Disruption through Dazzle

The creation of a British Navy officer/painter named Norman Wilkinson, Razzle Dazzle was a design language originated in the First World War, during the early days of camouflage. Razzle Dazzle countered the fear of torpedoing at the time through an attempt to disguise ships, not by hiding them, but by disrupting a U-boat's ability to tell which direction a ship was heading.

"Most camouflage is based on the idea of concealment and blending in with its surroundings. However another school of thought has argued for making the item in question appear to be a mashup of unrelated components. Naval camoufleurs found this theory particularly appealing. Blending didn't work because ships operated in two different and constantly changing color environments – sea and sky. Any camo that concealed in one environment was usually spectacularly conspicuous in others." source

There are no color photographs of Razzle Dazzle, but simply seeing the patterns in black and white gives a good sense of a designer's motivation. Directionality is confused; the dressed object, while whole, seems like a conflation of a dozen different and unrelated components. Forms are stretched, distorted and abbreviated; The HMS Mauritania, for example, seems drawn from the costumery of opera or theater. Interestingly, there is a lot of fine art from the period that expresses and portrays the ships in context. Additionally, fashion of the era adopted the patterning and textures of the style. (A classic chicken and egg situation, did the pattern come before the cubist art that it evokes, or was it a direct homage to the art style?) Whatever the provenance, the result is surreal, magical and fantastic.

Here are some fun examples to look at...

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/11/modernist-art-in-camouflage.html

http://historyiselementary.blogspot.com/2007/07/razzle-dazzle-and-all-that-jazz.html

http://gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle.html

http://www.bobolinkbooks.com/Camoupedia/DazzleCamouflage.html

and a modern version...

http://www.hyperstealth.com/Mig29/

As frog's Executive Creative Director, Nick de la Mare leads frog’s cross-disciplinary teams in the pursuit of strategic design solutions across product, service and experience. His work focuses on the convergence of digital and physical media to create branded experiences for Nike, Chase, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, among others. His projects have been recognized by the IDSA, AIGA and others, and published widely.