Word: vanderbyl
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Dates: during 1987-1987
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...young masters, Michael Vanderbyl and Michael Manwaring, lead a splurge in San Francisco graphics -- fresh, playful, elegant...
...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...
...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...
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...