Warning: Graphic Content

March 20, 2006 issue - It wasn't just the Vietnam War, the music and the drugs that fueled the boomer design revolution. Raised in Ward and June Cleaver's house—with that cheesy laminated furniture, the tacky repros of birds or flowers framed with wide mats on the walls and that godawful shag carpet on the floor—they had a cause for revolt right there at home.

Boomers first exercised their own taste in design with record-album covers. Back in the '60s, albums came in foot-square cardboard sleeves, which presented a new generation of graphic designers with veritable Sistine Chapel ceilings. An album was as much a visual experience as an auditory one. Any number of them—"Sgt. Pepper," "Disraeli Gears," even the "Hair" soundtrack—spoke to the age of Aquarius, but for capturing the cartoony chaos of the times, the champ is probably "Cheap Thrills" by Janis Joplin and her band, Big Brother the Holding Company.

The cover's designer was Robert (a.k.a. R.) Crumb (born 1943), a nerdy Cleveland greeting-card artist who'd just moved to San Francisco. (Joplin befriended him and gave him the commission.) Crumb's much greater contribution to design ultimately lay in the new field of underground "comix." Coming out of New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, magazines like Zap Comix, featuring Crumb's cynical, horny guru, Mr. Natural, and Gilbert Shelton's relentlessly stoned Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, thumbed their collective nose at anything remotely "establishment." They paved the way for the irreverence industry that followed: Garry Trudeau (born 1948) couldn't have created "Doonesbury" without them, and today's sophisticated graphic novels might never have been.

In San Francisco, some of Crumb's peers were creating another major monument to boomer flava in graphic design: the rock-concert poster. Bill Graham's Fill-more Auditorium was the main venue, where Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers and Santana were among the electrifying electrified acts. The posters—by the likes of Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso (a.k.a. Neon Rose), who had studied color theory at Yale—flouted graphic design's cardinal rule: clarity. Hookah-smoke lettering, gleefully morphed photography and eye-boggling combinations of hues furnished pictorial previews of the "altered consciousness" experienced at the shows. Graham used to tell of whizzing around the city on a motorcycle, putting up posters on telephone poles, only to have rabid collectors follow behind and take them down.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the Art Workers Coalition took a different tack with posters, because the war in Vietnam—the bellwether event in the lives of boomers—was more deadly serious than music. Its most famous affichement showed up in outrage over the massacre of villagers in My Lai by a company of U.S. soldiers in 1968. The AWC used a gruesome photograph of the slaughter—corpses of civilian men, women and children lying on a dirt road—and captioned it in a large, ragged typewriter font, with a snippet of testimony from the inquiry. Q: AND BABIES? A: AND BABIES. It was one of the period's greatest examples of powerfully un-designy graphic design.

In the '70s, however, boomers began to leave behind their passion to protest. Sixties sybarites cooled into the more tepid narcissists of the "Me Decade," starting families and moving to the suburbs they'd fled. At the start of the decade, Bill Owens, a photographer for a little newspaper in Livermore, Calif., made friends with some young homeowners and took pictures of their pursuit of stucco security and two-car bliss. He might not have intended to create a social document right up there with the Dust Bowl anthologies of the 1930s, but his 1972 book "Suburbia" trenchantly put the question: "Is this really what people think will make them happy?"

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