i had fun with your presentations. thanks! guess what, i'll bring your typeface projects to class next wednesday, so you can take pics & send them back to me for a digital exhibit here.
we are approaching 19th century fin-de-siècle. there's plenty to talk about yesterday's class: gutenberg, political satire (punch, charivari, puck), newspapers, postcards, children's books, daguerrotype, camera oscura, pictorialism, dana gibson, talbot's pencil of nature, 19th century fashion, the dandy, etc.
pick a theme and develop it, no echo chamber, no derivative comments (be meaningful).
this is a history class. my focus is epochal & anthropological. the trend today is to revise history without proper focus. they miss the epoch's weltanschauung! our 2022 glasses don't work in 1822.
click here for my discussion on the anthropology of myths (this is the deep level i referred to that we all share. cultural differences are very important, but they represent surface level. karl jung called this deep level collective unconscious.
16 comments:
What stood out to me the most in this week's lecture was the importance of viewing elements of design without the perspective of a person in the 21st century. This is necessary both for viewing morals and evaluating the quality of art. We touched on this theme in previous classes as well, but I think the typeface project made this concept more meaningful. I could not appreciate the time and skill involved merely looking at the pictures of illuminated manuscripts and bibles. With the 21st century glasses on, I knew one could design and easily use any sort of typeface on the computer. However, keeping that consistency by hand is very difficult, and I have a new appreciation for the work of those scribes. Just a page of careful typeface felt like it took forever. I feel better suited to evaluate other historical art pieces now. I feel like I can better put myself in the past and understand how things worked during different time periods.
Andrew Dubinett
Last class resonated a lot with me, during the type face project and presentations, we had to go through the same process that hasn’t changed really at all since it began. Making something that is seemingly unconscious into something deliberate. Everyone had their own take and style and I find that really interesting on how everyone choice to convey themselves. We also talked about how today’s art can’t really compare to physically putting brush to canvas or pen to paper and I think that the project really demonstrated that. I struggle with finding peace in not creating art in the traditional sense that I prefer and feel that being a graphic design major is lesser than those orthodox methods. This project just showed me how much more thinking and personal influence and humanity goes into creating a simple font.
Mallory Harrington-Fei
I found that the type of humor first introduced within newspapers and magazines is extremely fascinating to look at compared to today’s kinds of humor. For instance, humor today isn’t completely based around politics as it was at the beginning of the 19th-century. Nowadays, there doesn’t really seem to be a limit or boundary on what can be turned into a joke and what is too inappropriate or scandalous. I believe to some extent the use of comedy in modern-day media has gotten a bit out of control due to the emotional damage it can do to a person/group of people. With “cancel culture” being extremely prevalent in today’s society, humor can be borderline dangerous, just like it was when it was first put out to the public. A journalist/author could’ve been killed or sent to jail due to the humourous content they decided to put out in the early days of comedy. Although the consequences aren’t that extreme anymore, humor still has the ability to ruin a person’s life one way or another.
Maggie Nusim
The idea that myths in many different cultures share the same meaning and themes is very compelling. There are many archetypes that mythologies can possess such as the hero, justice, fate, and gods. There are also repetitions of symbols, some more vague representations, and some with very similar structures and meanings across cultures. One very interesting mark with a high level of similarity in historical mythology is the ouroboros mark. This mark is typically shown as some type of serpent arranged in a loop with it consuming its tail. While the etymology of the word goes back to Greece, meaning “tail-devourer”, the first record of this mark is not in Greece. One of the first records that we have found of this mark was on a shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamen, King Tut. Known as one of the oldest symbolic marks in alchemy, it showed the early human knowledge of the world's periodic renewal which the Egyptians attributed to the summer monsoons where the Nile River would flood. There is also an early record of the ouroboros in ancient China. Moving forward in time this symbol would also pop up in Hinduism, Norse mythology, Greek Mythology, and Mesoamerica to name a few of significance. The mark even inspired the chemist August Kekule when he discovered the benzene ring structure. In all of these cultures there is a similar meaning behind this symbol: cyclicity, infinity, and unity.
Will Neugebauer
Something that we discussed in class that caught my attention was the illustrations for the natural sciences. I have always been a fan of the art style that is used in textbooks and posters because although very informative, it is also beautiful. I liked the phrase “clear, faithful, but also beautiful” because I think this whole idea can be applied to graphic design as a whole. The whole purpose of design is to take something useful and make it aesthetically pleasing. From buildings to furniture to commercials, graphic artists chose to spend their life making it beautiful. Artists easily could have done the bare minimum for the illustration and everything, but instead hours of studying and practice goes into each print. And their dedication truly shows when people frame these illustrations for their wall and use something so scientific as art.
Marley Rubin
Very nice thread, & don't mind me. 🤓
What interested me the most from last class is how newspapers used many different types of typefaces to grab our attention. They used all kinds of typeface for posters, flyers, and advertising. Choosing the right font is important to be able to capture a person’s attention and make them want to read about it more. Fonts can make a brand or person seem more friendly and trustworthy. People choose the font of a newspaper very precisely because they need to pick the perfect one. It shows us how much detail goes into making all of these and how each letter font is deliberate. This is very interesting to me because I never thought about how my handwriting is so unique to me and how I make unconscious decisions when I write certain letters as well.
Megan Alexander
I enjoyed learning about Gutenburg’s bible last week. I found it so interesting that each copy was printed exactly the same, but all contained different rubrications. It made each book unique and personal to the owner and essentially nothing like that exists today. We are so focused on efficiency and mass production that design has become less important than simply pushing out content. It’s really sad because people in my generation don’t really have unique pieces, in fact, most of us don't really “own” anything. My parents constantly point out how my generation doesn’t own the music we listen to on music streaming platforms, and how important it was in their youth to actually own records and CDs. They still cherish their collection and will occasionally pull something out that they bought at my age to throw on our record player. There is an excitement that runs through them when they pull out something they haven’t listened to in a while or forgot they owned that I will never know. The same concept can be applied to hardcover books, which I stopped purchasing in middle school and replaced with ebooks. We are so obsessed with consuming as much as possible and as quickly as possible that we really let go of material ownership. Learning about Gutenburg’s bible made me want to have something that is uniquely mine. It made me reflect on our society's want for constant consumption and left me questioning what we will have to show for ourselves when we are old and want to share our youth with younger generations.
Clarke Weddington
Last class we learned about how the Gutenberg press revolutionized the world of print. In the video we watched the title claimed that the Gutenberg press was the "greatest invention of all time" because it enabled the mass production of uniform printed products. This essentially allowed the bible to be present in todays society. What I find fascinating is the way that this press has carried onto todays mass production of books, newspapers, ect. At the time the Gutenberg press could print up to 3600 pages in a day as opposed to now where we can essentially produce that in a matter of minutes. Another aspect that the modern day printer has incorporated that the Gutenberg press did not is the ability to transcribe in a plethora of different texts/fonts. The modern day printer is essentially based off of Gutenbergs press except for the fact that it is significantly more efficient. As you also discussed last week its important for us to view elements of design without "21st century glasses" which has me thinking how an invention such as the printer can be transformed into something more powerful. As Art and history have shown us, technology is constantly innovating and evolving.
Luke Shea
During the week's class, the discussion about typefaces and the details associated with them are designed to capture the reader's attention and invoke certain feelings based on the design was what I would like to focus on. This semester, I have been exposed to many new different development softwares. While reading the tutorials for each software, I began to notice patterns in the way the softwares had been designed and laid out similar to a typeface. I then looked into it further and found that many large tech companies like Apple and Microsoft had been pushing and incentivising to their own and third party developers an optimized template for the softwares. I found that this reminded me of the fact that Gutenberg's Printing Machine brought about a revolution in typefaces, design and books. The results of these incentives ended with many softwares that look and function the same while dealing with radically different operations. It is very similar to the way two books can look the same without any identifying marks, but on the inside, they can contain wildly different stories.
-Michael Wexler
Something I found interesting last class was the photography of William Henry Fox Talbot. It is very interesting to me how he sought out to photograph every day life and scenery that others wouldn't think of as interesting and now his pictures are some of the first photographic representations of everyday landscapes like boulevards and alleyways. I also did further research and saw that he was an accoladed mathematician and he also invented the polarizing microscope which is what is mainly used today in science. Talbot additionally created the "Calotype Process", which was the first recorded type of negative-positive photography. I find it really interesting how one singular person can make such a powerful and long-lasting impact on the world. I wonder if Talbot was appreciated for his genius during his lifetime or if he only gained major recognition after death.
- AJ Christian
I was really interested in the discussion of punk as the other romantic. I did some more research and discovered that punk, along with other subgenres like goth, emo, etc., is really just a schism of dark romanticism, which served as the other hand to romanticism. While they both rejected the enlightenment and industrial revolution, romanticism celebrated the individual and freedom of thought. Dark romanticism, on the other hand, focused on the loneliness of isolation, the weakness of human thought, and the morbid curiosity that we all intrinsically experience. Romanticism is the exploration of the sublime in nature and its beauty, whereas dark romanticism explores the depth of its terror and fear of the unknown. I think the most important part of dark romanticism is the concept of this “other” both in the vastness of the universe and how much we fear what we don't know, and also in identifying with this other as well and finding those qualities within ourselves. Punk, goth, etc. all embrace this darkness and fear and claim it as their own, crafting it to suit themselves and accepting it as a part of their identities.
Sophie Amador
An aspect of our last lecture that stood out to me was the idea of punk being another version of romanticism. Romanticism was all about the spectacle of being an individual human. Punk had a lot to do with expressing one’s self and themselves within society. This is represented in a prime example such as with the Romanticist’s painting, Liberty Leading the People. It is interesting to think if the Romanticism period had inspired those of the punk era or if there had been a sort of “reincarnation” of the Romanticism period carried out by those participating in the punk era. This leads me to think about whether or not other art periods can repeat themselves in history. Usually, the realm of art keeps progressing and creating new art periods instead of going back toward the past. This also makes me wonder if these periods would expand into a modern, 21st century version of itself or stay as it used to be known as. I believe that this could happen due to society’s ways of revisiting the past and studying it as it was. Society is also much more open to experiencing all techniques and styles of art in this modern era.
Melanie Bergunker
A concept that interested me last class relates to the abundance of cards in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were used as a form of identity, almost like you would share yourself on a sheet of paper. This practice is still used today as business cards and whatnot, but the usage back then seemed far more expressive. The florist may have a more decorative card than the dentist and the dentist more so than the businessman. There were also cards used for advertising to increase the traffic into stores. These cards were made to pop with color and humor, so people could keep them and share them with friends. This concept of individualism could also be expressed with the Gutenberg bibles. They were all different depending on the customer, but he still maintained his particular style throughout. This style included his “mark” on the ink, meaning his typographic legibility and texture. This also included his generous margins and beautiful presswork, which could not be done today.
John Dudzik
What interested me most last class was our presentations comparing all of our different typefaces. Given the same assignment, we each explored our creativity in different ways and seemed in our choices of decoration to match the aesthetic we associated with the writing material we chose for our piece rather than ourselves. A lot of us chose books or poems we liked as children when faced with an assignment to come up with a style that matches us as people. As college students, it is easy to feel detached from our inner child, but creative assignments like this where we get to draw and decorate seem to nurture that inner child. It’s hard to trace back aspects of our personality our the aesthetics we like because of things we did in elementary school, yet when we are asked to reflect ourselves in a piece a majority of us chose something from that period in our lives as a way to represent ourselves. Even in a class where some of us are strangers we are willing to illuminate intimate details of our past and childhood to each other for the sake of design.
Julie Erhardt
What interested me most last class was our discussion about the camera obscura and pictorialism. I wanted to bring up a point that addresses both. There is a technique that Utahs;izes both where the photographer turns an entire room into a camera obscura. They cover every window, enterance, or anything that light can come through and leave only a tiny hole in now of the window. After this is done the image of the outside is reflected upside down, inside the room. Abelardo Morell's famous image of "Time Square in a Hotel room is captured this way. I think this is a cool way to portray pictoralism because you are using the first, most simple form of a camera to create animate that Is manipulated in such a unique way.
Jordyn Simon
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