OME April 27th Final of the Semester

The start of class we watched a movie about Barbra Kruger, and visual voice. The enter of deconstruction we opened with Jaques Derrida and the study of writting grammatology, writting was a distinctive mode of representation. Derrida coined the term reconstruction. A history of formal typographic structure would be included to the explore the split between form and content inside and out. Cranbrook explored post structuralism and the language of Derrida grammatology. Then there was Ed Fella who distinctly unsystematized - and inpired "grunge" (He fathered the grunge movement.)He would go out and photograph signs and turned to  handmade type and letters for the design of his posters. David Carson, Narrative of type and design. He was untrained, free to invent the line between legibility and chaos, and disregard for functionality.

Postsructuralism challanged hierarchies. Postmodernism sees reality as being fragmented, diverse, tenuous, and culture specified. Deconstruction, structure in mass media can be reshuffled and re-inhabited. The Culture Jam, payed attention to the role of language and "texts" in our construction of reality and identity. To nights lecture was closed with Stefan Sagmiester with a video of his art gallery in Soho, and how graphic design can be interpreted and controversial to the outsider. Times are changing and graphic designers are going to have to think out of the box, and go out of their element. Graphic design is what you make it.

OME April 20TH

In todays class we learned about Postmodernism and what went along with it. Postmodernism examines various cultural codes that govern our understanding of our selves, our place, and all our procedures, that are socially culturally or politically movtivated. It was marked by rejection. 

In the 60's a new pluralism emerged.  Postmodernism is NOT A STYLE, but a group of approached motivated by some common understanding, not all of which is necessarily shared.

Some characteristics are montage, pluralistic, surface, parody/irony, randomness.

 Wes Wilson and Victor Moscoso used bright colors and crazy text to go along with the electric and drug era of the 60's. Milton Glasser and Push Pin studios, has a style of graphic design appeal to the counterculture of youth and the dizzying euphoria of the era. Chic graphic design became a consumer stable. Wolfgang Weingart was one artist to reject the right angle intuition design and rich value effects. His layouts were inspired by architecture. He used one of the first MACs bought from NYC. He was one that used the NEW WAVE which was all about, wide letter spacing, diagonal type, mixing of type faces, randomness, etc. With new wave typography came the swiss inspired designs by Willi Kunts. He had much more dynamic designs. Rosmarie Tissi used letters forms not only to create words but to form shapes and she used the shapes within the letters also. Designers saw historical styles and materials as inventories of signifies potentially relevant to only the purpose or need.

Discourse 2!!

1923

THE NEW TYPOGRAPHY

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

• Teacher at the Bauhaus
• Self-Taught
• Hungarian
• Designed a number of publications
• Typographic form
• "elasticity"
• Typography is a tool of communication.
• absolute clarity
• photographic form
• intellectual relationship
• priority
• clarity
• legibility 
• letters may be forced into a preconceived framework.
• contemporary typography
• zincographic techniques
• hieroglyphs
• personal imagination
• photography
• replacement of literature by film
• letter writing obsolete
• intricate
• costly
• simple and available
• typographical image
• making of posters
• photography had replaced poster-painting
• camera
• photographic techniques
• enlargement of posters
• new typefaces
• brilliant color effects
• intensity of the message
• vision and communication
  
  

I chose this image to show how typography can be used differently. You can clearly read what each section says, you can also make out what the image is trying to show you. The type makes up NYC. The type in each section of NYC is different for all, they are all brightly colored. I like how they used the arrow in upper west side, and how they used the other symbols. This changes the way we look at the "map" its not just a map its art.

I then chose the Bee movie poster because in the article they talked about movie posters and how they wont be hand painted any more. This poster is clearly not hand painted, and the type is 3d also. This is very very different form something Moholy-Nagy was used to. Typography these days is pushed to the limits. We have 3d type, comp type, and hand drawn the list can go on forever. Movie posters theses days dont just rely on images its also all about the type, and what message the type is bringing to the viewer.

I like this poster and the type face also. They made the type face out of gravel, and formed them into letters to be used as a type face. Back when the Bauhaus was around they did make handmade type but nothing to this extent, times are a changing. This is something you would nave never seen, they were just starting to form alot of type faces. I chose this because its a type face and a photographic poster. 

OmE April 13th

American Corporate Design, besides branding with promises identity systems became the means of making complex organizations seem like a single entity with distinct personas. Paul Rand understood the value of imented forms for both symbolic and communicative ends, through skillful analysis of the context. Lester Beal helps define the emerging corporate design movements of the 1950-60's. Branding was seen as a major way to shape a reputation for quality and reliability through "brand promise". Good designs is good business. Paul designed many identities that are still in use today.

Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar created the "early design office" with strong aesthetic background through educational diversity of the partners.  They went on to creating major post war identity in america. Vignelli Associates Designed the unigrid system for the united states national park services. They designed programs so rational and rigorously systematized that they became virtually foolproof as long as the standards were maintained. They also designed the NYC subway system.

Saul Bass had the NYC design stability and to LA film industry form motion pictures to design programs and famous corporate identities. Designers were no longer confined to static images and pioneers of motion graphics used timing and sequence. He created the first print and tv ad. for the movie Exodus. In the 1950's a revolution in editorial design occurred in part by design classes taught by Alexis Brodovitch.  Henry Wolf designed covers for Harpers Bazar and Esquire, the covers were made up of photos that caught everyones eye. Then conceptual strategies for typography was unified with photography by Boyle Done Bernbach. George Lois was thought to be be and advertising genius, with his conceptual power of images, his text and images became completely interdependent. Then in the 1970's Herb Lubalin designed the Ebony magazine. Photo-typography had a profound impact on the direction and the look of design influenced advertising as well as editorial design. The not until the 1960's did graphic design slowly become a national profession through the merging of the international style of typography and american corporate design with their large "image" factories.

OME April 6th

In todays lecture we began to talk about The Search for Visual Language, which began in the constructivist movement then Bauhaus and Isotype movement. Isotype is the acronym for "International system of typographic picture education". Information design emerged as a powerful means of large bodies of complex data into simple iconic statistics with emerging rational. Isotype was one of the most important informational design innovations. The use of the pin head icon was very common along with other icons. They were very versatile and found all over. Ladislav Suntnar was one of the most pure visual educations in writing and design. He defied the information with bleeds, visual coding of numbers, words and rules. 

There was also design for information, with data integration from multiple sources. Herbert Bayer was known for his geographical atlas van-diagram. Addison Dwiggins was the first to use the term Graphic Design. 

The information age was a big deal. Claude Shannon combined mathematical theories and engineering principles to set the stage for development for digital computers. (Bell Labs) He modeled the problems in terms of data and signaled processing and thus the coming of the information age. The school at ULM developed a curriculum that addresses new needs of this particular age. Similar goals to the Bauhaus , with a philosophical theories of signs and symbols. ULM evolved along scientific and methodological approaches to design problem solving.

The came early Swiss Design. They set principles to go by; 1. designer and conduit of facilitator for delivering important info, 2. clarity means and form was ideal achievement, and 3. believed solutions emerge from close examination of its content in the most economic way.  Anton Stankowiski had a major contribution, the creation of visual forms to communicate invisible process and physical forces. The design process included in depth research of topics from scientific and engineering. Josef Miller Brockman also known as the grid man, designed a book all about the use of grids and grids themselves. He designed the DerFilm and public awareness posters with photos. Music poster masterpieces of the purist understatement and crated visual counterpart to the structural harmony of music. The Swiss movement had a huge impact on American Graphic Designers and the engineering field of corperate graphics.

OME 3.23.09

In todays lecture we talked about Post Cubism and Art Deco of the 1920's and 30's. Art Deco expressed the desires of a modern era and a passion for geometric decoration of the machine age. AM Cassandre was considered one of the great illustrators of the 20th century who also had great typographic skills. He used a lot of bold designs and iconic elements. With his L'Intansigeant poster in 1925 he was called the master of art deco letterforms. Another man known for his posters was Kauffer, he used synthetic cubist ideas. He was known for is underground London posters. Between the wars Germany became the central hob, German art absorbed cubism and french advertising. Ludwig Holwien produced propaganda posters the evolution of his work coincided with Hitlers. Even the Olympics was becoming ideas for propaganda images. Then a style of realism developed, celebrating national strength and offering grotesque depictions of the enemy. Herbert Matter fully expressed the role of extreme contrast of scale in photography for european posters style. He was very good at approaching his posters, he used pictorial symbols by silhouetted images, uncommon angles, black and white images with sign of color. and over printing and transparency. The war had a big impact on whit kinds of art came out of this era, because the Nazis were such a threat artists portrayed them in different ways with so many different styles. When the railroad was first introduced artists began to produce skiing posters which no one had ever seen because before the rail road on one could get that high in the mountains. 

OME March 16th

In todays class we talked about De Stijl and how it shared the same goals as Malevich and Supermatists . De Stijl was concerned with the spiritual and intellectual climate. Theo Van Doesburg was the founder he applied De Stijl to architecture, sculpture, and typography. He formalized a typographic style. His Alphabet was made up of all curves and color was a structural element not for decoration. Mondirans paintings were a huge visual representation of their work. M.H.J Schoenmaker defined horizontal and vertical lines in shaping his world, jsut like Mondrian. The colors blue, red, yellow, and black were a big part of this movement everyone was using them in their work. De Stijl did not survive after Van Doesburgs death in 1931.

The Bauhaus was to solve design problems created by industrialization. There was no distinction between fine arts and the applied arts. There were two locations of the Bauhaus, one in Weinmar from 1919-1925, and then the on in Dessau opened in 1925-1933 after all the staff left and the students were sent to Dessau. At the Bauhaus the heart of education was the preliminary colors. At the Bauhaus Johannes was to teach the fundamental principles of design with an underlying of visual art. Moholy Nagy also had an impact on the Bauhaus he was to design the type image curriculum. Where type met image in experiments and helped plot the course of modernist design. The Photoplastics expanded the role of photography in a design context. The faculty voted to close the school August 10th 1933.

Jan Tschichold introduced the New Typography, he explained modernist ideas to a wider audience of printers, designers, and typesetters. His book "The New Typography" used alot of white space, symmetrical arrangements, dynamic forces, point, line and plane. He also designed the Sabon font in 1964 which amazed other graphic designers because it was a serif font that was yet modern. 

The Dutch Masters of Typography messed around with alot of different elements but also elements that we have seen before. Paul Shoetema used photos in design and type play. Hendrick N. Werkman did not live along life but he did accomplish great designs. He let his imperfections in his work become the work. Piet Zwark was the most different of the three, he did things no one had really seen before especially for someone who is self taught. He incorporated all of the design elements in collages, diagonals, grids, movement. He had alot of typographic contrasts within his work, but yet he never lost concern for the reader.