Nouvelle Cuisine For the Eyes

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$ Manwaring's work is more deliberately jarring. His graphics are often intriguingly precarious collages, pages teeming with violently disparate visual elements. Ziggurat shapes and plant leaves appear obsessively ("I can't drop them"), and his posters are frequently fenced off with thick bars at the perimeter, frames within frames. His sensibility is Californian but more edgy than mellow. Surfaces are often made to look scratched and torn, and his palette has grown darker and richer over the past few years. "If I don't get a little resistance from clients," Manwaring says, "I don't like it."

Manwaring was schooled in the dogmas of visual rationalism just at the moment when the crude baroque of psychedelia was popping up on posters all over San Francisco. That formative combination may explain why Manwaring still seeks to produce images on the border between the orderly and the wild, at once restrained and mannerist. A wine label for Sonoma County's small Hanna Winery, for example, is no neat, well-behaved rectangle but an asymmetrical ziggurat with type stacked in surprising ways. For a poster meant to express the idea of summer, a fragment of architectural statuary is enclosed within a flaming triangle, bracketed by scratched asymmetrical bars top and bottom, placed over a regular field of tiny squares and beneath an action-painting slew of paint drips. Instead of hokey chaos, it is jam-packed, allusive, improbably coherent.

Both Vanderbyl and Manwaring are now sufficiently sure of their visions and skills to move beyond the traditional boundaries of graphic design. Vanderbyl is creating showrooms, chairs and tables and, for Esprit, a new line of bed linens and towels. Manwaring is designing rugs, signs and building details. In his work with architects up to now, he says, "I have come in and bolted on things afterward." More and more he is working for developers directly. "I want to come in earlier -- to try to make it look not like an afterthought. We add the human scale and the life in many cases." His practical ideas are deeply elegant: outdoor maps for the retail center of a Marin County town will be three dimensional, cast in bronze and overlaid with a directional grid. For his latest commission, the grandest yet, he will help oversee the renovation of Bay Meadows, a Thoroughbred racetrack built in the 1930s.

Manwaring's and Vanderbyl's expansive ambitions are reminiscent of the 1930s and '40s, when a few well-known designers proposed to remake the nation -- objects, interiors, buildings, anything. In Northern California today, that can-do catholicism is abetted by the stylish young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley and Marin County, who have no fixed ideas about orthodoxy in design or about what a designer does and does not do. "If someone asked me to build a building," Manwaring declares, "I'd say yes." Vanderbyl agrees and ups the ante. In fact, he says, "I want to do everything." Nor is that implausible. In an era when surfaces -- of objects, of interiors, of buildings -- get all the attention, the graphic designer is king.