Life

Google Books, one of my favourite research sites, now boasts a large collection of Life magazine issues from decades ago that can be read in their entirety for free. They are an interesting opportunity to evaluate the design choices of yesteryear, some of which stand up well in my opinion. I particularly like the graphic cover of the July 14, 1952 edition: a hung-over man – scrappily drawn and worse-for-wear – sporting a bolt through his head.

Turn a few pages, however, and the design becomes less timeless: advertisements for toothpaste with “active chlorophyll”, ‘safer’ cigarettes, and another for cleaning products that asks ‘Should men wash dishes?’ and decides that the wife will probably do them. Though to look at this another way, we have our modern equivalents: skin cosmetics that use a bull-shitty jargon of ‘Boswelox’ and ‘collagen biospheres’ to cloak themselves in a medicinal air, alcohol advertising in the face of a binge-drinking culture and cleaning adverts that still depict women as the completer of domestic chores, all be it because her husband is too inept. Despite this lengthy introduction my intention is not to look at social history through the lens of graphic design.

   

I came across The Telegraph’s reproduction of Lennart Nilsson’s photographs from the book A Child is Born. These photographs – including the very first of a living embryo inside the womb – created a storm when they were first published in Life in 1965. It occurred to me that I might be able to see them in this context, and this issue is also available to view on Google Books here, with the article Drama of Life Before Birth on page 54.

Any designer worth their salt should find nature inspiring, particularly the origins of human life. It’s humbling and bizarre to consider our microscopic and alien origins. This photograph shows a five week old embryo with a very rudimentary face. At some point we all looked like this (and indeed some enthusiastic gurners still can). These pictures emphasise the commonality of all humans, before age, culture and society make their mark on us and send us on individual convergent paths, good and bad. In this light they only reinforce the idea that all we should treat all people as equals in the same manner as we would wish to be treated. But they also remind us of our fragility as biological machines, and in a form more pleasing than a raging hangover, a.k.a. a bolt through the head.