Nouvelle Cuisine For the Eyes

By KURT ANDERSEN

Not long ago, important American graphic design was thought to occur exclusively in New York City. But San Francisco, for one, has been changing that. Starting about 20 years ago, a new generation of designers came of age in the Bay Area, formally trained but unconventional by temperament. At the same time, decoration became fashionable again, modernist doctrine loosened, and a sort of regional self-infatuation overtook the arts. Baby-boomer entrepreneurs, with their hip clothing companies, upscale shops and software firms, became prime graphic-design clients. By the early 1980s the most talented of the San Francisco designers were creating the visual equivalent of nouvelle cuisine. The result was an identifiable local style -- sunny but sophisticated, fresh, playful, elegant -- that has become widely imitated across the U.S.

Among the San Franciscans, two are especially prominent, and have demonstrated particular staying power: Michael Vanderbyl, 40, and Michael Manwaring, 45. Although they have highly distinct styles, their parallels are striking. Both were born and reared in the Bay Area and educated at California art schools; both are lapsed devotees of European modernism. Despite success, both have kept their offices small. They do have some stylistic moves in common -- both show a fondness for fan shapes and silhouettes, and both have recently looked to turn-of-the-century Architect Josef Hoffmann for inspiration -- yet both have survived several years of extravagant attention without sinking into hack signature styles.

Some of Vanderbyl's best work is found in a series of posters depicting postmodern architectural whimsies. He is wont to portray almost any three- dimensional object in gaily colored axonometric view, and the effect is a sort of jaunty rigor, Bauhaus on holiday. Another of Vanderbyl's fun-with- geometry motifs is a flurry of polychrome squiggles tossed onto a severe black or white field. In catalogs for Hickory Business Furniture, he has roughly scribbled in color over precise black-and-white photographs of chairs -- once again, antagonistic design impulses in playful coexistence.

Vanderbyl is responsible for more superb corporate logos than any other designer of his generation. Ordinarily, logos tend to epitomize the worst tendencies of modern design: distilling a complicated business into one simple symbol almost inevitably results in bland, meaningless abstraction. Vanderbyl's best occupy that ambiguous zone just this side of abstraction; although highly refined, they suggest serendipity and imperfection, the real world in other words. For a World War II shipyard turned condo development, a star of horizontal stripes is given a trompe l'oeil, waving-flag wrinkle. For a printing company, a triangle is composed of lithographic printer's dots that actually muddle and blur.

$ Manwaring's work is more deliberately jarring. His graphics are often intriguingly precarious collages, pages teeming with violently disparate visual elements. Ziggurat shapes and plant leaves appear obsessively ("I can't drop them"), and his posters are frequently fenced off with thick bars at the perimeter, frames within frames. His sensibility is Californian but more edgy than mellow. Surfaces are often made to look scratched and torn, and his palette has grown darker and richer over the past few years. "If I don't get a little resistance from clients," Manwaring says, "I don't like it."

Manwaring was schooled in the dogmas of visual rationalism just at the moment when the crude baroque of psychedelia was popping up on posters all over San Francisco. That formative combination may explain why Manwaring still seeks to produce images on the border between the orderly and the wild, at once restrained and mannerist. A wine label for Sonoma County's small Hanna Winery, for example, is no neat, well-behaved rectangle but an asymmetrical ziggurat with type stacked in surprising ways. For a poster meant to express the idea of summer, a fragment of architectural statuary is enclosed within a flaming triangle, bracketed by scratched asymmetrical bars top and bottom, placed over a regular field of tiny squares and beneath an action-painting slew of paint drips. Instead of hokey chaos, it is jam-packed, allusive, improbably coherent.

Both Vanderbyl and Manwaring are now sufficiently sure of their visions and skills to move beyond the traditional boundaries of graphic design. Vanderbyl is creating showrooms, chairs and tables and, for Esprit, a new line of bed linens and towels. Manwaring is designing rugs, signs and building details. In his work with architects up to now, he says, "I have come in and bolted on things afterward." More and more he is working for developers directly. "I want to come in earlier -- to try to make it look not like an afterthought. We add the human scale and the life in many cases." His practical ideas are deeply elegant: outdoor maps for the retail center of a Marin County town will be three dimensional, cast in bronze and overlaid with a directional grid. For his latest commission, the grandest yet, he will help oversee the renovation of Bay Meadows, a Thoroughbred racetrack built in the 1930s.

Manwaring's and Vanderbyl's expansive ambitions are reminiscent of the 1930s and '40s, when a few well-known designers proposed to remake the nation -- objects, interiors, buildings, anything. In Northern California today, that can-do catholicism is abetted by the stylish young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and Marin County, who have no fixed ideas about orthodoxy in design or about what a designer does and does not do. "If someone asked me to build a building," Manwaring declares, "I'd say yes." Vanderbyl agrees and ups the ante. In fact, he says, "I want to do everything." Nor is that implausible. In an era when surfaces -- of objects, of interiors, of buildings -- get all the attention, the graphic designer is king.