Good design, for fun and profit

Feeling overwhelmed by TMI, too much information zooming in on too many platforms? Whistle up a graphic designer to edit, organize, prioritize and make sense of it all. That's what those smart mad men and wise women do in "Graphic Design: Now in Production," Walker Art Center's up-to-the-minute report on the state of the graphic arts.

BYO smartphone, and wear comfy shoes. Besides tweeting, you can use the phone to insert your own messages into a billboard-sized wall of ever-moving "posters" at the show's entrance. The shoes? Well, this is a huge, endlessly fascinating display that's likely to keep you on your toes a while.

Billed as the largest museum event of its type in the past 15 years, the exhibit presents a dazzling array of multimedia posters, logos, brands, fonts, graphs, charts, books, magazines and products by more than 250 international talents, including about 25 Minnesotans. It focuses primarily on the past five years.

Fun, fast and informative, it was organized by the Walker's design curator, Andrew Blauvelt, in cooperation with Ellen Lupton of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, where it will travel after its Minneapolis presentation ends Jan. 22. Then it embarks on a two-year tour to other museums nationwide.

Technology has revolutionized graphic design in the two decades since Blauvelt finished his 1988 MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the legendary home of American modernism in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Back then, the design ideal was streamlined Swiss typography, minimalist imagery, sleek products and crisp branding.

Thanks to computers, digital photography and other fast-moving changes, design has been "democratized" and changed from a "specialized, invisible profession to a widely deployed tool," Blauvelt said.

"We operate in a much more diverse and pluralistic landscape," he added. "Modernism began to break down in the 1990s. There's no one style now, and what used to be a man's field is dominated by women, about 60-40 now, all working at a very high level of professional practice."

The field's eclecticism is evident in the show's juxtaposition of high-tech and traditional posters. An electronic poster-wall, produced by a collaborative called LUST, offers an ever-changing array of colorful messages in poster-sized formats that seem to dance across a light wall, advancing, receding and responding to visitors' movements. Computer algorithms generate up to 600 of these electronic "posters" every day by mining local websites for images and text. Using smartphones, visitors can use QR (Quick Response) codes to add their own messages.

Nearby hangs a ceiling-to-floor cascade of funky but traditional silk-screened music posters by Aesthetic Apparatus, a Minneapolis-based duo, and a collection of type-only posters that British artist Anthony Brill created using woodblocks and, in one case, "ink" made from oil salvaged from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill. Albert Exergian cleverly revives Swiss modernist designs for conceptual posters about popular television programs ("Scrubs," "The Simpsons"), while Michiel Schuurman uses computer programs to create the kind of mind-buzzing psychedelic lettering that San Francisco stoners once drew by hand.

Graphic designers really justify their existence by distilling complex data into crisp, memorable and ideally witty graphs, charts and other visuals. Brilliant examples abound here. In an utterly absorbing short video, "The Joy of Stats," a hyperkinetic Swede named Hans Rosling uses colorful bubbles to chart 200 years of changes in world population, longevity, health and wealth -- factoids that would otherwise require a mind-numbing 120,000 numbers.

Sir Ken Robinson's cartoon video critiquing misguided education models shows how fun school could be if only all teachers could draw. Kai Krause dramatically illustrates how really big continental Africa is by turning it into a puzzle that holds, believe it or not, the entire United States, China, India and a half-dozen other countries.

Populist touches

Given the recent turmoil in the publishing industry, where paper products (books, magazines) are assumed to be obsolete, it's surprising to see half a gallery devoted to such publications. Classy designs with chic images and stylish typefaces, the publications may have small print runs and economically questionable futures, but they are definitely intriguing. The French fashion magazine Elle is using new technology to niche-market its product, producing different covers for subscribers (more esoteric) and newsstand buyers (more eye-catching). Twin Cities artist Monica Haller has produced a series of print-on-demand books, available via the Web, that poignantly document the experiences of American soldiers serving in Iraq. Dozens of other international examples show the persistent attraction of paper products worldwide.