Nouvelle Cuisine For the Eyes

Not long ago, important American graphic design was thought to occur exclusively in New York City. But San Francisco, for one, has been changing that. Starting about 20 years ago, a new generation of designers came of age in the Bay Area, formally trained but unconventional by temperament. At the same time, decoration became fashionable again, modernist doctrine loosened, and a sort of regional self-infatuation overtook the arts. Baby-boomer entrepreneurs, with their hip clothing companies, upscale shops and software firms, became prime graphic-design clients. By the early 1980s the most talented of the San Francisco designers were creating the visual equivalent of nouvelle cuisine. The result was an identifiable local style -- sunny but sophisticated, fresh, playful, elegant -- that has become widely imitated across the U.S.

Among the San Franciscans, two are especially prominent, and have demonstrated particular staying power: Michael Vanderbyl, 40, and Michael Manwaring, 45. Although they have highly distinct styles, their parallels are striking. Both were born and reared in the Bay Area and educated at California art schools; both are lapsed devotees of European modernism. Despite success, both have kept their offices small. They do have some stylistic moves in common -- both show a fondness for fan shapes and silhouettes, and both have recently looked to turn-of-the-century Architect Josef Hoffmann for inspiration -- yet both have survived several years of extravagant attention without sinking into hack signature styles.

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 printer's dots that actually muddle and blur.