unit 3 continued

-A new pluralism emerged from the “ME” generation, a spirit of the 60’s, pluralistic, eclectic, hedonistic, and anti - establishment.

-Styles of graphic design appeal to the counterculture youth, and the dizzying euphoria of the era.

-Graphic design had never been a pure art or dominated by the international style the way architecture was.

-Deliberate self- conscious reaction against the universal and utopian vision of modern formal languages and the assumptions of the

international style in art and design.

-Postmodernism: appropriation, to copying styles, was no longer naive nostalgia but calculated because the past itself

was considered invented

-History of Art and Design become a vast archive to be quoted appropriated and reused.

-Designers saw historical styles and materials as inventories of signifies potentially relevant to any purpose or need.

-Like music of the 80’s Postmodernism does not comprise a single unified style- but a conspicuous group of trends– retro, punk,

grunge, beach, techno, parody and pastiche.

-Words are not merely codes, using them is a behavior, and the behavior alters their meaning.

-A history of formal typographic structures would be included - to explore the spilt between form and content, inside and outside.

-David Carson Disruptive and disturbed... attacking the “grand narratives” of type and design.

-Words are not merely codes, using them is a behavior, and the behavior alters their meaning.

today when we talked about postmodernism, it really got me thinking. Postmodernism is now and that thinking started in the 60's and still continues now. the impact that postmodernism has on the work really gets me excited that one day I too will be a helper in creating an impact on the world.

we also watched a video on Barbara Kreuger. I really like her work and it's nice to hear about a woman graphic designer who is well known and has amazing work. The combination between image and text is amazing and makes everyone who sees her work think about the piece and think about the world and life in general. Her work is what i'm trying to aspire too.

please count my 2nd article I already submitted

title: Why Designers can’t think

From the book: seventy-nine short essays on design

posted wed. march 3rd at 5:05pm

unit 3 continued

key points

-Der Film posterand Public Awareness posters all masterpieces of 20thCentury Swiss design.

-The Swiss Movement had a major impact on American Graphic Design

and the emerging field of corporate graphics. The two ultimately merged.

-Paul Rand: Understood value of invented forms for both symbolic and communicative

ends, through skillful analysis of the context.

-Branding was seen as a major way to shape a reputation for quality

and reliability.

-Saul Bass along with Paul Rand helps define a new American

Graphic design that turned away from European sources.

-“Early Design office” with strong aesthetic background through educational diversity of the partners.

-Unigrid system, developed in 1977 for the United States National Park

Service by Vignelli Associates

-Corporate design- begun with Peter Berhens - sees its Zenith

with American design for a global marketplace.

-George Lois- advertising Genius Conceptual power of images

-Concept was dominate and text and image became completely

interdependent.

-Photo-typography- had a profound impact on the direction and look of

design-

-Decorative faces had a revival loosesened the grip the

“international style” had held of type design in the US.

-Lubalin almost single-handedly defined the aesthetic potential of

“photo- typography”

-Not until the 1960’s did graphic design slowly start to become a national profession

today in class we watched a movie about post modernism. I thought it was very interesting to see how art really effects the world and how people think and how one person can be the catalyst for what we see even today.

unit 3

key points

-A pictorial language to help pubic understanding of social issues related to

housing, health, and economics after WWI.

-The use of simple pictographs to convey information about directions, events, and objects

that have complex relationships in space and time; Usually statistical in nature.

-Visual “unit” becomes the double page spreaddefined

for function, flow, and form.

-American design was reflected in its cultureegalitarian

with capitalistic attitudes and values

-1940’s saw steps toward an original American approach to

modernist design reflective of European models...

-Commissioned major European artist and

designer to produce work for editorial design.

-Theo Ballmer and Max Bill Established its early formal vocabulary based on a rationalist model

-Major contributioncreation of visual forms to communicate invisible processes and physical forces.

the last half of class we watched "Helvetica" and i had never seen it before and really made me appreciate the font but also gave me inspiration to think outside of the box but also when the time is right use the fonts needed. Also, jt made me love fonts even more and i really enjoyed the documentary.

McLuhan's wake: ideas and examples:

Extension/Enhancement: chair is an extension of our butt and spine, the latter is an extension of our legs, the alphabet is an extension of our eyes. the printing press extends the alphabet, page by page. Book by book. It's a translation that shapes you. The cell phone for example enhances your voice, your car enhances your speed,

Closure/Obsolescence: old tools may still be around, but your going to want the latest thing. Such as a horse and buggy is now an automobile. Or a phone booth is now a cellphone. "Their is only one city on the planet. the planet itself." Every time you turn off or on a light, the space is shaped around you, creating new shapes and new objects around the space. With electric technology it's putting your nervous system outside, such as a dancing game or shooting game. Electric media retrieves the news, the old age, the monsters alll around us. Information is coming in all directions

Retrieval: speech retrieves old adventures from the past. Stories about the stars are told to remember where they are in the sky. We retrieve old culture to tell the story of the past and bring it to the present.

Reversal: your car is a reversal as soon as you leave the place where you live, such as traffic. Too much of something always ends up being the opposite of what your getting. Such as a neighborhood full of houses on top of each other. The only way to fight for something is to protest or fight back. The cell phone is like a leash...of your life.

what i learned when i saw the movie today is that the media and technology around us really effect ourselves as a person. And that the media has a purpose that shapes our actual world around us.

unit 2 continued

-IN DUTCH MODERNISM... the printing arts perform as an expressive tool

Means and methods of commercial reproduction become tools of

creativity.

-Like Tschichold and the New typography masters- Dutch design believed in dynamic interplays between

asymmetrical typographic elements should form a field of tension on the page.

-The printing arts perform as an expressive tool

-Exploratory techniques- small presses to produce one of a kind compositions he called “druksels”.

-Used collage technique with parts from the typecase

-Diverse elements unified into a design system consistently applied regardless of subject matter

-Dutch Modernism partners with German Plakastil to define a modernist playbook for designing commerce and advertising...

-Designers applied reductive compositional principles of Plakatstil with synthetic Cubism inventions and the purity of De Stijl.

-Exploited Futurists ideas about visual motion- and Synthetic Cubism

-The Art Deco Quality – Streamlining, zigzag, moderne and decorative geometry.

-art Deco Moderne- mastered the graphic representation of industry and commerce. Their work

prefigured branding in advertising.

-no graphic message was immune from seductive lure of European modernism between the world wars

-Highly refined and styled naturalism based on geometric cones, spheres, and cubes, then stylized through Synthetic Cubism.

-by the outbreak of world war 2, European modernism had clearly proved it could raise armies

-Evolution of his work coincided closely with Hitler’s concept of effective propaganda: Hitler rejects the artistic in Plakatstil

“Slogans and popular illustrations of Allies were more effective”.

-A stylized realism developed, celebrating national strength and offering grotesque depictions of the enemy.

-Suspicion motivates - a tactic of persuasion appealing to patriotic emotions and fear of the unknown enemy.

-Influenced by German Plakastil- Matter applies new approaches to Photography started by Rodchenko, Moholy Nagy, Tschichold.

-Understood Russian film innovations-The use of montage and collage-

-All of Matters’ poster from this period are considered masterpieces of 20th Century graphic design.

tonight we finished learning about the bahus and what came from that. we looked at the many different styles of posters and different interpretations from The Art Deco Quality to the Cubist advertising poster. you can see how the different styles bring out the different ways people can look and get the posters.

The philosophy of modernism in Typography

By Douglas C. McMurtrie

From the book: Texts on Type

By Heller and Meggs

Key points

- - the underlying principle of the new design is the dictum “Form follows function”

- -clarity is the essential feature of modern typography. Any form which does not first express the function of legibility is not in the true spirit of modern typography, no matter how “modernistic” it looks.

- -“pretty” layouts and exceedingly bizarre arrangements are frowned upon as diverting attention from the message itself to the physical form of it’s typography, which is always to be considered not as an end in itself, but only as a means to the end that the message be read.

- - In modern typography we are to depend on ourselves alone for the working out of any typographic problem, and not depend on the solutions or practices of another age. We are to do our creative work in the spirit of the present and to let it be truly expressive of our own interpretation of the message we are transmitting to readers through the medium of type.

Why Designers can’t think

From the book: seventy-nine short essays on design

Key points

-the men and women who invented graphic design in America were largely self-taught; they didn’t have the opportunity to go to fully developed specialized design schools, because none existed.

-American programs seem to fall into two broad categories: process(swiss) schools and portfolio (slick) schools.

-process schools favor a form-driven problem-solving approach. Such as drawing letterforms, “translating” three-dimensional objects into idealized high-contrast images, and basic still-life photography. One way or another, the process schools trace their lineage back to the advanced program of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.

-the portfolio school has a completely different, admittedly more mercenary, aim: to provide students with polished “books” that will get them good jobs upon graduation.

-Unlike the full-time teachers of process school, the portfolio schools are staffed largely by working professionals who teach part time, who are impatient with idle exercises that don’t relate to the “real world”

-both schools hate each other. To he portfolio schools, the swiss method is hermetic, arcane, and meaningless to the general public. The the process schools, the “slick” method is distastefully commercial, shallow, and derivative.

-however, the best-trained graduates of either school are equally sought after by employers. East Coast corporate identity firms love the process school grads; anyone who’s spent six months combining letterform and ballet shoe won’t mind being mired in a fat standards manual for three years.

-On the other hand, package design firms are happy to get the portfolio school grads: not only do they have a real passion for tighter-than-tight comps, but they generate hundreds of stylistically diverse alternatives to show indecisive clients.

-nowadays the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, grads will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand. And designers, more and more, will end up talking to themselves.

unit 2

key points/ideas

-Suprematism- creates a theoretical model for an abstract visual language where form is understood as a set of forces soon aligned with those of revolution.

-Russians coined the phrase “Cubo- Futurism”

-The revolutionary discipline: Impersonal, rational, structural toughness, and harmonious cooperation using modern machine industry...

-These “production artists” or Constructivists born of the Avant Garde in revolutionary Russia during the 1920.

-Icon of Modern Graphic Design- Poster for Dziga Vertov’s film Kino-fot (Film Eye)

-Constructivists enhanced rhetorical power through “hyperbole”,extravagant exaggeration...

-Rodehenko Makes the book form more dynamic by incorporating the grammar and syntax of theater and film in its design.

-EL Lissitzky-Developed a painting style he called Prouns- “projects for the establishment of a new art”

-Geometric abstraction was adopted as a sign of functionality. Visual forms represent a set of abstract “forces” to serve the utopian cause.

-Of Two Squares- a mode of reading that promises a new graphic syntax based on mixing verbal and visual signs to speed absorption of information.

-The “Isms” of Art 1914-1924 co -edited with Hans Arp One of the most influential graphic designs of 20th century.

-Late Constructivism was instrumental in placing the radical typographic forms of Futurism and Dada into the commercial realm in the late 1920’s

-The Steinberg Brothers-theatrical designsCompensated for photographic reproduction difficulties-made realistic drawings using projected film stills and grids

-Revolution completes the establishment of a “professional identity” for modern graphic design.

unit 2 part 1

key points

-war posters were used to market the active war

-The evolution of Graphic Design into a true expression of the 20th Century is closely tied to the revolutionary art movements that occurred

in Europe during the early decades of the Century.

- structalism, semiology-language may be analyzed as a formal system of different elemets

-“materiality” in signification. - the relationship between form and expression, material and content

-First collages-Combine real fragments from the built environment in a picture plane. Declared the picture to be a real 2d object.

-Cubism introduced in the painted field the concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes- not just phonetic symbols.

-Futurism was launched by Filippo Marinetti in 1909

-Avant-garde poets of the 1910s became the graphic designers, teachers, and systematic theorists of the 1920s and 1930s

-“Iconoclast” means “icon destroyer”, attacks on settled beliefs or institutions.

-Berlin members of DADA sought a role for visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change.

-Kurt Schwitters-Invited to promote Dada in Holland by Theo van Doesberg and Later Graphic Designs fall under the influence of

Constructivism and El Lissitzky

-Surrealism’s impact on graphic design was by the movements painters and showed how poety, fantasy and the

subconscious could be expressed in purely visual terms.

-Automatism becomes formalized and part of the designer’s skill.

as the invention of the 35mm camera came about, it opens a whole world of new graphic design

-

key points:

-Type design and book design became casualties of novel graphic expressions for commercial consumption.

-Godefroy Engelmann in 1837, patenteda process named chromolithography, using multiple Lithographic stones to print component colors.

-because of chromolithography:

Illustration dominates mass media

Advertising and packaging for massconsumption uses lithographic

naturalism...New formats: billboards, hand bills,posters.

-Louis Prang-most

prolific innovator of the

medium- “Father of the american christmas

card.” Put printing into the everyday

lives of citizens...

-John Gamble in 1801- English patented a machine to make paper in single sheets from 1 to 12 feet and upwards wide and from 1 to 45 feet and

upwards long.

-Ottmar Mergenthler- July 3rd 1886-The first machine to compose type layouts.

-Monotype a machine that cast single letters from hot metal came a decade

later.

-Thomas Nast- father of American political cartooning- Popularized important images.

-First ad agency in 1841:Volney Palmer of Philadelphia, sold ad space like a travel agency, sells tickets today-Conventions

-Kelmscott Press major contributions to a History of Graphic Design

-Historicism- use of past forms and styles to express the present instead of inventing new ones.

-Hand painted lettering integrates into the design. Artists were responsible for all elements. This control over print: beginning of modern

GRAPHIC DESIGN

-cheret considered father of the modern lithographic poster

-First Gismonda poster, 1894. Life-size figure, mosaic pattern, and elongated shape created an overnight sensation.

-The Beggarstaffs

New vocabulary of form for the graphic artist- -flat color and sharp silhouettes, high contrast.

Used new technique of flat design later called collage-Cut-outs using colored papers-“edges drawn with scissors” Sharp silhouettes, high

contrast was new vocabulary of form for the graphic artist-Harper’s Magazine

-final phases of art nouveau-jugendstil and sezessionstil-inspires the utopian artistic visions in the early 2oth century

-Gustav Klimt - founder and presidentfrom 1897 to 1905. His painting The Kiss is a symbol of Vienna Secession.

-Koloman Moser- defines the approach to graphic design for the movement.

-Alfred Roller 14th Secession Exhibit poster 1902 - Anticipated Cubism and Art Deco.

-Joseph Hoffmann business card and clock design for he Wiener Werksstatte

-Glasgow School made notable contributions to the new century’s architecture and interiors.

-Peter Behrens- From 1907- 1914 Design advisor for German Industrial manufacturer AEG who in 1888 bought the patients of Edison.

-1908 - Model for a modern era of graphic identity as a comprehensive program.- Given a graphic Identity still in use today-

-Frank Pick- design advocacy- created an international model for corporate design publicity.

tonight what i really learned that really in order to make a piece of art have a great impact is to do something different, new, and controversial and that some type faces made in the 30s is still around and still used for the same companies today

also the fact that santa clause was invented just so graphic designers could make cards and packaging and paper etc was very impressive and interesting to me