The Brief Reign of Factory Pomo

This piece was published in collaboration with the digital culture newsletter Dirt.

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In the early 1990s, the now-defunct technology distribution company Access Graphics released a brochure promoting their “Ultimedia Tools Series,” a media and digital design software package. For a cutting edge product in an emerging field, the brochure’s graphic design was surprisingly retro: On the cover, a burly factory worker “forges” CDs, letters, film strips, and music notes as if he’s metalworking. The style is reminiscent of Depression-era WPA posters and Diego Rivera murals, and the typeface follows suit — the tall, closely-spaced lettering with heavy slab serifs look almost like metal signage on a factory’s exterior. 

Inside the brochure, CDs merge with gears while technical arrows and jagged, sharp forms are overlaid onto simple figures similar to those seen in commercial illustration of the time. As a piece of design, this brochure is pure “Factory Pomo,” a short-lived aesthetic in the 1980s and 1990s associated with the transition into the Information Age and the integration of personal computing into our everyday lives.

Factory Pomo, like many other postmodern styles, is a melange of several interrelated references and influences. In architecture and interior design, it merged the then-contemporary high-tech architectural movement with revivals of Art Deco, Futurism, and general industrial vernacular and technological iconography from the first half of the 20th Century. In graphic design, the new capabilities of desktop publishing mixed with postmodern revivals of Bauhaus/Deutscher Werkbund, early Soviet-era Constructivism and WPA graphics to create a completely new style.

While Factory Pomo was quietly replaced in the mid-90s by aesthetics like Cyber Gen-X Corporate and Y2K Futurism, for a brief moment the aesthetic became the dominant visual shorthand for tech, science, industry, and even fitness. This manifested everywhere from corporate branding to science museums, avant-garde political posters to underground house records. 

The societal threads that would lead to the emergence of Factory Pomo began to coalesce in the early 1980s. Amidst a wave of financial scandals (the savings and loan crisis), a weakened social safety net (Reaganomics), growing inequality, and rampant deregulation, an undercurrent of aesthetic discord started to proliferate. Activists used simple, bold, and impactful graphics to succinctly convey their leftist positions on everything from queer culture to global politics. The revival of graphics and design motifs from the Russian Revolution and early Soviet era — Constructivism in particular — became a way to signal an association with left-leaning movements, and could be seen on everything from posters for the UK Socialist Party to artistic direction for new wave and synth-pop acts like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Heaven 17, and The Communards. 

Pulling from imagery and iconography associated with workers’ movements, this new style — termed “Soviet Chic” in a 1988 Los Angeles Times article — emerged in stark opposition to the status-obsessed aesthetics of the yuppies, as well as Reagan and Thatcher-era nouveau-riche excess.  

Over the next decade, Soviet-era worker movement motifs appeared in a wide range of commercial applications: In Santiago, Chile the fashion boutique Soviet sold “proletariat, utilitarian clothing,” while elsewhere Soviet Chic could be found in the branding of breweries, clothing, creative club invitations, and even stock music library CDs. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the style had been so stripped of any actual revolutionary meaning that it was used solely to signify a vague, commercially palatable sense of rebelliousness. However, in the 1980s, this leftist signaling through revival of Soviet-era design would be merged into the postmodern soup of Machine Age-era styles that came to form Factory Pomo, due to both its association with industrial production and its prominence during a major upheaval in work culture and economic composition.       

By the mid-80s, the US was in the midst of a wave of deindustrialization. Manufacturing jobs were being automated or outsourced and industries associated with tangible results like steel, textiles, and automobiles were being replaced with technological products and services. The nascent software industry needed its own visual languages (see also the Early Cyber, Silicon Dreams, and Cyberdelia aesthetics) and it was within this period of transition that companies started to inject motifs, visual metaphors, and themes associated with the peak era of industrial production (1880s-1940s) into contemporary design. Out of this zeitgeist emerged Factory Pomo, which used familiar industrial symbols, processes, and design movements prominent in the Machine Age era to represent emerging Information Age concepts.

Take this brochure graphic for the digital records company Intermation, for example. The process of “assembling” documents is represented by a factory assembly line motif in a technical drawing-like isometric projection. 

There’s also this logo for Typesmiths, a desktop publishing software company, which modifies an Art Deco-era logo by designer Karl Schulpig by simply mounting an “A” on top of the existing strongman figure, lending a sense of industrial tangibility to emerging Information Age technology. 

In other examples, Factory Pomo incorporated motifs from science and technology that had only recently matured in the popular consciousness, like atomic and nuclear symbology, radio waves and towers, radar, and 1950s TV-test patterns.   

Meanwhile, in the fields of graphic design and typography, the emergence of desktop publishing software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator allowed designers greater freedom to quickly manipulate text and design simple compositions, leading to an explosion of typefaces and foundries. 

Typefaces like Emigré’s Modula and Neville Brody’s Industria would come to define the typographic look of the late 1980s. Their heavy weights, tall lettering, and slab serifs recall earlier eras, though they are digitally transformed into sharper, cleaner, and more experimental letterforms. Computer-aided design of this time reflects a certain tension between the optimistic promise of digital graphics and the reality of their limiting capabilities. As Emigré puts it on their website, “In 1985, the computer was very crude as far as being able to produce subtle curves, but it was outstanding at producing perfect geometric elements.” This might be why digital designers sought inspiration in design movements like Bauhaus and Art Deco, with their simple geometric forms and compositions. 

In the music world, popular genres like industrial, new jack swing, house, and rave also exhibited the Factory Pomo aesthetic visually, sonically, and even architecturally. Many of these scenes developed in clubs and impromptu gatherings located in former industrial complexes hollowed-out by the forces of deindustrialization. An early example of this was The Hacienda in Manchester, a former warehouse refurbished into a nightclub by Factory Records in 1982. Existing architectural elements such as exposed steel beams were wrapped with hazard tape in vibrant patterns, serving as both decoration and safety precaution. Computerized theatrical lighting hung from existing trusses, while high-tech fluorescent light tubes lined the walls and columns, lighting the room with a harsh bluish-white hue. Upstairs, a “deconstructed archway” led onto the balcony. With its simulated concrete degradation, the archway is an ironic take on the “postmodern faux ruin” in a formerly disused but now otherwise pristine interior. 

By the 1990s, the trend of repurposing old factory spaces with a contemporary industrial vernacular was in full swing. As opposed to later industrial-vernacular revival aesthetics like Industrial Americana and Genericana, Factory Pomo spaces were more of a mixture of the high-tech architectural movement (e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Lloyd’s Building in London) with abstracted retro and contemporary industrial motifs. 

The set design of The Party Machine — a brief entry in the now-forgotten category of TV dance/musical variety shows — exhibits this confluence well. Contemporary elements like the colorful ducts, metal pipe railings with mesh infill panels, space-frame trusses, and collections of TV monitors mingle with oversized decorative gears, Art-Deco influenced typography, industrial fans, and fog machines. The music genres featured on the show — mainly new jack swing, house, and dance-pop — sometimes echoed this aesthetic in both their art direction and their music videos. Elements of Factory Pomo can be seen in Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation,” Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” and the entire concept of C+C Music Factory.

By the early 1990s, the aesthetic had become ubiquitous in consumer design, appearing on everything from wine packaging to workwear. Commercial spaces, especially those associated with science, media, or electronics, exhibited a more cartoonish, exaggerated form of Factory Pomo than the earlier architectural examples. One of the best examples of this latter manifestation were the Metronet stations at the Great Mall of the Great Plains. Massive kiosks with interactive touchscreens featuring directions, events, and directories stood below an elaborate steel structure supporting a rotating “globe” mapping out the mall’s different “neighborhoods.” Here, various “retro-coded” Factory Pomo elements like cellular beams and the Modula Sans font were combined with touchscreens and floating CRT TVs, all in an effort to introduce the public to 1990s information technology with familiar iconography.

The most fully-realized Factory Pomo environment came in the form of Disneyworld's “New Tomorrowland” in 1994. By that point, the death knell for a style once associated with progressive movements was beginning to ring. Perhaps Factory Pomo was always destined to  be short-lived, tied as it was to always-evolving digital technology. As the global economy started to improve in the ’90s and early aughts, the cultural milieu began to shift into brighter, exuberant, and more optimistic tech-focused aesthetics.