the bastard child of Christmas

Graphic design could be the bastard child of Christmas – the modern day festivity is made up of a sack full of graphic information – whether it is the digital design which creates non-repeating motif patterns on wrapping paper or the simple message, inlaid in gold, spelling out happy holidays in a pre-digital font which follows its own eccentric spacing. For many designers, the one personal project a year which anyone gets to see is the studio Christmas card – suitably ironic and unintentionally kitsch or vice versa – it is the thing that manifestos are made of!

The pièce de résistance, for graphic design, is the corruption of Uncle Nick himself; in 1931 the illustrator Haddon Sundblom created a red and white Father Christmas for a Coca-Cola advertising campaign whilst Father Christmas was originally dressed in blue? Sometimes green? The urban myth grows, but we cannot completely blame Coca-Cola for this graphic corruption – in the Christmas spirit, we have to point out that as early as 1908 an English picture postcard, postmarked 24 December, showed a figure in red, trimmed with white fur, with a sack of gifts. In 1929 Norman Rockwell produced a Father Christmas portrait for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post – replete with white beard and red togs.

At the same time as graphic design was changing Santa from green to blue, to red – and with the mass production of Christmas cards depicting his image - a German commentator was lamenting the fact that the very aura of an image - Santa Claus, and Christmas itself - was being diminished… Now zip to a new century… today we have an infinite number of new signs to create nuanced, personalised meaning to the Christmas Season. Elves now really do live, courtesy of the Movie screen and Santa has been reduced to a pair of boots and a sack - see the girl on the front of the lads-mag who is not only your Santa, but your half-unwrapped gift – and she fills her own stockings too…

Happy New Year!

Colin + Monika