using the same magic, no?
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=24358
