Adrian,

I’m unclear on how selling product is any less “moral” than selling war. Quite frankly, I’d rather see design used to promote organic products than fear and killing, any day of the week. While I agree that evoking war poster imagery is not the strategy I would have suggested to Sam’s Club, there’s certainly nothing sacred about the style of historic propaganda posters.

Sorry. I’m a disgruntled designer and my statement contributes very little to your conversation.

However, if you are looking to designers to do something about these misuses and agendas, you’re wasting your time. From my experience, the marketing directors of the world are the people that push this crap. And the marketing directors are only responding to pressures from upper management regarding their drooping bottom line. You may as well blame the guy driving the truck hauling the troops for starting the war.

In fact, maybe Modernism is the real problem here. Yeah….

I don’t necessarily think the flyer is a design mistake, but it definitely is interesting coming from Sam’s Club.

p.s. Adrian, you should be recycling those junk mails!

What they should have done is “…and organics for all” and did a Metallica spoof.

Ehh, but on a serious note, that new Sam’s logo. Not feeling it.

Drew,

To defend my statement, I think it’s important to place my comment in context to the rest of my post:

“1) To equate the consumer decision to buy organic as some holy imperative for society, and that by buying organic we leading ourselves to a better world.”

And as adrian pointed out, There’s no organic products shown and what the family is viewing is not seen in frame. So what is being sold? A better future/ world/ life/ whatever.

Tie that with the quoting of war iconography and symbolism from Communist Regimes like China and the USSR and take both of those things and add an asian family, and something discomforting is being communicated.

To clarify < a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism”>wikipedia ( grated not the best place for definitions) defines racism as : Racism is a belief or ideology that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race.

What is getting implied ( or at least to the point that I notice something is funky) that this certain group of people think or act in a certain manner — in this case idealistic, for progress, the future, etc. etc. In the best case, or in the worst case, “Asian = Red China” even when obviously there are many, many other nationalities and cultures in asia then China.

What this the intention? God no. But it seems odd enough that it was worth pointing out.

typically in social realist posters like this, the leader is the one pointing, so it’s interesting that the baby is doing so here. is he the leader?

I have toddlers and we actually have that duck toy. To play devils advocate, it seems that the style being referenced here is not solely a war poster style, though undoubtedly there are many examples of war posters in this style. It is heroic in nature and has been used for movies, comic books, non profits, and even ads in the past. It is perhaps more a representation of its era than subject matter and the style was popular at the time. Culture always informs design (and vice versa) and it would be impossible to separate the cultural happenings at the time from design styles and trends of the period. You can also equate the very heavily contrasted vector illustration style that had a big resurgence in the nineties with communist art from the 20s, but why? I don’t know Sam’s clubs intent in this piece, but I don’t think referencing a visual style is a particularly egregious error. I think its main mistake is it moves a little too close to goofy. Perhaps the only thing red in this poster is the herring.

As I finish out another trip through teaching graphic design history to a captive audience of students, I’m reminded in this discussion of points pretty loudly made by Tibor Kalman, J. Abbot Miller and Karrie Jacobs in Good History / Bad History regarding extracting style from its original context:

“The key word in bad design history is de-contextualization. A history of design artifacts only interested in constructing an evolutionary chain of progressive design styles….One symptom of this tendency has been the production of graphic design in which style is a detachable attribute, a veneer rather than an expression of content. This is nowhere clearer than in the so-called historicist and eclectic work which has strip-mined the history of design for ready-made style. And this brings us to the second part of the problem: the use and abuse of history.”

And in another section of the same essay:

“What we’re arguing against is design that cashes in on history. We object to contemporary ideas who take ideas that might have been radical seventy years ago but have since become legitimate – more than that, endearing and very, very safe - and reuse those ideas without even reinterpreting them. We’re not opposed to historical reference: Just as there is good history and bad history, there is good historical reference and bad historical reference. Reference means just that: You refer to something. It give you an idea. You create something new.”

(Good History / Bad History is available in Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design if these words are at all of interest - if not, forget I quoted them…)

The underlying problem with visually riffing on and cribbing from designs styled after propaganda (particularly Social Realist propaganda) is the wealth of prior associations brought to bear on the content presented. The only thing expressed convincingly by this bit of junk mail is the assumption that few other people will know where this style came from and think only about “Going Organic.”

Although several have cited the comic book hero overtones to the artwork, that’s really only a side-door entrance to the same originating style / artwork - propaganda artwork inspired and informed the comic artists in the 40s and 50s who started utilizing the “heroic” lower vantage points and flat color panels pioneered by 1920s and 1930s designers. We see this style and, however vaguely, recognize that it refers to the “voice” of an earlier style devoted towards political messages, utopian dreams, and one or another variety of mobilizing the masses to rise up and (fill in the blank).

It’s a hopelessly mixed message, and ultimately just a quick “fix” for a piece of advertising someone needed to get out the door.

It’s irresponsible to continue to peddle this image style assuming that everyone’s forgotten where it came from and what it meant in the first place - it causes exactly the associations and confusing crossovers that have been discussed above in this thread. It’s proof that those who don’t know their own history will be damned to reiterate it.

If we say we have no problem with this style reference, it’s only because it has been played so often and in so many ways without any regard for original context and original meaning.

Passing off our individual lack of assocation with the original meaning as a reason no one should have a problem with this is simply short-sighted. It raises a glaring call to do some homework and glean the connotations that particular imagery / a style brings with it.

They are absorbing the sun. The Expo is about showing off certified organics and environmentally friendly products. It’s a growing, healthy, happy family aware of their surroundings.

dj_sissor, Well, if they did have different versions for different markets then they made a mistake by putting me in the “Asian” category. It seems most unlikely that they would have multiple versions of this piece, though. I would vote for lack of planning over strategic planning on this one. I am not sure on this, but I doubt that you could even buy a mailing list based on race alone.

Regarding the duck in the pocket, as a father of two I find it perfectly normal to have a duck in my pocket while exiting a store carrying a tired child and an armload of groceries.

To the note on the asian family I feel this was very well planned for a company that has a global perspective considering 60% of the world population is asian. The style does portray empowerment of the individual for the purpose of a greater cause which seems to be a legitimate message for the product.

Featuring pictures of organic food wouldn’t really set themselves apart from the unorganic food (which are generally more attractive) so I can see why they focused on the abstract qualities that draw consumers to buy organic, namely it’s health and environmental benefits (hence the family, style and blue sky). And no, I’m not affiliated with Sam’s Club.

Adrian, interesting observation about the style, though I think it looks more like Maoist Communist chinese propaganda posters:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&resnum=0&q=chinese%20propaganda%20poster

Which is interesting in the context of the subject of the poster.

Personally, I’m not sure much of the Sams Club membership would even realize this is a style lifted from propaganda posters, and the probably 000.1% of the Sams population who may have caught this, probably had a chuckle about it.

Hahaha, this reminds me of a shirt that I designed for a middle school once. I had about 2 hours to come up with this design, and I had -just- finished looking at a bunch of Soviet propaganda posters. The shirt was done in a Soviet font, and it feaured two hands shaking inside a circle (yes, the handshake of racial harmony or whatever), but done in vector, and styled to resemble the “Fight the Power” fist. I REALLY expected the school to reject the design, but they loved it! I definitely got a good chuckle out of that one.

As a follow up; does anyone know who created this work?