{"id":51030,"date":"2018-12-13T14:52:26","date_gmt":"2018-12-13T22:52:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/?p=51030"},"modified":"2024-04-17T06:41:56","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T13:41:56","slug":"design-trend-report-pop-art-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativemarket.com\/blog\/design-trend-report-pop-art-design","title":{"rendered":"Design Trend Report: Pop Art Design"},"content":{"rendered":"Pop art design

is a movement based on art populism that sprang out of the growing prosperity and consumerism of post-World War II America<\/a> and Britain. Call pop art design a rebellion against the elitism of fine art that’s characterized by its focus on imagery and themes found in popular culture, like comic books<\/a>, advertising and everyday objects accessible to the average person.\nFrom its arrival in the 1950s to its heyday in the 1960s, this style relied on irony to celebrate the mundane and even tacky features of pop culture, which oftentimes resulted in works that were iconic and memorable from a modern-art perspective. Definitely avant-garde for its day, pop art design counts among its famous contributors well-known names like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Not only are its designs bombastic and colorful, but its artists utilized techniques like reproduction and rendering to create their masterpieces.\nHere’s a look at the love affair with pop culture and consumerism that we know today as pop art.\n<\/p>

<\/span>The History of Pop Art Design<\/span><\/h2>

\nThe history of this style comes down to unique developments in America and across the pond, in Britain. To help us understand how it became so big in the U.S. by the 1960s, we have to go back a decade earlier and examine how it was developing in Britain in the 1950s.\n<\/p>

<\/span>Britain<\/span><\/h3>

\nIn Britain, this movement began with a collection of creatives in London known as the Independent Group, a motley crew of rebels who wanted to upend the then-popular modernist interpretation of culture and society. Such gatherings of creative rebels who want to fight the status quo of their day are known to occur quite frequently in the annals of design and art, with the Impressionists<\/a> in late 19th<\/sup>-century France being a notable example.\n\"\" Image Source: Museum of Modern Art<\/a>\nThe IG met several times throughout the 1950s and are considered the precursor of pop art design. At each meeting, discussions on the pop-culture impact from movies, comic books, science fiction, advertising and technology would take place. What was unique about these meetings was twofold:\n1) The term “Pop Art†was actually coined during these discussions\n2) Much of the material at these meetings betrayed an obsession with American pop-culture elements\nAs exciting as these IG sessions were for these designers and artists who argued for the legitimacy of pop-culture images and themes as a part of fine art, the biggest splash this design movement would eventually make would actually be in the States. Thanks to these seemingly innocuous IG sessions, the foundations for a pop art takeover were already in place.\n<\/p>

<\/span>America<\/span><\/h3>

\nBuoyed by the boom of prosperity and consumerism that marked the end of World War II and peacetime, America in the 1950s and 1960s was a hotbed of growth and opportunity for average folks. The returning servicemen swelled the ranks of the middle class and ensured that there was a huge market based on popular appeal for increasingly influential pop culture whose expansion was aided by then-nascent media like TV and radio. Other influential design movements, like Mid-Century Modern<\/a>, were also firing the imaginations of a country that was settling into its new role as a superpower in the world.\nIn short, the landscape was ripe for another movement to come along and take advantage of this new, cultural zeitgeist.\nThanks to what had happened in Britain with the IG a decade earlier, by the 1960s, pop art was already gaining steam in the States. The term was officially made known to the public as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Symposium on Pop Art<\/a><\/em>, which took place in December of 1962.\nBy this time, American designers and artists wanted to consciously distance themselves from the very polished and fine art-inspired presentation of the American advertising scene. As a result, they looked to the British for inspiration due to a schism in how British and American designers of the time generally viewed pop-culture images:\n<\/p>