Graphic Content

In the '70s, however, boomers began to --leave behind their passion to protest. Sixties sybarites cooled into the more tepid narcissists of the "Me Decade," starting families and moving to the suburbs they'd fled. These boomers were car people; so why, the U.S. Department of Transportation wondered, shouldn't the signage along the interstate highway system be as reassuringly uniform as their homes? In 1974, the DOT commissioned the design firm of Cook and Shanosky to come up with instantly decipherable pictograms for a phone, toilet, restaurant, etc. While these compact little symbols--the same ones we still use to locate the airport loo--were a spike in the heart to the vogue for psychedelic illegibility, they manifested a deeper truth about the boomers: theirs was an era of images, rather than words.

But when the '80s came along, and boomers assumed a few catbird seats in the Reagan era of arbitrageurs and leveraged buyer-outers (earning them Tom Wolfe's sobriquet "the splurge generation"), they found they could indulge themselves graphically as well as... otherwise. In terms of typography and page layout, that meant anything from the galactic overlays and darting diagonals of April Greiman (born 1948), to the blasted "grunge" fonts of ex-surfer David Carson (born 1956). But for sheer exuberance and total immersion in boomer taste, nothing designwise came close to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The organizers turned to architect Jon Jerde, who came up with a festival of portable, lightweight faux-architectural gewgaws, fluttering banners and fruit-salad colors. Thanks in part to the fresh look he gave them, the Games turned a nice, boomeresque $200 million profit.

Once individual boomers got rich, they became the first generation to practice the widespread collecting of contemporary art. They'd taken art-history courses in college and were now going to museum exhibitions in record numbers, so starting in the late '70s, they wanted to put their money where their taste was. Down came mom and dad's flower repros and up went hip, accessible and comfortably ironic pop-art prints by Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha.

Edgier collectors favored the work of Barbara Kruger (born 1945), who'd been the precocious head designer at Mademoiselle magazine at the ripe old age of 21. Kruger reprised banal images from the Eisenhower years, threw such admonitional captions as we don't need another hero, and presented her large, crisp montages in striking combinations of black, white and red. Kruger's art contained the radioactive residue of all the upheavals of boomer youth in the '60s. Which was, of course, what has prevented that star-struck generation's appetite for abundance from slipping entirely into complacency.

© 2006