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Excerpt From The Book
Victor Moscoso paychedelic Blues Project poster is as illegible today as it was in 1967 when it, and scores of other vibrating rock posters advertising the San Francisco rock scene, first appeared.
It is also as electrifying. Moscoso posters did for graphic design what bands like the Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company did for rock music turned up the juice and broke all the rules,
During the mid 1960s San Francisco was the vortex of the counterculture. The hippies prevailed, hallucinogenic drugs were plentiful, and rock and roll knew no bounds.
Brooklyn raised, Spanish-born Victor Moscoso (b. 1939) stumbled into this milieu and became a defining force in the distinctly American design genre known as the psychedelic poster.
Characterized by illegible typefaces, vibrating colors, and antique illustrations, psychedelia was a rebellious visual language created to communicate with an exclusive community.
Within a year, however, it was usurped by entrepreneurs who turned it into a trendy commercial style that appealed to a new market of youthful consumers.
Most of the more than sixty posters Moscoso designed during a frenetic eight months in 1967 rejected publicity photos in favor of found images.
For the Blues Project poster, he used a vintage photograph of a nude Salomé. Following her contour, he hand-lettered the concert information in a typeface that Moscoso called Psychedelic Playbill (an adaptation of a Victorian wood type),
Because he drew the letters out of negative space (whiting out all the areas between the bodies of the letterforms rather than drawing them directly), they look as if they have been carved onto the page.
The figure was printed in bright orange against an acid green background: the lettering was printed in process blue.
Design Literacy Understanding Graphic Design Book