Psychedelic

Composition: radial symmetry; hand-drawn borders.

Typography: hand lettered, warped.

Lettering is hand-drawn and warped to fill an irregular field until letterform and ground share a contour. Legibility is treated as a spectrum to be spent, not a requirement to be met.

TIME wrote that at first glance the calligraphy is totally unreadable, so people stop for a second glance.

Carries a hard technical requirement: the vibration only occurs when complementaries sit at equal value. A designer who picks complementary hues at differing lightness gets no optical effect and the register fails.

Complementary colours are set at equal value so their shared edge vibrates optically. Equal value is the mechanism; a merely bright palette is not this.

Complementary colours in standard inks were set side by side so their edge vibrates; Moscoso, trained under Albers, attended to value and brightness in doing so.

Mouse and Kelley often appropriated images rather than inventing them: from advertisements and product labels, art books and illustrated texts of the past, including a 19th-century illustration.

Collage, including photographic collage, is a documented device alongside drawn imagery.

The Family Dog logo borrowed an image of a Native American fur trader from the American Heritage Book of Indians.

Later, the poster artists responded with clear, legible text and recognisable imagery in place of psychedelic colours and themes.

Most posters of 1966-1968 were printed on uncoated papers; coated papers were used more often from 1969.

The artists emphasised that the popping colour came from juxtaposing standard printing inks.

Slow continuous warp or colour cycling. Never scroll-triggered — the effect must be present, not revealed.

The dance concerts the posters advertised had liquid light shows: oil-and-dye emulsions on overhead projectors made bubbling visuals that pulsed with the music.

Some Moscoso posters used standard colours to give the illusion of animation under alternating coloured lights.

Bill Graham recalled that people often spent time looking at the posters and would sway back and forth.

Most posters were photo-offset lithographs from small San Francisco shops; a few were screen prints.

Colour was pre-separated by the artist into flat spot colours, one plate per colour, giving planes of solid colour or dot patterns rather than process-colour reproduction.

Most posters were printed on small one-colour sheet-fed offset presses, and young artists collaborated with commercial lithographers.

Blended rainbow backgrounds came from the split-fountain inking technique; metallic inks were also used.

Four-colour process printing was used for some of the later Fillmore posters.

The objects are flat printed posters, plastered on telephone poles and in store windows.

There is deliberately almost no hierarchy. Everything competes at once, and the reader resolves it over time. Stating "no hierarchy" is itself the instruction.

Wilson's designs were described as expanding to fill all available space.

Form / motif / surface / technique: warped field, hand-drawn border.

The Art Nouveau descent is documented, not inferred: Time named the style 'Nouveau Frisco' in 1967 and Wilson's work was directly influenced by Art Nouveau.