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Perrin Drumm Founder and director
Green mind, Cancer
T + I @perrindrumm
Like Dorothy stepping out of her humdrum, black-and-white world and into the gleaming land of Oz, Eye on Design is leaving behind the gridded comforts of home and diving headfirst over the rainbow and under our brainwaves for issue #02, the Psych issue. Give your mind a good yogi stretch and join us. Psychedelia has a unique etymology; its rather noble, high-minded dictionary definition is the result of what linguists call an “irregular formation,” the rocky marriage, so to speak, of its two main roots: psyche, the human soul/mind/spirit + the Greek “delos,” meaning clear, manifest. Pulling back the curtain and shining a DayGlo-bright light on our deep, dark inner worlds seems like a chewy enough brief for a designer as well as for us editors. While the word itself didn’t come into mainstream parlance until the 1950s, we want to look well beyond its obvious trippyhippie connotations and more broadly at the intersection of design and mind-altering experiences of all kinds.
Madeleine Morley Associate editor
Purple mind, Capricorn
T @mdimorli
When the term “psychedelic” did come into prevalence in the middle of the 20th-century, it was coined by psychologist Humphry Osmond in a letter to author Aldous Huxley, 4
in reference to popular hallucinogenic drugs. Its meaning grew from there, becoming a way to describe a new kind of sound, style, and sensibility. It would be impossible for us to create a Psych issue without touching on the history of the designers of that period, with their fluorescent inks, oozing typography, and pattern-heavy optical illusions. But to us, embracing irregularity means uncovering some of the lesser-known design stories from that time. For instance, the “Summer of Love” wasn't so bright for everyone, so we tracked down some women designers to hear their versions of this moment in history. And, of course, the American version of psychedelic posters isn’t the only version, so we trotted around the globe to see how different countries interpreted the visual movement. There's never just one side to a story. In the spirit of expanded consciousness and shifting perspectives, the issue in your hands also represents a plurality of experiences.
Emily Gosling
Senior editor
Yellow mind, Sagittarius
T + I @nalascarlett
And not just a plurality of experiences, but a plurality of mindsets, too. We’ve long championed design stories that explore the mind: how design shapes and is shaped by the multitudinous ways in which we see the world, through the lenses of mental health, substance abuse, and so on. The Psych issue offers ample room to experiment with new takes on how certain external agents— everything from drugs to gong baths to perceptual psychology—can expand or contract the creative mind. Moving beyond the lysergic stereotypes and the tired “tuning in and dropping out” doctrines, we see how designers today are really tinkering with their brains; touching on the wider spiritual, legal, and sociological conditions around these trends.
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Liz StinSon Managing editor
Green mind, Taurus
T + I @lizstins
Uncovering the tensions between reality and perception has long been at the crux of what designers do. Visual tricks—or, intentionally messing around with other people’s brains— is an oft-wielded tool that we’re eager to explore. In our Sike! package we uncover the optical illusions and clever turns of shape that impact the way we perceive the world around us. From ’90s fads, to perceptual tests, to the calculated influencing of consumer behavior, exploring the theme of Sike feels appropriate and timely, well beyond its homonymous ties to its psychedelic past.
MEG MILLER
Senior editor
Green mind, Aries
T @megilllah
With our new, expanded definition of what psych was, is, and could be, we began to wonder about the psychedelic design of the present moment. If the hallucinatory experiences of the ’60s were made visible through vivid, kaleidoscopic posters, and the trademark excess of the ’80s carried over into the next decade with maddening patterns and a healthy dose of optical illusion, we wanted to know: What is our equivalent now? We immediately thought of the deliriously ironic social graphics and spinning, glittering gifs that fuel our feeds— and of the group of designers who’ve honed
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this aesthetic and brought it to the fore while working at, of all places, a major business magazine. Hallucinatory graphics today play out online and any place with a hashtag, but they still respond to a sense of social and political turbulence with an irreverent sense of humor and savvy critique. With a little help from some psychics, we also try to peer into the future and see how our current climate might affect the design world of tomorrow. And we discover that bringing together the past, present, and future of design, all at once, is its own kind of trip.
Tala Safie Designer
Purple mind, Gemini
T + I @talasafie
As we do with all of our issues, we brought on a guest designer to wrangle our visions and revelations—as well as the work of our incredible contributors—into a cohesive, thoughtfully designed magazine. We chose Shira Inbar, a New York-based graphic designer, for the fluid and surreal quality of her work, her bold and striking use of color and typography, and the smart ways in which her design reveals layers of meaning. We knew she’d give us something erratic yet thoughtful, bold but clean, prismatic but still completely coherent.
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TA BL E OF “ T H E D O O R” 10 A Comic By Alexis Beauclair
A NEW DIM E NSION IN P OS TER DESIG N 6 0
Designer Homa Delvaray talks about her trippy take on time, place, and tradition By Shira Inbar
THE FUTURE OF D E S I G N 12
According to two psychics and an app By Meg Miller
W H E N U G LY WAS AM A ZING 16 How a band of design misfits brought anti-aesthetics to Bloomberg Businessweek By Cliff Kuang
W H AT C OL O R I S YO U R M I N D ? QUIZ 2 7 By The Rodina
WO M E N OF PSYCHEDELIC DESIG N 3 2
The cost of free love and the designers who bore it By Madeleine Morley
A LT E R E D S TATES 49
What happens when five creatives design under the influence, sans the drugs
WHEN AN OP T IC A L ILLUS I O N BRIEFLY TOOK OVER THE WORLD 6 4
Cross your eyes. Position the page just right. Pull it close, then pull it away. Now can you see how Magic Eye launched the whole ’90s straight into 3-D? By Liz Stinson
A V I S UA L G U I D E TO TRICKING YOUR TAS TE BUDS 7 8
Think you choose what you eat? Our experts prove how your food cravings are the result of a careful concoction of branding, packaging, and pop psychology. Introduction by Mark Wilson
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By Shira Inbar and Tala Safié
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CON T E N TS SPILLING THE T E A ON YOUR PROFES SIONAL FUTURE 9 6
When it comes to fortunetelling, tea bags are the new tea leaves. What’s at the bottom of your mug?
H OW T O B U I L D A FOLLOWING 9 7 A Visual Satire By Tala Safié
YAY, I WAS SAD TODAY 10 0
As creator of the internet’s beloved Animated Text, designer Cat Frazier got millions to come for the memes, and stay for the mental wellbeing By Perrin Drumm
THE R ISE OF T H E CHIEF HAPPINES S OFFICER 117
And what it has taught us about workplace wellbeing by Kati Krause
TUNING IN AND NEVER DROPPING OUT 12 4 The designers shifting drugs from recreational to vocational By Emily Gosling
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A L PH A BE T CITIES 136
Now you read it; now you don’t. An interview with the designer Scott Paul Joseph
BR E A K ING FR EE OF THE FEED 13 8 Illustrator and art director Marina Esmeraldo on kicking her Instagram addiction
LOOK IN TO OUR E YE 145
Hit a creative roadblock? Let our all-seeing Eye of Design Destiny guide your way.
TA DA N O R I YO KO O’ S G R APHIC SELFDES TRUCTION 147 The death-obsessed graphic designer moved to the forefront of a Japanese counterculture scene by celebrating new life rising from the postwar ashes By Chase Booker
L OV E LE T TER 15 6 A rhyming ode to Pamela Coleman Smith, illustrator of the highly influential RiderWaite tarot deck By James Cartwright Handlettering by Bryony Quinn
E DI T OR’S L E T T E R DE SIG N E R’S L E T T E R C ON T R I B U T OR S
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the phrase ‘Summer of Love’ one more time, I will scream,” says Louise Sandhaus from her design studio in the mountains of Ojai, California. I’m looking for the women involved in what has become known as “psychedelic graphic design.” While I can easily name-check at least five famous male designers associated with the era, when I try to count the famous women, I come up short. Sandhaus, with her encyclopedic knowledge of 20th-century Californian design history, seems like the right person to ask. 33
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“It was a period responsible for radical cultural change, and graphic design is of course part of that,” she says. “But there were things about it that weren’t so pretty.” When author Joan Didion visited San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1967, she cooly observed the “desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” She saw five-year-olds on acid and spoke with women who, after being shunted from “entering the men’s talk,” found their “trip” in “keeping house and baking.” Does the same hold true for the women involved in the period’s design? I want to know where they are and how that Summer of Love might have filtered into their graphic work.
Some women, like Joan Didion, were far more dubious of the role consent played in all the loving.
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Victor Moscoso, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson make up the aforementioned five men, known today as the “Big Five,” said to be “responsible for designing the majority of the best San Francisco psychedelic posters in the 1960s.” 1 But Sandhaus is skeptical of this particular grouping. “We have to keep in mind that many people become known through press,” she says. “Not to diminish their work at all—they were producing things that were prominent and recognizable. But to the degree that they then became known as the Big Five... I wonder about that. The history of design can often be the history of publicity, promotion, 34
journalism—whatever you want to call it—the design literature machine.” In the prevailing history of psychedelic graphic design, the Big Five are the figures whose work and stories dominate the era. Their posters hang in galleries and are collected by major museums. Finding the names of the women involved in the period’s graphics, on the other hand, requires some significant digging; there are no eager publicists waiting for your phone call, no email addresses on websites or directories referring you to estates. The women I’ve spoken to for this article are the ones I’ve been able to surface, and only after following a veritable trail of breadcrumbs—many leads went cold, though, and countless stories remain deeply buried.
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t one point, each of the Big Five was working on promotional material for rock concert promoter Bill Graham and his legendary Fillmore West venue in San Francisco. As word spread of the sudden cultural explosion taking place in Haight-Ashbury at the beginning of 1967, an estimated 100,000 young people descended upon the small neighborhood of just 25 blocks. Some would dub the months that followed the “Summer of Love.” Some, like Didion, were far more dubious of the role consent played in all the loving. For the churning wheels of the design literature machine, it was the climate that generated the classic swirling poster known as the psychedelic print. By the time school was out for the year, promoters predicted that three million kids would show up to dance in
Aspen, no. 9. 1970. Designed by Hetty MacLise. Edited by Angus and Hetty MacLise. The Letterform Archive, New York.
Bonnie MacLean.
The Yardbirds, The Doors. 1967. Offset lithograph, 21 1/4 x 14� (54 x 35.5 cm). Published by Bill Graham Presents, San Francisco. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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the area’s venues. In response, Graham’s Fillmore West hurriedly prepared to stay open six nights a week, and it distributed alluring rainbow-colored posters across the country to entice America’s youth to head out West and join the party. “Bill Graham tapped into the alternative lifestyle and values of the hippie movement centered on San Francisco,” says MoMA’s curator of modern design, Juliet Kinchin. “Posters were an important dimension of the psychedelic phenomenon, as were the light shows accompanying many musical acts promoted by Graham. Those reached their most ambitious and innovative form in 1967–1969, turning the concert hall into an immersive environment.” The liquid light undulating across the venue’s walls and dancing bodies was one of many inevitable influences of the “melting” typography that we now refer to as psychedelic. In 1965, the University of California, Berkeley also hosted exhibitions highlighting expressionist and art nouveau styles, which were attended by the type of artist we now associate with psychedelia. The best-known female designer of the era was Bonnie MacLean. She married Graham in 1967 and started out painting the venue’s noticeboards. When Wes Wilson and Graham fell out over money, MacLean stepped in to become the main poster designer for the Fillmore West, creating distinctive and flamboyant designs that played with letterforms and used striking, illusional patterns to trick the eye. “She was in the right place at the right time, and clearly soaked up the scene happening around her,” says Kinchin. “In a sense, she and many other successful poster designers at the time didn’t need formal training; they learned on the job.”
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The underground newspapers in San Francisco became another alternative space for would-be artists—they took advantage of cheap printing technologies to spread progressive ideas, and experimented with mimeograph machines to make them explode with color ink.2 Coupled with a rush of anti-establishment resistance and youthful energy, the new availability of the birth control pill, and a growing feminist movement, there were new possibilities for women to get involved with forms of creative production that were previously less accessible. “Like the advertising and printing industries at the time, the graphic design profession was male-dominated, and women were often required to give up their jobs if they married or had children,” says Kinchin. “But poster-making in the countercultural scene was less
2 “Among the first to experiment with the artistic possibilities of [the mimeograph and Gestetner] was the Communication Company (Com/Co, or CC), founded in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward in January 1967... Com/Co cranked out an endless stream of flyers and handbills for community groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, as well as scores of events. As their promotional flyer stated, they planned to ‘provide quick and inexpensive printing services for the hip community.’” For more information about how Com/Co hacked machinery to create vibrant printed material, see: aiga.org/cranking-itout-old-school-style-art-ofthe-gestetner
The liquid light undulating across the venue’s walls and dancing bodies was one of many inevitable influences of the “melting” typography that we now refer to as psychedelic. structured and formalized than in the leading commercial agencies. Women like MacLean found it relatively easy to slip into this kind of graphic design. But the whole phenomenon was relatively short-lived, and progressing to one of the established agencies or professions was altogether more difficult.” I wanted to hear from those women who were contributing their artwork during that momentous year and a half; to see another picture of that time and its design, and see what might have been. 37
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3 The split-fountain technique stems in part from a technique often used in Japanese woodblock printmaking called “Bokashi,” where a variation in lightness and darkness of a single color is achieved by hand-applying a gradation of ink to a moistened wooden printing block. In Louise Sandhaus’ book, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design, 1936–1986, the first page features a 1908 poster by Henry Taylor made using the rainbow roll: “It later became hugely popular in counterculture California, thanks to the underground tabloid The Oracle of the City of San Francisco in the mid-1960s . . . ”
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n 1966, a few blocks from the Fillmore West, the steps of the neighborhood’s brightly painted Victorian houses were filled with hordes of young people wearing beads and bells, frock coats and velvet fringe—and holding The Oracle of the City of San Francisco in their hands.
a The Oracle, no 6. 1967. Back cover: Ida Grif fin. Female A q u
r i a n Age. The Letterform Archive, New York.
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The Oracle published 12 issues between ’66 and ’68, with rainbowprint covers under the art direction of Michael Bowen. Editor Allen Cohen published beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, as well as the work of Haight-Ashbury’s burgeoning artists. It was a local tabloid for what was happening, what was thought, and what was discovered, as minds under 38
the influence bent in impossible directions. For the “The Aquarian Age” issue, medium and astrologer Rosalind Sharpe Wall devised a tarot deck, and writers predicted what was in store for the year. The cover was printed with The Oracle’s favored split-fountain (or rainbow roll) technique, which blended a spectrum of colors so they appeared to fade into one another in a way that’s often likened to a Californian sunset. 3 Beneath the masthead was a personification of the Aquarius zodiac sign drawn by the meticulous hand of underground comic artist (and Big Five member) Rick Griffin; the back cover depicted the counterpart, an angelic-looking female Aquarius drawn by his wife, Ida Griffin. The pair met in 1964 while studying at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts). Ida continued to illustrate for underground newspapers until Rick’s career began to take off. Today, she manages her late husband’s estate. When I ask the galleries that have shown Rick’s work in recent years where to find her, I hit a dead end; the last anyone’s heard, she’s living in Hawaii. Ami Magill was a staff artist at The Oracle, though lack of attribution makes it difficult to pinpoint her exact contributions. Magill worked closely with the paper’s longest-standing female designer, the late Hetty McGee, who has been described by friends as “a wild woman who danced with ribbons and lace” and brewed tea the prim English way, in a porcelain pot (she was from Liverpool). More often than not, McGee didn’t sign her Oracle illustrations. Many of the women contributing to the newspaper didn’t either, deciding to omit any authorship from compositions and to dedicate their designs to a muse that had supposedly worked through them instead.
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he very first hippie clothing store appeared on Haight Street in 1966. It was called In Gear and was founded by a man
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named Harry Tsvi Strauch (or just “Tsvi”). In Gear was where you went to find the beads, feathers, and paisley print that were The Oracle readers’ preferred accessories. Tsvi helped form the Haight Independent Proprietors, which published notices scolding police for harassing the Haight’s new influx of residents; 7 he was also among the organizers behind the infamous Human Be-In. His wife, Hyla Deer, was credited in the San Francisco Chronicle with inventing “love beads.”
4 Timothy Leary married the pair in Golden Gate Park.
5 There are also images and texts derived from a North American take on Eastern philosophies and religions. It’s been noted that the following issue of Aspen was a reaction to this ill-informed “Dreamweapon” release, as it presented a studied historical survey of Asian art in a “corrective to the unfixed hippie sentiments of the previous issue.” See Gwen Allen, “The Magazine as a Medium: Aspen 1965–1971” in Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, 2011).
a n Man. The Letterform Archive, New York.
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Hetty McGee was said to have lived with the Grateful Dead in their château recording studio in France. She also lived in New York for some time; a personal photograph taken by Andy Warhol shows her walking down the streets of Soho barefoot in purple taffeta and sunglasses, heavily pregnant, smiling with her husband, Angus MacLise—the drummer who quit the Velvet Underground when the band began to play for money. 4 Together, MacLise and McGee (who took his name when they married) edited the “Dreamweapon” issue of avantgarde multimedia artist magazine Aspen. Presented in a box, each issue focused on a different genre or different scene— including conceptual, minimal, and pop— and invited a guest editor to curate and design the material. Steeped as they were in The Oracle and its surrounding culture, McGee and her husband were the natural choice for the psychedelia issue of Aspen. McGee’s cover oozes an orange and pink landscape, and inside there’s photo-poetry and a sheet of stamps illustrated with brightly colored nudes. 5 After time spent in Haight-Ashbury, the wifeand-husband duo traveled from Haiti to the Middle East and India, eventually moving to Kathmandu, Nepal. MacLise died young of hypoglycemia and tuberculosis, and McGee raised their newly born son, Ossian, in South Asia, returning to the UK later in her life, where she earned a living doing phone readings for the Psychic Network. 6
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a The Oracle, no 6. 1967. Front cover: Rick Grif fin. A q u
I get a tip that Tsvi is the person to talk to if you’re looking for connections, and my conversation with him is brief and to the point. “Everyone always thinks the ’60s were a guy thing—not so. There were some important women drug dealers, too.” Tsvi gives me the number of the graphic artist Mari Tepper, who worked at In Gear for a short period and contributed art to The Oracle. Before moving to 39
As a three-year-old toddler in Nepal, young Ossian was chosen by Buddhist priests to be an incarnation of a deceased high Tibetan lama, Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche. A 1991 PBS documentary told the story of the young American boy who grew up in the Tibetan Buddhist monastery.
7 According to Tsvi, these complaints spurred police to coin the term “the love generation.” He says: “When we made our complaint to the police, they turned to us and said, ‘you’re not beatniks, they live in the West, so what are you then?’ The cops thought about it for a moment and then one of them turned to us and said: ‘I know . . . you’re the love generation.’” The next day, the term was in all the newspapers. Journalists recording the spiraling atmosphere of the Haight always had their ears pressed closely to all the neighborhood’s doors.
i s e . Edited by Angus and Hetty MacLise. The Letterform Archive, New York.
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Aspen, no. 9 1970. Box interior. Designed by Hetty M a c
“Everyone always thinks the ’60s were a guy thing—not so. There were some important women drug dealers, too.” 8
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“My father always said, ‘If it works in all four directions then you have a good design.’ If you notice in my work, you can turn it around in all four directions and it generally works,” Tepper recounts.
the Haight in ’66, Tepper grew up nearby with her mother and three brothers. She began designing gig advertisements for Bill Graham as a teenager. Her style is unique: detailed compositions feature elongated and expressive bodies informed by Egon Schiele’s twisted figures, as well as the intricacies of Friedensreich Hundertwasser and Gustav Klimt. Tepper’s father, Gene Tepper—a well-regarded industrial designer immersed in ’50s functionalism—taught his daughter certain principles that she combined with 40
the youthful dynamism brewing around her. 8 Tepper’s mother was one of the first women to study painting at Yale’s School of Art; she put her young daughter in contact with political organizations in the mid-1960s, such as the performance group the San Francisco Mime Troupe. It was Tepper’s poster for the improvisational comedy collective The Committee that first caught Graham’s eye and landed her the gig designing promotional material for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Grateful Dead. At the time, though, these names were unknown—just local kids in the Haight with a new kind of sound. “Graham liked my work, so he became my first boss,” Tepper tells me. “I had a great experience with him. Around that time in 1966, I also had my earliest shows—one at the Psychedelic Shop and the other at the
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Print Mint.” Tepper received a scholarship to the Academy of Arts in the summer of ’65, during which she honed her craft. It was while she was working with Graham that the Big Five’s Wes Wilson taught her how to put together a poster for printing. 9 Tepper has always identified as a feminist, and from an early age she stood with her mother at the front of picket lines in solidarity with the civil rights movement. She’s fixated on depicting groups of people in her posters: expressive figures hold hands, dance, or stand together in a united line. Living in the Haight as a young woman, she felt more like a “beatnik than a hippie” compelled by a sense of social responsibility and committed to social and structural change.10 It was the giving, anti-money ideology of the Diggers community-action group that especially caught her imagination from the moment that they appeared in ’66, dishing out free food in the Golden Gate Park. Although it’s typically attributed to the Grateful Dead, it was at the Free Store that the Diggers women first introduced tie-dye to the American youth. One day, when the shop was overstocked with uptight white button-down Oxford shirts that no one wanted to wear, the women gave them new life by knotting the fabric together and dipping them into dye. Not long afterward, the new look was everywhere. In the Free Store’s garden, among the buckets of suds, white shirts, and rainbow water, Tepper painted the legendary oversized door frame for the Diggers, which became known as “the free frame of reference.” This door shows up in nearly every historical account made of Haight-Ashbury, though Tepper’s name almost never accompanies it. If you wanted a plate of free food at one of the group’s events, you’d have to step through the frame,
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Somehow the whole deck of cards had been thrown up in the air and was coming down in a new order. which Tepper adorned with the words “A Magic Theatre for Madmen Only. One Who Enters, Forever Lonely” 11 in her characteristic free-flowing script. “There was a lot of very magical stuff going on,” says Tepper. “But I wasn’t happy with a lot of things taking place, like when the Hells Angels came into the Haight in late ’67 and brought in speed and all kinds of other freaky stuff. At the time, being a woman was not as fun as being a man. The ‘make love not war’ thing was taken very literally.”
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t’s within this energetic and tumultuous period that young Tepper began making posters for the American Newsrepeat Company. “I was asked to do a poster about birth control pills, which had only been out for maybe six years at that point, and I was taking them,” she recalls. The pills appear in the poster’s center, in their typical round container, and “tantric figures” stem from them to form a star. “I was using luma dyes, which had these brilliant colors, and I hand painted the whole thing with brushes.” Tepper designed it on the floor of her first apartment in the Haight, which she shared with her roommate, an emancipated minor who was 16. One day, her roommate’s boyfriend, a guy by the name 41
9 In ’66, young Tepper won the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair Contest, and designed a poster that was given out to all the residents of the area. She designed it to be a calendar, and half a century after its first release, it was reissued to celebrate the fair’s 50th anniversary—the dates falling on the same days of the week as the original print.
10 As Louise Sandhaus says: “When we talk about this kind of moment in time—the ’60s—we have the hippies who are associated with a kind of utopian ideal, and then we have the political activists, who had a somewhat different utopian ideal, a political one. The latter wanted to change the system instead of dropping out of the system.”
11 A riff on Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
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Bonnie MacLean.
Chambers Brothers, Sunshine Company, The Siegel Schwall Band. 1967. Lithograph, 7 x 4 1/2� (17.8 x 11.4 cm). Published by Bill Graham Presents, San Francisco. Architecture & Design Study Center. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Bonnie MacLean.
Eric Burdon and the Animals, Mother Earth, Hour Glass. 1967. Lithograph, 21 x 14 1/16� (53.4 x 35.7 cm). Gift of the designer. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Mari Tepper.
Hallelujah the Pill. 1967. 22 x 22” (55.9 x 55.9 cm) Published by American Newsrepeat Co. © Mari Tepper. Courtesy of the artist.
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of Bobby Beausoleil, was over while she was painting. “It turned out he was one of the Manson guys,” she says. “It was my roommate’s first boyfriend and he started talking to me about how he wanted to bring her back to his family.” Luckily, she didn’t go. Tepper found Beausoleil as mesmerizing as he was disconcerting, standing over her while she worked. “I was sitting on the floor doing this poster, which was very erotic, so it made me feel quite vulnerable,” she says. “I was so naïve, I didn’t know about these things, but he tried to seduce me.” Tepper wasn’t interested, and she turned him away. Her triumphant design, one of her most successful, celebrates women’s liberation and newfound sexual freedoms with glorious exuberance, but it’s significant that it was produced during a moment of vulnerability. While the snakes could represent Eve, they could also denote the shadows of a dark side of the Summer of Love and all its new, uncertain forms of negotiation. They signify a sense of precaution in the midst of colorful discovery, especially during a moment when the exploitation of the young was rampant, as the world opened to uncharted and alternative ways of being. “Now with the #MeToo movement, I think things are really going to change, you know?” says Tepper. Both Tepper’s “Hallelujah the Pill,” and another for American Newsrepeat, “God Grows His Own,” likely sold over 60,000 copies in the ’60s, but Tepper never got paid for them. The systematic exploitation of her work has been unrelenting ever since, with continual copyright infringements and numerous instances where she has either been underpaid or not paid at all. Tepper realizes that those who reaped the historical and financial benefits from the period’s
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infamous graphic art were mostly the “straight, white men” who were around. She tells me she is not embittered; rather, she is politicized.
“I was asked to do a poster about birth control pills, which had only been out for maybe six years at that point.” In ’68, Tepper fell for a young man in her building who “looked just like George Harrison.” He had an LSD vision that beckoned him to “move to the country and stop doing drugs,” so Tepper packed up and went with him to New Mexico. Before they left, though, he told her that if she wanted to be with him she needed to get rid of her artwork, so Tepper threw away her prints. It’s a similar story to the one Joan Didion tells; her Haight women were also dissuaded from their creative pursuits by men. “Poster design just felt like something that I was doing. You don't realize that it’s going to have value later in life,” says Tepper.
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n 1967, more than 5,000 miles away from the Haight, something similar yet altogether different was occurring— connected in spirit and appearance, but with a life of its own. In a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate, West London, not as swish an area as now, three Australians— editors Richard Neville and Jim Anderson, along with the graphic designer Martin Sharp—began publishing the UK edition of the infamous underground 45
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h for Oz logo, 1960s.
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Virginia Clive-Smith, notebook wit h s k
12 “I would sit upstairs in the maisonette to put the magazine together,” says Clive-Smith. “I remember Richard Neville would often sit downstairs, and writers and bands would come in and he’d interview them. There was one time when he was interviewing The Incredible String Band while I was working. Practically every adjective they used was ‘incredible.’” Clive-Smith stifled her giggles then, but not now. “‘Wasn’t that incredible. . . ? When we did that it was just incredible. You know, that’s soooo incredible.’ It was their one adjective!”
Virginia Clive-Smith at the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco, 1969.
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magazine Oz, which by 1971 would be the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history. Alongside energized writing by Germaine Greer and misogynistic comics by Robert Crumb were dazzling wraparound and pull-out posters, unexpected use of color, and trippy compositions, making Oz stand out like a firework against a gray, industrial postwar Britain. Its libertarian tinge and blunt, obliviously sexist content rightly deterred and riled up London’s growing feminist movement, but it also became a celebrated space for pioneering writing on gay liberation, the politics of sex and drugs, music, and anti–Vietnam War sentiment. The only woman listed under the title “design” on the staff was Virginia Clive-Smith. Oz was Britain’s most celebrated graphic response to the spiraling psychedelic influences, and Clive-Smith sat in the heart of it with her scalpel and metal ruler, putting all the elusive pieces together. She often went uncredited on the issues she designed, though. “I mean, I was a girl,” she says. Clive-Smith also went on to work for Sir Terence Conran on the graphics for the interior design store Habitat, and for Rolling Stone in London and in San Fran46
cisco, as well as Island Records. She lived for some time in Notting Hill in a small studio apartment with a yellow canary that would sing along to the record player. “Life rolled so quickly then,” she tells me. She’s lively in conversation, with a bright and undiminished rebellious attitude. During the ’60s, Clive-Smith was at art school with designer John Goodchild, who would later bring her to Oz. He was a few years ahead of her at school and became “a sort of mentor.” They shared a flat on London’s Old Brompton Road, and the pair first began experimenting with layout for an underground newspaper called Image. It was while working on Image that Clive-Smith, a gifted typographer, first became aware of Allen Ginsberg, and the rhythm of his poems began to influence the rhythm of her design work. “That playfulness of Image then went on into Oz,” she says. “But of course we also had the inspiration of brilliant Martin Sharp.” Clad in a uniform of mismatched ski pants and a backward V-neck men’s sweater, Clive-Smith poured what she saw and what she felt into editorial layout, and especially into type treatments. “Everything was changing terribly rapidly, and all these young people from around the world were arriving in London. Somehow the whole deck of cards had been thrown up in the air and was coming down in a new order. “I had been trained in a way that was Bauhaus-inspired. Grids and all that. When all the playfulness came in, it sort of got overlaid on top of the grids. I started to realize I could use lettering to illustrate a feeling, and that was... well, it was very, very thrilling.” One of her credited designs for Oz, a cover made with Goodchild in editor Neville’s maisonette flat 12 , combined
Oz, no. 8. 1968. Cover designed by Virginia Clive-Smith and John Goodchild. The Letterform Archive, New York.
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13 Alongside a young man named Colin Fulcher, who would later become an acclaimed graphic artist better known as Barney Bubbles.
14 “There was a piece of graffiti that I always loved, which said ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.’ One evening, I did a graphic of an angel and wrote the same thing underneath on an A4 paper. I then Xeroxed a copy for everyone in the office and put it on their desks at night. Jann Wenner came in in the morning to find it on his desk, and he called everybody into the central office space. He said, ‘I want to know who did this.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting it, Jann. Have a look at what it says.’ He was livid.”
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pop graphics from Marvel comics with exuberant DayGlo ink that would become the magazine’s staple, a material bought at industrial stores where it was intended for road signs. For her 1968 cover, CliveSmith drew from the light shows at London nightclubs to create a melting, vivid typography spelling out the magazine’s name. The team was aware of what was going on in the Haight, too, as tubes filled with San Francisco’s music posters found their way to London. Around the same time, Clive-Smith began working at The Conran Design Group13 and as a fiery young freelancer, she didn’t stand for disrespectful, patriarchal behavior from her superiors. While she admits being in awe of the “inspirational and fantastic” Conran, she recalls how one day he came into the office and sweepingly marked a giant red X over a design that Clive-Smith had labored over for weeks. She didn’t hide her anger, and instead ran to the bathroom to violently kick at its door.
Exuberant DayGlo ink would become the magazine’s staple, a material bought at industrial stores where it was intended for road signs. W O M E N O F P S Y C H
“He never treated me like that again,” she says. “He knew that when I was kicking the door, I was actually kicking him.” In 1970, Clive-Smith joined Goodchild at Rolling Stone in San Francisco for 18 months; they’d been working for the magazine in London, adding British plates to the American content for the UK edition. “It was completely different in San Francisco; it was a much bigger 48
setup and was ruled with a rod of iron. Cofounder and publisher Jann Wenner was more like Conran than Neville, in that he was building an empire. There wasn’t any mucking about. I did nearly get sacked from Rolling Stone because it was pretty serious.”14 That seriousness felt stifling to free-spirited Clive-Smith. By that time, the frenzy of Haight-Ashbury had begun to fade, or rather, the culture around it had rapidly commercialized. Clive-Smith became close with Cindy Ehrlich, another female graphic designer at the magazine, and was in awe of “brilliant” Annie Leibovitz whenever she came into the office. After returning to London, she remained freelance, which gave her a liberating sense of both “freedom and control.”
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f thousands of young women flocked to the Haight in ’67, and even more opened their minds in countless cities and towns across the world—with bright ink and new printing mechanics at their fingertips—who knows how many posters and prints got tossed into dumpsters without a second thought. The year 1967 sometimes felt turbulent and dangerous, the edge of something edgy, but for a brief and wonderfully strange moment, for women who happened to be in the right room in front of the right printing press at the right time, there was also a sense of exciting possibilities.
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What happens when five creatives design under the influence, sans the drugs t out some mindalterin g ac tiv iti es — fro m beats to sound baths—w ith th e go al of ut what happens wh en you go in sear ch lly induced inspira tion.
The desire to lose one’s mind— at least for a moment—is familiar to those who create for a living. For some, the path to enlightenment is paved with pills and smoke, But not every mind-expanding experience requires biochemical alterations. Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer of the Bauhaus famously incorporated meditation and restricted diets into the school’s early teachings. Filmmaker and artist David Lynch attributes his darkly whimsical visions to the power of transcendental meditation. In his book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Salvador Dalí describes how he would nap with a key in his hand and a plate beside his bed. As soon as he drifted off to sleep, the key would slip from his fingers and clang onto the plate, rousing him from a half-drowsy slumberland where he found his surrealist inspiration.
In that spirit, we asked a handful of designers to test out some mind-altering activities—from binaural beats to sound baths—with the goal of finding out what happens when you go in search of artificially induced inspiration.
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WHEN AN OP T IC A L IL LUSION
Cross your eyes. Position the page just right. Pull it close, then away. Do you see it? An optical illusion is a secret hiding in plain sight.
For a flash
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in the 1990s, Magic Eye, the world’s most famous and infamously frustrating—optical illusion, was everywhere. Posters bearing the brightly colored op-art hung from the walls of Midwestern mall kiosks. Postcards filled gift store racks. Books with taglines like “A new way of looking at the world,” lined and then disappeared from store shelves as people snatched up more than 20 million copies of the series. 64
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Magic Eye was something of a paradox: a deliberate graphic mess that relied on grids and precision to achieve its intended effect. The fact that it was so difficult to see the 3-D shape hiding behind the hypercolored patterns was a major part of its appeal. To find the secret image, people adopted a signature Magic Eye stance: bent forward, handson-hips, staring—dumbfounded—at the visual static in front of them. The others who crowded around (there were always others) passed along tips like an unsuccessful game of telephone— Cross your eyes.
But in the more than 25 years since Magic Eye first hit bookstore shelves, the 74-year-old, self-styled retired hippie has come to learn a lot about what happens when you follow the unexpected bends in the road when they come your way. “Life is a real pinball machine,” he continued. “The most successful people understand that and they don’t try to force the game. They follow the bounces and try to keep ahead of them as much as they can.”
No, squint. Try relaxing.
To find the secret image, people adopted a signature Magic Eye stance: bent forward, hands-on-hips, staring—dumbfounded—at the visual static in front of them.
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Click. Suddenly the image would appear. Every illusion is solvable, as long as you know how to look at it. For a time, people were obsessed with the visual trickery of not being able to see what was directly in front of them. And then, just as quickly, they weren’t. “Fads have a predictable life,” says Tom Baccei, who would know better than anyone. As one of the creators of Magic Eye, Baccei and his small team of designers orchestrated one of pop culture’s most bewildering whims, turning an obscure perceptual experiment into a publishing empire. To be honest, he finds the whole thing just as curious as you do. “It was the right place at the right time,” he said recently, speaking from his home in Vermont. 66
The story of Magic Eye begins at a technology company in a quiet office park outside of Boston. At the start of the ’90s, Baccei was working as the U.S. manager of Pentica Systems, a British company that sold in-circuit emulators, small devices that were used to debug early computers. At the time, Pentica was looking to boost sales in the United States for a product called the MIME in-circuit emulator, and it was up to Baccei to create an advertisement to run in a national trade magazine. Baccei came up with a concept in which a mime would stand at the end of a conference table, his arm digitally altered to appear as if it were plugged into a series of wires that connected to a computer. “It was a play on the phrase ‘chairman of the board,’” he recalled, chuckling at his old idea. Baccei wrote the copy and hired a photographer and a pantomimist who
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Turn the Magic Eye image on the opposite page horizontally and hold the center close to your nose. Don’t worry! It should look blurry. Diverge your eyes; pretend that you’re looking through the image into the distance. Slowly pull the image back from your face.
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5 Don’t cross your eyes! 6 Don’t blink! Relax—it helps. 7 8 Can you see it? 9 Now? 10 Ask a friend.
© 2018 Magic Eye Inc.
It’s not just you. Magic Eye is notoriously hard to see. To help the autostereogram-impaired, we asked the makers of Magic Eye how to see past the visual clutter (hint: It takes some practice). Below is a step-bystep guide to bringing hidden images into view. Headaches not included.
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would star in the shoot. As fate would have it, this mime, whose real name is Ron Labbe, was also a 3-D photography enthusiast and had brought along one of his stereo cameras. Baccei found himself intrigued by the idea of 3-D photographs. “I asked him where I could buy one of the cameras, and he pointed me to a magazine called Stereo World.” Baccei picked up the next issue, and that’s where he came across a story about autostereograms, a little-known perceptual concept invented in the 1970s by visual neuroscientist Christopher Tyler. Tyler had studied under Béla Julesz, a famed neuroscientist known for his research of the human brain’s visual system. In the 1960s, Julesz pioneered the concept of the random dot stereogram, a visual trick that shows how humans can achieve the sensation of stereopsis, or 3-D vision, by looking at a pair of 2-D images filled with randomized, black-and-white dots. In his experiments, Julesz placed these two images side by side, and then horizontally shifted a section of dots on one of the images. At a glance, the pair of images looked flat. But when viewed together with a stereoscope or by diverging the eyes, the section of shifted dots appeared to be floating in the foreground or background of the static dots. Julesz explained that this “cyclopean vision” was the result of the brain registering slight disparities in the images hitting each retina. Instead of viewing these images as separate, the brain fuses them together to create a single image and avoid the sensation of double vision. By intentionally shifting where an image is placed relative to its background, Julesz was able to trick the brain into seeing depth and create the illusion of 3-D geometry. 70
At the time, Julesz’s research was heralded as a massive advancement in the understanding of 3-D vision. But it wasn’t until the 1970s when Tyler figured out how to achieve the same 3-D effect with a single image that the roots of modern-day Magic Eye were formed. Baccei was mesmerized by the autostereograms as well as by the image that ran next to the story in Stereo World — a black-and-white rectangle filled with what looked like TV static, but revealed a series of random circles and dots when you diverged your eyes. “I thought it was the most compelling optical illusion I’d ever seen,” Baccei said. He was so compelled that he decided to create his own for Pentica’s next advertisement in Embedded Systems Engineering magazine. On his old PC, Baccei designed an autostereogram with the phrase “M700” (the name of a Pentica product) obscured by an array of black-and-white dots. At the bottom of the ad, he urged readers to solve the puzzle, adding a disclaimer that to see the hidden message you had to diverge your eyes, as if you were looking at a faraway object. The ad was a hit— and not just with the engineering crowd. “I remember the fax machine going into overdrive,” recalls Bob Salitsky, who worked with Baccei at Pentica and later developed the software that helped Baccei make Magic Eye images at scale. “We started getting requests for all kinds of custom orders.” Emboldened, Baccei started spending his hours outside of Pentica designing more of what he called “gaze toys,” or autostereograms with simple hidden images in the background. It was around this time, in 1991, when Baccei met Cheri Smith, a freelance artist who was working at ImageAbility, a computer graphics company outside of Boston, training
Courtesy of Ron Labbe/Studio
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clients to use its sophisticated 3-D, animation, and computer graphics workstations. As Smith remembers it, Baccei had seen her artwork in the office’s hallways while he was there on business, and asked who had made it.
house, and with the help of Smith started Magic Eye as a sub-company under one of his existing businesses, N.E. Thing Enterprises.
“When you see it in 3-D, it puts you in an altered state,” says Smith. “It increases your alpha waves and makes you feel happy.”
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Baccei had been using clip art in the backgrounds of his autostereograms and was interested in improving the aesthetics of his gaze toys, but he had no artistic background. He showed Smith an example of his autostereogram, and she was struck by its potential. “I told him, ‘This could be really beautiful artwork,’” she recalled recently. “He said, ‘You really think so?’ We then enthusiastically started to discuss how we could combine our skills to create more complex and beautiful 3-D images.” Not long after meeting, Baccei and Smith designed another autostereogram advertisement—this time with a hidden airplane—which ran in American Airlines’ inflight magazine, American Way. Baccei started getting calls mid-flight from flight attendants asking for the answer. “They were giving away bottles of champagne to the first person who could identify what was in the picture,” he said. Soon after placing the ad in American Way, Baccei says he was jolted awake in the middle of the night with an epiphany. “I realized I was selling the wrong thing. People wanted more autostereograms, and they’d buy it.” Baccei mortgaged his 72
In 1991 N.E. Thing Enterprises began working with Tenyo Co., Ltd, a Japanese company known for selling an array of magic products. This relationship led to the christening of Magic Eye. “We called it Magic Eye because it translated well to Japanese—and because it had ‘magic’ in the name,” Smith recalled. At the time, Tenyo was selling Magic Eye autostereogram posters, postcards, and other retail products. When the company released the first three Magic Eye books later that year, Magic Eye became an overnight sensation. Soon distributors and publishers from around the world were contacting Magic Eye to license the work. One of those people was Mark Gregorek, a licensing agent from New Jersey who had first seen Baccei’s autostereograms when a friend sent him a fax of the American Way ad. “I spent days staring at this stupid picture, and I couldn’t see anything,” Gregorek recalled. “It was driving me nuts.” Then one day he was working in his home office and had the piece of paper in one hand while he glanced out the window at his daughter in the backyard at the same time. “I wasn’t looking at the piece of paper in
Courtesy of Ron Labbe/Studio
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front of me; I was looking past it to the yard,” he said. “And that’s when I saw the airplane appear. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.” The next day, Gregorek called Baccei and told him he wanted to make him rich. By 1993, Baccei and Smith had set up a small business with a handful of employees in Massachusetts, and Gregorek (who is no longer affiliated with Magic Eye) had secured Magic Eye a deal with the publisher Andrews McMeel to publish its first book in the U.S. A few of those employees were designers who helped Baccei and Smith translate Tyler’s esoteric optical illusion into the kind of colorful, attention-grabbing images that would sell lots of books.
edges like cars, sailboats, and certain animals, worked best. They’d then build a greyscale version of the shape, which allowed the program to assign depth values to its outline. Lighter areas signified pixels that were closer; darker areas were for pixels farther away. This depth map is what pops out when you look at Magic Eye just right. Next, the designers would create something called a starter strip, a vertical column filled with a colorful pattern that repeats over the hidden 3-D image like camouflage. Salitsky’s software combined the 2-D pattern with the grayscale depth map by shifting each patterned strip horizontally depending on the depth information in the 3-D image. To make
Magic Eye’s gift shop roots make it easy to overlook its place in the lineage of perceptual psychology tricks that help researchers make sense of the brain’s most confounding habits.
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A year prior, Baccei had enlisted Bob Salitsky, a programmer from his time at Pentica, to assist him in creating a more advanced software program that could automate part of the painstaking process of making autostereograms. Instead of using random black-and-white dots in their autostereograms like Julesz and Tyler, Salitsky’s enhancements to the software allowed Magic Eye designers to make images with something called “Salitsky Dots”—colorful, asymmetrical blobs whose position was calculated to render the hidden image slightly sharper than it would otherwise be. To make a Magic Eye autostereogram, the designers would first decide what shape to hide in the background of the image. Simple objects with defined 74
a 3-D shape appear closer, the software would repeat the starter pattern in nearer intervals; to make part of the shape seem farther away, they’d repeat it in greater distances. “When you do this properly, the repeating pattern overlaps, giving each eye different depth cues that we have embedded into the image, tricking your brain into seeing the intended 3-D illusion,” Smith explains. Most people don’t think of Magic Eye as an exercise in considered graphic design, but that’s exactly what it is. Its gift shop roots make it easy to overlook its place in the long lineage of perceptual psychology tricks that have helped researchers make sense of the brain’s most confounding habits. “When you stare at something and it’s just pattern, and then
Courtesy of Ron Labbe/Studio
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suddenly you’re seeing something that’s not there, but it is there—that’s magical,” said Labbe, the mime who went on to work at Magic Eye as an artist in the mid ’90s and now owns a company called Studio 3D. To Smith, the magic of Magic Eye goes well beyond the initial “ah-ha” moment. For some people, she adds, it’s almost like an addiction. “When you see it in 3-D, it puts you in an altered state,” she says. “It increases your alpha waves and makes you feel happy.” Its “drug-like” draw might explain why the first Magic Eye book sold out immediately. Baccei received a call from his publisher soon after the 1993 launch, telling him the original 30,000-book run was gone. “Within 24 hours they’d ordered a print run of 500,000 copies,” he said. The fad caught fire, and Magic Eye had a head start. For more than a year, he and Smith worked 15-hour days, 7 days a week, cranking out images for licensees like Disney, Looney Tunes, and even eye doctors, who wanted to latch on to the trend. There was a sense of urgency, if only because Baccei believed this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Tom and I both knew this wasn’t going to last forever,” Gregorek said. They were only partially right. By 1995, Magic Eye’s retail sales started to slow. What had once been a booming industry with posters selling for $25 apiece was turning into an overrun market where optical illusion posters could be bought for less than $5 at department stores. Using a mathematical analysis called an accumulative S-curve, Baccei calculated that Magic Eye had, indeed, reached its peak, and it was now on the downward slope. “It showed that the returns were diminishing at such a rate that the end was in 76
sight,” he said. People were moving on to Beanie Babies, Furbies, and Tamagotchi. Or maybe they were getting headaches from too much Magic Eye. Either way, Baccei decided to sell his majority portion of the company to Smith and his other employee Andy Paraskevas, who officially renamed the company to Magic Eye Inc. in 1996. Today, Smith still runs the shop out of a little office in Provincetown, Massachusetts. For Smith, Magic Eye is still very much alive, even if the initial fervor has died down. She and her small team have turned Magic Eye into a creative agency of sorts, where they make custom work for companies who want advertisements, posters, and products emblazoned with Magic Eye’s distinct brand of visual chaos. They’re currently working on a 25th anniversary edition of a Magic Eye book, and recently made a poster for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Smith attributes Magic Eye’s continued existence to the quality of the company’s autostereogram artwork, though even she acknowledges the importance of nostalgia in keeping the company alive. Appropriately, Magic Eye’s website is like taking a visual trip back to the 1990s—all low-res visuals and animated clip art. At the bottom of the page, a disclaimer reads: “WELCOME TO the Home Page for Magic Eye Inc., producers of the patented Magic Eye 3D images that ignited the world-wide 3D craze of the ’90s.” Now, 25 years later, the 3-D craze has turned into something quieter and smaller, but there’s still something entrancing about staring at the hypercolored static, searching for something you can’t see but know is there. As satisfying as it is to best a trick, there’s a perverse pleasure in trying, and failing, to bring something hidden into view.
Courtesy of Ron Labbe/Studio
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