Plexus, front cover, Felix Labisse, January 1970 (via 50 watts)
this is a heavy duty list: Memphis School, April Greiman, Deborah Sussman, Dumbar aesthetics, Ed Fella, Stephan Seigmeister, Dan Friedman, Oliviero Toscani, Lucas de Groot, David Carson, Jonathan Ellery, Chris Ware, Branbrook.
what do you think?
8 comments:
Punk design is something that I look to for inspiration for a lot of my own work and projects. I continuously see a cyclical resurgence of punk elements in design. The elements of collage, cartoon, hand lettering, and the ransom note style is so interesting. These designs contain so many stories and emotions behind them. The images illicit feelings of rebellion, anarchy, and also create comradery among viewers.
Recently I have seen a watering down of such elements to create designs and images that do not necessarily represent the same messages that they did during the 70s punk era. Instead, they are just sprinkled with designs to add a little bit of “spice” for lack of a better word. The anarchy that is usually inlaid in each of these designs in the past has been broken down. I see it as a sort of shame. As a child I can remember fondly when I first saw the sex pistols God Save the Queen cover art. I was young maybe 10 or 12, but my friends and I used to chant the name of the album and wear the merchandise with the queen’s dace on it. Now that I think back, I am really not sure why we did that, but I think at the time it made us feel a part of something bigger. Which I believe to be the entire point of the punk movement and the message behind these designs—for the misfits to come together and create something bigger than them. I think this idea still resonates with many today, and is probably why the designs and music come back into style.
Olivia Ginsberg
Last week in class, we talked about Deborah Sussman and environmental design. This concept interested me to think of design as something that we don't just look at but can physically interact with our space. After some research, I found that environmental design is generally divided into five categories: directions, exhibits, interactive experiences, public installations, and placemaking. Each of these categories serves its purpose, but we interline them all differently. For example, we may not give a second thought to the projected arrows on the ground at IKEA. But those are still a form of environmental design. Branding places a large part in environmental graphic design. One of the examples from last class was the Mickey Mouse looking over a sign. This type of design gives the DIesny goer a Queen to start getting excited because they are that much closer. As humans, we like recognizable things; they make us feel safe and can bring joy. When we see something that we are already familiar with placed somewhere where we are not so familiar, we tend to feel more at ease. People also tend to enjoy their time in new places more if they feel like they interact with the environment and it back at them. That's why it tends to be more fun to get your pop out of one of those Coca-Cola machines with the touchpads rather than a regular old pop machine. The more out of the ordinary a design is, the more engagement and interaction it will receive. Thus that place will have a spot in your memory because it provided a "cool" factor.
-Sam Zeigler
What stood out to me last class was Teruhiko Yumura’s concept of heta-huma, or bad-good design. The designs were deliberate and conscious, yet it wouldn’t seem like the type of “art” to be boasted about, yet it’s good in such a unique way. The colors and illustrations are bold and each time you look at them there is something different to see. It made me realize that this is a huge facet of art that I follow on social media; I’ve curated my social media feeds to be images of inspiration, so I only follow musicians, illustrators, artists that inspire me in my own work. I hadn’t realized before until it was brought to my attention in class that this is a style I am drawn to. I think it makes me feel comfortable to just let go and create, without worrying about things being perfect or award-worthy; sometimes it’s hard to just get pen to paper or mouse to software, but artists that follow the heta-huma aesthetic open up a freedom to deliver art how you want without worry about mistakes or perfection. This type of work is the kind of art that makes you feel like, oh I could do that, because it looks random and done with minimal effort, but in reality it is extremely strategic and artists like Yumura are very conscious with what they are doing and how they are creating this art, but it creates an inclusive environment where you feel comfortable to experiment and to create without inhibition.
Meghan Morrison
Luc(as) de Groot really interested me because he was able to find an identity in the tech world and art world through his type designs. He is a Dutch type designer who is the head of Fontfabrik. He created some of my favorite fonts including, sans-serif, serif and calibri (the default font for Microsoft office). Luc(as) studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague and then worked at BRS Premsela Vank, an amesterdam design company. He worked at BRS Premsela Vank for four years and then moved to Berlin. In berlin he became the typographic directer at MetaDesign in 1993. At MetaDesign he made corporate logo designs, magazine ideas, and client specific fonts. In his free time he created the largest digital type family ever, Thesis, in 1994. In an interview, he explains that he was able to do this because he did not have much of a social life after moving to Berlin. In the interview, he also talks about how it is important to remain precise when making typefaces but also human, he says if you try to be too scientific the fonts lose their humanity. He suggests people also look at his calligraphy and illustrations to understand his artistic style. He enjoys making type because he likes to find ways of meeting technical constraints (like the width of a newspaper, etc) and solving visual problems through type.
Emma P
Stephen Sagmeister brings typography to life. It is easy to see graphic design as a 2D, flat, digitally made product, but Sagmeister goes way beyond. Maybe this came to be given his engineering past interest, but either way, he shows the broadness and creativity that can be found in graphic design.
After watching his TED Talk I also noticed the purpose and thought he puts behind his projects. It isn’t just a communication tool like a handout with pretty graphics. He works with happiness. Even though many of the projects he showed as examples are just typography-related, he had a personal and very specific reason for each of them, in a way I never saw typography before.
“The Happy Film” project was actually a product of grief. The fact he could no longer make an actual happy film, so the title became the content as he faced the passing of his mom. The literal block he faced, as his art just presented “The Happy Film” but without really showing what that was or what it meant, which was exactly what he was going through. I found that fascinating.
He is a true example of the importance to work with what matters to whom is creating, make something out of real emotion, because while letters literally speak they also express. His graphic design doesn’t just communicate, it shares.
Julia Martins
Last week’s class, heta-huma was described as the “use of ‘bad’ art”. Developed by Japanese illustrator Teruhiko Yumura, heta-huma started in the 1970s as an underground manga movement for the then popular magazine Garo. Heta-huma translates to “bad but good” by its use of a badly sketched illustrations with an aesthetically aware quality to it. This effortless distinctiveness is what got it, its cult following; there are many forms of art like heta-huma that use “the use of bad art” to create a gravitation of people who feed off the horridness. for example, Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, had a horrible box office outcome yet years later in Japan and suddenly all over the world the film became a beloved cult classic or even Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans slowly became an iconic symbol over time. Yet what makes bad art good? or vice versa. Is it the people or the critics or are the critics moved by the people’s response or vice versa? When one goes into a contemporary art museum and sees a work that makes one think, “oh I can do that”, that is what I believe the artist wants you to question. Art is conceptual individuality, made to curated thought and bring in judgment, yet it’s the ones that you quickly judge are the ones that have that lasting effect on you.
-max Speziani
In this class, I got interested in April Greiman and her designs made on a computer. Therefore I investigated her life and history in design. She left New York City in the mid-1970s when she decided to leave the comfort of a design community deeply entrenched in European tradition for an uncertain future on the opposite coast. Seeking a new spirit, she moved to Los Angeles and entered a culture that, for better or for worse, had a limited aesthetic of its own at that time. Soon on a trip, she got inspired by the desert, creating a desire for evolution. Then in 1984 Macintosh appear on the design market. April Greiman recognized the vast potential of this new medium. Now she's growing the extremely wide extent of her work, Greiman regularly teams up with designers on spaces and conditions, with the majority of her commitment in the space of shading, completions, and materials. She sees these three-and four-dimensional coordinated efforts at this point as another part of hybridizing, wherein she thinks about thoughts of incorporation of building and scene, inside and outside, inward and external selves.
-Roman Moscato
In the last class we discussed a plethora of material from different aesthetics to a variety of groundbreaking artists. One of those artists who I found particularly interesting was April Greiman. Unlike almost all the artist I have written about in this class thus far Greiman is alive and well. Greiman is younger than I believe all my grandparents are which is I see as a testament to people's ability to appreciate artist when they are alive, something I often think about. Just like myself, April does not refer to herself truly as a “graphic designer” but more of a “transmedia artist” in her own words. I completely agree that the word “graphic designer” has a different connotation than what I feel I do on a regular day. Greiman is a computer artist that was practically the first digital artist to be recognized by Apple for using their product. April is unique and incredibly adaptable as how many artists over the age of 70 use a computer to create their work, very few.
Harry Reid
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