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.