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Postmodern
Postmodernism
Design movement from the late 1970s and 80s that mixed historical styles and rejected modernist uniformity.
Postmodern
Entry 008
A reaction against modernism's insistence on consistency. Modernist design asked what a project needed. Postmodern designers were often more interested in what would be visually interesting, even at the cost of coherence.
Robert Venturi was central in architecture, April Greiman brought similar ideas into graphic design. A postmodern poster might combine several unrelated typefaces on purpose, an argument that visual consistency was itself just a choice, not a fixed rule. It fell out of favor through the 1990s, dismissed as chaotic, and has had a real resurgence lately in web and graphic design work described as anti-design or maximalist.