Graphic Content; Since Vietnam, baby boomers have led a design revolution. Turning into rich retirees won't stop them now.

Byline: Peter Plagens

From their arrival after World War II to their imminent retirements, baby boomers have been the most prosperous and protected generation in history. But since coming of age in an era of turmoil and rebellion--from rock and roll to drugs to the Vietnam War--they have always had a hard time wearing their fortune without guilt. They've struggled to balance economic pride with humility, self-fulfillment with social responsibility. Perhaps nowhere is this reflected more than in their taste in graphic design, which over the decades has ranged from lyrical incoherence to antiseptic order.

Today their whims are defining the art market. Boomers are now the ones old enough to have accumulated the money--yet young enough to maintain the energy--to collect modern and contemporary art. The fortuitous combination of boomer collecting power and a new desire on the part of young artists to engage a wider audience has driven the market for contemporary art to unprecedented levels. From New York's Chelsea district to London's Mayfair, galleries are seeing boomers--eager both to pep up their stylish homes and, perhaps, amass collections that museums will someday welcome with a plaque--haul out their checkbooks to take the plunge.

This is only the latest twist in their ongoing influence over design. Boomers first exercised their own taste with record-album covers. Back in the '60s, albums came in foot-square cardboard sleeves, which presented a new generation of graphic designers with veritable Sistine Chapel ceilings. Any number of them--"Sgt. Pepper," "Disraeli Gears," even the "Hair" soundtrack--spoke to the age of Aquarius, but for capturing the cartoony chaos of the times, the champ is probably "Cheap Thrills" by Janis Joplin.

The cover's designer was Robert (a.k.a. R.) Crumb (born 1943), a nerdy Cleveland greeting-card artist who'd just moved to San Francisco. Crumb's much greater contribution to design ultimately lay in the new field of "underground comix," which paved the way for the irreverence industry that followed: Garry Trudeau (born 1948) couldn't have created "Doonesbury" without it.

In San Francisco, some of Crumb's peers were creating another major monument to boomer design: the rock-concert poster. Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium was the main venue, where Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers and Santana were among the electrifying electrified acts. The posters--by the likes of Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso (a.k.a. Neon Rose), who had studied color theory at Yale--flouted graphic design's cardinal rule: clarity. Hookah-smoke lettering, gleefully morphed photography and eye-boggling combinations of hues furnished pictorial previews of the "altered consciousness" experienced at the shows. Graham used to tell of whizzing around the city on a motorcycle, putting up posters on telephone poles, only to have rabid collectors follow behind and take them down.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the Art Workers Coalition took a different tack with posters, because the war in Vietnam--the bellwether event in the lives of boomers--was more deadly serious than music. Its most famous affichement showed up in outrage over the massacre of villagers in My Lai by a ...