Anton Stankowski, 1967
Hi class.
Plenty to talk about. the International Topographic Swiss School (and its masters), Fortune magazine & pre LOGO, LOGO proper, (and its masters), Giusti, Stankowski, propaganda, advertising, Bass's design for film, Alvin Lustig, Cipe Pineles, Kula Robbins, Rockwell, Vargas...
go ahead,
8 comments:
It was interesting to learn about the importance of logo design in it's early days. To see how certain artists were able to maintain a stronghold monopoly on the logo game was fascinating. I particularly liked the concept behind the Haloid Xerox logo in 1958 and how we discussed it's overall shape being based off the up and coming television at the time. The work of Saul Bass is also interesting to me as he has maintained his artistry even in today's design age.
-Ethan Punal
I am especially interested logo design history because I have recently started to experiment with Adobe InDesign to learn to create my own logos. Based on our last class, I have come to see that the logo should not only be something that can easily identify a company to its consumers, but also evolve alongside the evolution of the company because it should always mimic the “personality and worth” of the company. This was especially easy to see in the Xerox example, which has changed five times between 1949-2007. The Xerox logo is very simplistic, which is a characteristic that is very popular among logos. However, I prefer the work of logo master Saul Bass. His portfolio masters the art of simplicity through lines and curves, but he uses more color which to me seems more eye catching. I had never considered that the symbols that we use daily—whether it be logos or public signs—have a connection to Egyptian iconography. I can see how that has evolved from a language to what we now use as a supplementary language.
-Camila Chediak
I found our review of American and Nazi propaganda surrounding WWII fascinating. Your argument that Nazi propaganda was better or more potent than American propaganda was unfamiliar to me prior to class, but I think the argument is compelling. I had never considered that the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda may have been reflective of the more “cohesive and emphatic” ideology of the Nazis as compared to the less unified America. This makes sense given that the Nazis eliminated political rivals and instituted a one-party system whereas the United States’ values of democracy and political freedom prevented the United States from being quite as convincing. (True, the United States isn’t perfect, and certain political ideologies are socially punished but overt elimination of outspoken political opponents is arguably less prevalent). In the United States during this era if you disagreed with the dominant political party, you may be looked upon disdainfully. In Nazi Germany if you disagreed with the Nazis you were potentially incarcerated, sent to a concentration camp, or worse. Similarly, propaganda in the USSR can be seen to have an equally dramatic effect given the lack of political and media freedom in Soviet Union.
Abbie Auster
There is an inverse relationship between company size and the significance of its logo. At the small end of the spectrum of company size, a startup has little foundational investment into its logo. Partially due to the ambiguity of future company direction and partially due to the lack of company relevance, startups tend to focus less on the power of logo. As the company grows, descriptions of what problem to solve and how to solve it consolidate - and a logo is the most succinct representation of their mission. Also, the logo is printed on more material, eliciting even greater need to portray the right emotions. For great graphic designers like Paul Rand, it seems as if this innate understanding of a company and how to elicit such a response from customers came natural in design of the logo. Job’s quotes Paul Rand as stating that he’d take care of the Apple logo and for Jobs to not worry how to handle the design. The Swiss style Rand helped introduce brought with it a sense of simplicity which helps exemplify the specific attributes (veracity, worth, management, novelty, permanence) each company desires to elicit. While the company may want to come off as high in all the characteristics described, it is more realistic to optimize for specific one’s - and Swiss model of ‘Nothing to Add, Nothing to Remove, Space to Breath’ highlights such optimization. It seems this simplicity inspired the next line of great graphic designers, such as Chermayeff & Geismar with their logo designs for major fortune 500 companies.
Ryan Berkun
I found our review of American and Nazi propaganda surrounding WWII fascinating. Your argument that Nazi propaganda was better or more potent than American propaganda was unfamiliar to me prior to class, but I think the argument is compelling.
Abbie, "better" in the ideological sense: they had a ministry of propaganda. We didn't. But not "better" in the moral sense. Pity this is not an ethics class, but a design class. :)
I was extremely interested in researching/learning more about Anton Stankowski. He was one of the most influential names in the late-modernist art. He created revolutionary concrete art and memorable identities. He was a German graphic designer and had a impact on typography, photography and design. His designs attempt to illustrate processes of behaviors rather than objects. In some of his work you can see that he values the negative space, and obviously his use of color around it. His work is yet so simple but to the point where he was able to create so many fantastic pieces, when others didn’t have the train of thought he did. Even his use of typography in his 1978 poster, he makes the numbers abstract but easily readable. He proves the point that shapes can be used in many different way to create numerous amount of designs that constantly caught the viewers eye.
What impressed me most about the Swiss graphic designers is how they turned simple shapes into art. For example, Stankowski’s piece that has a black background with white lines converging in two different locations is incredibly simple, but also beautiful. His use of line manages to be clean and complex. I was surprised to see how now famous magazines, such as Fortune, have been hiring graphic designers for so many years. By making graphic design part of everyday life through items like magazines, art becomes much more commercial and a larger part of everyday life. The Fortune covers that we looked at in class are a good example of how art was used to explain and provoke interest into subjects that were either seen as difficult to understand or boring. For example, in one of the covers the text reads, “Jet Airliners, the Race for Leadership.” Even if the viewer did not know anything about Jet Airliners the cover would still get your attention.
Last class, we discussed a number of different issues, but a particularly striking theme was the rise of commercialism, the Plakatstil as well as the aspect of modern design. Within the group of the artist discussed (Breuer, Binder, Matter, Brodovich ect.) I realized that they consisted centrally of male figures. I was particularly intrigued with the aspect that Alexey Brodovich, a emigrant artist who resettled in New York City, was known for his strikingly feminine images (especially while working for Harpers Bazaar). I thought it to be particularly ironic that there are much more famous male fashion photographers than female ones, even though the market that they are trying to attract is largely female. In general, even within the Bauhaus-genre, I was fascinated by the gender gap between the two sexes.
This led me to wonder why graphic design, and art (historically and in general) is such a “old boys club”, and whether today things are different.
On a very different note, I was also interested in the use of color. Not only were the propaganda posters very striking with their mostly monochromatic use of stark colors, but I was interested to learn that the black-yellow-red palate had spiritual connotations (whereas blue was the color of technology, and was commonly used in traditional Flemish paintings).
-Victoria von Faber-Castell
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