Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

On the Road to Elementary Typography

ON THE ROAD TO ELEMENTARY TYPOGRAPHY We can easily demonstrate, on the basis of our life experience as well as through scholarship, that the World War caused not only material but immense intellectual damage. It butchered enlisted men by the hundreds of thousands, but, by other means and in other forms, it destroyed hundreds of thousands of those who for some reason or other managed to stay away from the fighting per se. Only a relatively small number managed to survive the five years of the War without physical or intellectual injury. And this general shock has had to bring about general changes in all the manifestations of life in civic society. After the terrors of military drill came the terrors of civic chaos. Then followed the political revolutions, economic crashes and the free-trade booms intent on swallowing everything. The world seemed to have reached a state of complete collapse in both physical health and intellectual culture. But life means to outlive the pessimistic philosophers, and we have reached a new stage of possibilities. Political agitators, economic organisers and makers of advertisements have appeared amongst us. Of these three types, we shall primarily dwell on the makers of advertisements and the theoretical and practical significance of their work in what follows. The time for booms is over. All thinking tradesmen should know that it is again quality that determines the value of goods produced and that in order to place goods in their shops easily they have to make use of an indispensable element: the honestly designed and consciously handled advertisement. The function of an honestly designed and consciously targeted advertisement is to inform the consumer of goods brought to the market and to inspire confidence in the buying public. This is no easy task. The advertising manoeuvres of boom-trade have depended upon the illiteracy and good will of the buying public, and it will probably take a good deal of time until the public see advertisements not as a form of deception but as an indispensable means to serve the common interests of both the buyer and seller. One of the most urgent tasks of the society of tradesmen is to cleanse the concept of advertising of a disagreeable connotation, and to have their circulars, brochures and posters prepared so as to truthfully foster a good business reputation. The good tradesman should know that the modern advertisement is not there to attempt to convince individual members of the public to buy something once but to call the general attention of the public at large to the goodness, practicality and affordability of a certain article. Therefore, the solution to the problem of modern advertising is engrossment in psychology, business ethics and first-rate skill on the part of the maker and user of an advertisement. Were we to make a statistical survey of the quantity and quality of the various trade and professional journals, we would find that works on making an advertisement and on the practical methods of advertising come third after publications on technology and architecture. These works show a hundred aspects of this seemingly extremely simple technical issue. Today it is not only the representatives of commerce, but also critics of aesthetics and sociologists working in academia and business that acknowledge the artistic potential in and the social necessity of advertising. There is no longer any doubt that a good advertisement is aesthetically beautiful and socially indispensable. Advertising was called to life by commerce, and commerce is an outcome of humankind's ever more discriminating demands on life. If one wishes to pass strict judgement on the average European advertisement, one can without reserve state that a certain advertisement is on the whole tasteless and generally antisocial. But this criticism may as well be applied to capitalist commerce based on free competition. We should not conclude, however, that commerce should be rejected once and for all; it should simply be based on a socially more responsible footing. Undoubtedly, today's Russia, for instance, puts out far more propaganda with regard to culture and the economy than she did under the tsars. The formation of this state, which strives toward larger units and a more collective form of organisation, has not abolished advertising, she has only freed it from the claws of private interests bent on booms, making this formerly antisocial force into propaganda that serves the interests of the community. Thus the new Russian poster, much like its American counterpart, has greatly distanced itself from individual graphic art. Russian advertisement designers were among the first to realise the demonstrative character and agitative effect of advertising. And this realisation led to the general simplicity, objectivity and economy of Russian posters and works of typography. In Europe, it was primarily German industry and commerce that realised the modernity of the re-evaluated concept of advertising, the trend in that field toward artistic development and the devices used in making advertisements. This fast and consciously directed development in German advertising is probably connected with the great progress, technical aptitude and rationalisation efforts of German industry. Having lost the War, Germany quickly realised that the fastest and surest way to regain her political and economic significance was to economise on her production and raise the quality of the goods she produced. Her production is based on scientific considerations, and so are her attempts to gain market positions for her products. Her apparently indestructible instinct to survive and the conscious stress on this instinct is what governs the development of German advertising. An elementary art of advertising has been created for products made with care out of good materials, one with boundless opportunities to develop; advertisements made in this way are in many cases more like social propaganda than a mere hawking of goods that thrives on a buying public that is uninformed and naive in its good will. It is easy to ascertain the effect of German advertising art upon European advertising, and sociologists and aestheticians, as well as the lay public in general, will have to realise that good advertising is an active factor in our lives, an indispensable mediator between producer and consumer and that we judge its appearance using the word effective, not the word beautiful. Though the materials through which its essence is expressed are colour, sound and form, just as in the case of the subjective arts, on the whole it severs itself 11