Week Nine - Charles S Anderson

This week’s reading took me down a rebellious and psychedelic path. I found the assigned reading to be interesting but not terribly compelling to me. Little pieces here and there stuck out, but nothing resonated strongly as what I should focus on for this week’s field journal. So I decided to look deeper into one of the designs I was familiar with – the Classico pasta sauce label designed by Charles Spencer Anderson in 1985.  Its design had a vintage inspiration and appeal and combined with mason jars made the product soar in sales - $92 million in just two years, despite limited advertising.

When I dove into researching Charles S Anderson I came to find out he was far more than a designer who focused on packaging and labels – in fact he has been a driving force behind the popularity of retro and nostalgic designs that have flavored the last few decades of pop culture. His upbringing in a small rural town led to a love of drawing and fascination with vintage advertising, comic books and monster magazines and no doubt influenced many of his designs. His work is described as often being fueled by small town boredom combined with an overactive imagination.

His advertising art work is both ironic and artistic and seems to constantly evolve. He now owns his own design firm, charles s. anderson design co. based in Minneapolis, and unlike many of the graphic designers who I studied who passed away long ago or at an early age, he is not only living but still producing an astonishing number of designs every year. Besides Classico, his designs have appeared on products / in advertisements for Target, Urban Outfitters, Paramount Picures, Fossil, Nissan, Ralph Lauren, Vanity Fair, Turner Classic Movies and Rolling Stone. His work also has been featured several times at the Design Triennial of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

This is used as the masthead on his design firm’s website and I think it’s very insightful:

“Design is a brand's signature and its story. We like to think of it as art for commerce, the culmination of research, relationships, strategic thinking, experience, intuition, and aesthetics. We believe that truly great design is about making something that adds richness to people's lives; something inspiring, memorable, funny, abrasive, ironic, elegant, ugly, human – anything but uninteresting.”

As you see above, I included a small selection of his work - and his collection is truly extensive. In fact it is the largest I have seen when researching any graphic designer so far for this class. Here is a great link with just a fraction of his work. Just knowing that he is still producing his work, and the sheer volume produced each year is a bit mind blowing. 

I find his designs to be exactly as his company's masthead describes - interesting, ironic and memorable. I love the retro looks and influences, and am most attracted to his designs that he did in color as he uses bright, complementary colors in his work. From the samples I found online, his black and white designs are as numerous as his colored illustrations and both frequently feature dark, thick lines and strong subjects. 

His design firm's website mentions that he continues to find inspiration in the history of graphic design, and I can certainly see that in his work. I can also appreciate the evolution of his designs and see their influences in products I see on a daily basis. I am a bit surprised that with his considerable influence, vision and history as a graphic designer that he didn't garner a larger portion of Megg's History of Graphic design book. However, I have no doubt that his continued work in the field will lead to much larger mentions in textbooks for graphic design students in the future. With Charles S Anderson continuing to develop, produce and publish his designs today, I find that this is an exciting time to be a graphic design student and have no doubt that his work will influence my designs in the future.

Sources:

https://www.inkling.com/read/history-of-graphic-design-philip-meggs-5th/chapter-22/figure-22-47 - Classico Sauce Image 

http://www.csaimages.com/about.asp - Images of CSA designs and biographical information

http://mcad.edu/125/alumni/charles-spencer-anderson - biography of Charles S Anderson

 http://csadesign.com/ - Charles S Anderson's design firm, source of quote and images of work