The latest in a series of graphic design tools for Néojaponisme readers: a number of red, white, and black patterns based on “Modern” Japanese graphic design from the 1950s.

In the 1920s, Soviet Constructivism worked to apply “intellectual production” in multiple spheres of graphic creation for utilitarian purposes, including buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, and menus. Constructivists like El Lissitzky promoted spatial typographic assemblages, as well as the use of stripped-down sans serif typography in conjunction with geometric shapes in space.

In 1928, German typographer Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his book The New Typography. The popularization of abstract geometric illustration and pattern design went hand-in-hand with this codification.

These graphic trends increased in popularity across Europe through the late 1920s and 1930s. Artists adopted rule-based graphic design yearning toward increased efficacy of communication. Stripped-down, utopian-oriented form-making promulgated the avant-garde’s desire to build the world anew in the one way they could: graphically.

World War II brought about huge changes in the population of avant-garde designers — hundreds of progenitors of the geometric style died as a result of the war and hundreds more were forced to shift national allegiances and move to other locales. The most famous example is the emigration of the German Bauhaus school of design from Germany to the U.S.A. in 1937. This mass exodus brought the mass-produced minimalist aesthetic to America in force, sparking the greatest explosion of Modern graphic design design in the New World.

The booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly advertising and packaging. While the remaining Moderns in Europe helped stay the course of this graphic language on the Continent, the Americans took up the gauntlet with commercial fervor as well.

The post-war boom of the 1950s caused a wildfire interest in the avant-garde graphic design and typography of the previous decades in Japan, as well. While the aim of European avant-garde movements tended toward the utopian, Japanese designers’ interests were more stylistically inclined (as were American designers working in said style in the postwar era, often understudies of the radical Modernist progenitors of the prewar era).

This fascination with Modern design as style reverberates in Japan today. While Modernism as style is a recent trend in the rest of the world, Japan has clung fast to the aesthetics of the Moderns through the ’50s through the present. Much of contemporary graphic design in Japan is little more than early Modernism mimicked — linoleum blocks cut by hand in Adobe Illustrator, a strict adherence to monotone/duotone palettes, and old advertising cuts (clip art) re-purposed for the nth time, though in digital form.

The Pattern Pattern series is a reflection of Japan’s waning interest in the Modern that is rendered wobbly by stat cameras and multiple generations of manual analog reproduction. While this country belatedly (and with increasing rapidity) turns its eyes toward kiss-spaced Helvetica and the global trends of the International Style of the ’70s in retro fascination, the beauty that is Japanese Modern design (if in name only) of the ’50s through the ’80s is quickly dying.

The Pattern Pattern series of pattern designs are an homage to these simpler, yet still complex times when Japanese graphic designers charted an indigenous graphic course in the name of the International whilst unwittingly sustaining what was a graphic dead end to the rest of the first world.

While graphic design critics have decried the reemergence of Modernism as style in the West over the past decade, Japanese graphic design has long been in the curious yet utterly unacknowledged position as leader in Modernist mimicry. And just as the world is catching up, this country is letting go of early forward-thinking graphic design as applied aesthetic (sans utopian vision).

These patterns are free to use for non-commercial applications. (For commercial applications, please contact us for a license.)

The patterns are provided in Illustrator CS3, Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF format. You can download a zipped file containing all three formats here.