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Image courtesy of Henricus Kusbiantoro, Landor Associates.

Being a “creative,” I guess I should be used to cognitive dissonance. But admittedly, I suffer the greatest bouts of crisis whenever I see the graphic work of American Eagle Outfitters. After spending my life in desperate search for any bit of visual innovation—which usually started by purposely exploring “wrong” directions—to see avant-garde tendencies fully embraced by such a mass-market brand certainly makes me stop and reassess my preconceptions.

I suppose we could give American artist Robert Rauschenberg most of the credit for creating a unique aesthetic of mistakes and slapdash reproduction. Beginning in the mid-1950s, his assemblages, known as “combines,” elevated the casually placed, random image fragment to a particular, and oddly precise, technique. As one of his many followers, I can attest to the work involved in making something look perfectly random.

Besides this approach being an aesthetic, there was a matching ethic of permission to break conventional rules of placement and framing. Work didn’t have to look as messy as Rauschenberg as long as it had a similar anarchic attitude. For example, the late painter Steven Parrino’s technique of unstretching his minimalist paintings, crumpling them up and then putting them back with all the wrinkles lovingly preserved, has a similar disregard for proper edges and placement.

In the mid-1990s, I first noticed designers misplacing words and pictures on art catalogue covers, which seemed a logical place for it to appear. A title of a book, laid out so the title began on the back cover and wrapped around to the front, treated the type as both information and as gesture. The idea was too big, too wild to obey the rules of “everything on the front cover.” It was audacious.

Then several years ago, I noticed fashion designers like Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela taking a similar approach to silkscreened graphics—to the point where it became an identifying sign. If a T-shirt’s graphics are placed over the neck hole so they appear around the collar and inside the back panel, a fashionista would think of Margiela.

And now that aesthetic has worked its way through the system so well, and become so pervasive, most folks would think of American Eagle Outfitters. Thus, my disconnect.

I didn’t know much about American Eagle until I started watching the VH1 program Scott Baio is 45…and Single. That’s all he wore on screen, in glorious product placement. Here was television’s beloved Chachi from Happy Days—the definition of mass-market entertainment—wearing T-shirts with an avant-garde edge. And after that, as I began to see logo fragments on Coca-Cola cans or the Sundance Channel’s type bleeding off the screen, I felt the burden and the continual cycle of seeing once-radical ideas widely adapted. And the stinging realization that I need to reassess my relationship to the aesthetics of my design training.

This reverent disregard toward placement and framing used to represent rebellion, but its assimilation now represents status quo. Its meaning has changed and with that, designers now need to clarify what they’re trying to express when they run a logo off the edge of the page. Regardless of the message, the eternal requirement is that such a decision be done consciously.