Post-Modernism

Post-modernism is a late 20^th century movement, roughly late 1970s and early 1980s. Plenty of individuals did not know what the term post modernism meant or what it meant to represent.

Post modernism is hard to define because it follows various areas of study, art, architecture, music, film, literature, design, sociology and plenty of other subjects. 

Post modernism rejected rigid genre distinctions, irony, playfulness, parody, bricolage , and emphasizing pastiche. Postmodern favours the designer or artist to reflect and show expression by bringing what they thought to life, discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity and emphasis on the decentred subjects.

The idea of postmodernism seems very much similar to modernism which follows similar ideas; however postmodernism has a dissimilar attitude toward these trends.  Modernism tried to provide unity, coherence and meaning, in contrast postmodernism likes the idea of fragmentation, incoherence and likes to play around with nonsense.

For one to understand what post-modernism is it one has to think about modernism first, designs were decorative for functional objects, in this case a sewing machine and then it is put into these elegant and decorative patterns which later end up on the machine. Modernism saw that there was a great deal of effort into creating features of the decoration. They made elegant but not very functional designs. The idea of modernism was form follows function.

What Postmodernism tried it to create something decorative, it added strange out of the norm colours, textures testing things out in a humorous and interesting fashion, designers did not do it purely for the function, as mentioned above they did it with emotional interest or aesthetic engagement, which produced a movement to par with modernism.

Plenty mention that modernism and postmodernism is nothing alike, the rules are totally against each other, which when it comes to rules is very true, the colours used, textures, designs, literature and plenty of other things.

Here is an early influence of post modernism from the punk movement entitled “God save the queen” a design by Jamie Reid for the cover of the sex pistols band, the characteristics of this design could be seen in plenty of the characteristics in postmodern design for example the case of type, no organisation and visual wit in their designs.

The British youth culture magazine, I-D was an iconic representation of the postmodern graphic design aesthetics in its publication in the 1980s, the magazine was designed by Terry Jones, who uses aggressive collages, heavy use of colour, experimental typography, dramatic designs.

An important character of postmodern design is the idea of anti-humanism, which is why many humans do not share the same ideas.  

Reference: 

Bill Moggridge, what is post-modernism in design? [Video] available at: http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/post-modernism-design, [accessed 23^rd of December 2013]

Anon 2010, Modernism vs Post-Modernism [blog] available at: http://www.bdavetian.com/Postmodernism.html , [accessed 23^rd of December 2013]

Meggs P. B. and Purvis A. W. 1998. 5th Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons , Inc.