The Ransom Note Effect: Eclectic Typography in American Visual Culture

The ransom note effect, a graphic design term referring to the use of multiple and often formally divergent letterforms in a single printed document, has posed an enduring challenge to high modernist ideals of pure communication and avant-garde modes of resistance in graphic design. Eclectic typographic forms have thus both contradicted and supported the modernist design agendas of the 20th century by graphically distinguishing certain documents and authors from others. This conceptual bifurcation has shaped both American and European histories of printing and graphic design. Examining eclectic typography in American print and screen media from the 1820s through the present, this dissertation examines how such forms have been used to signify various strains of social, political, and cultural marginality. The project connects close visual analyses of 19th-, 20th-, and 21 st-century American typographic materials to economic, political, and historical theory and criticism related to American and European visual cultures of the early 19th century to the present. These methods are engaged to demonstrate how eclectic typographic materials have been deeply embedded within complex economic and political networks, as well as to permit an analysis of the role that typography has played in establishing cultural boundaries between the tasteful and the excessive, the unruly and the restrained, the innovative and the obsolete, and the professional and amateur.