Logo trends for 2012

2012

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Can Advertising Survive Digital?

In the Daily Beast, an interesting article by Dan Lyons:

In this brave new world, the role of advertising agencies would change as well. Instead of being a pack of well-paid liars, ad agencies would act more like consultants, helping companies figure out how to fix their businesses and improve their brand reputation based on actual accomplishments.

Your turn #8

Nicholas Gottlund, print on aluminum plates, via Juxtapoz

Polish posters, Cuban posters, LOGO! What's your take?

Freedom and originality

The Polish Poster is an original school, which goes from the mid-1950's to the early 1980's. There are two things that sets this school apart: search for freedom and originality. Polish artists try to create outside the box of Socialist Realism. In doing so they come up with a specific code-system, which is unique, and at the same time, universal. Two of the main underlying styles are a kind of Polish Surrealism and Polish Pop art.

By the way, this is a great page for Polish Poster History!

What's so (a)typical about the most typical face?

After this image appeared on Yahoo News, I posted something on miami.bourbaki about the riddle concerning "typical."

Your turn #7

Alicia Olink with Ray Gun, Fancesco Locastro, 2011

There is plenty to talk about: Bauhaus and its ripple effect, the war poster, information design, the masters: Lissitzky, Gabo, Moholy Nagy, the independents: Tschichold, Zwart, The New York School: Liberman, Herbert Matter, Saul Bass, Brodovitch, Sutnar, Lubalin, Pineles, the International Topographic Style, advertising vs. propaganda.

Go ahead!

Who needs Graphic Design Theory?

Helen Amstrong believes we do.

A Design Education Manifesto

I found this Design Education Manifesto by Mitch Goldstein I'd like to share with you:

School is hard. Design school is especially hard because so much of it exists within the abstract, the opinion. There are few, if any, absolutes as you go through design school. Much of design education is about learning some key techniques and then trying to apply them to your work in interesting ways. The following are some thoughts I have about how to go through a design program and get the most out of the experience, and beyond as a creative professional. More here.

Lady Gaga reaches 20-M t* followers!

Wow! What should we make of it?

Your turn #6

Jugend cover, 1901 (via Juxtapoz)

We've gone through an explosion of art movements & personalities. The main idea is the  design of the avant-garde: Cubism, Blue Rider, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Neo-plasticism, Constructivism, Surrealism, art for the people, art goes to the movies, propaganda vs. advertising, collage, photo-collage, the propaganda poster, (functional art ---> floor plans? ---> elevations?). Big names: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Marinetti, Duchamp, Breton, Dalí, Mondrian, Magritte, A. M. Cassandre, John Heartfield, etc. 

Go ahead!

Designing persuasion (early 20th century)

 

Two approaches, one in favor, one against. The important thing is to see that both persuasion and fear can be "designed."

Ken Russell's The Devils (1971), apropos of decadent Pre-raphaelites

Could not find Ken Russell Dante's Inferno in youtube

Your suggestion makes perfect sense: At the BBC Russell had his own "pre-raphaelite" company: Oliver Reed, Max Adrian, Murray Melvin, Christopher Logue (the one-time socialist poet). Iza Teller, and Judith Paris among others -names frequently found in the cast listings of his feature films. Russell is a music lover, who manipulates anachronism with almost baroque splendor (for which his work has been called "bizarre," "outlandish," "sick").

You get a good idea of Russell's bombastic style with The Devils, his 1971 film, banned by 17 local authorities in England. It attracted many scathing reviews. Judith Crist called it a "grand fiesta for sadists and perverts." Derek Malcolm called it "a very bad film indeed." However, The Devils won the award for Best Director-Foreign Film in the Venice Film Festival.

Your turn #5

Jean Delville, Idol of Perversity, 1896

There are plenty of themes: Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Aestheticism, Exoticism, Decadence, erotica, 19th century consumerism. Then there are the great artists of the epoch: Chéret, Grasset, Mucha, Dudovich, Koch, the Beggarstaffs, Toorop, Delville, Goudy, Beardsley, etc.

What are your thoughts?

OBEY's appropriation of Art Nouveau

 

 

Designing pork

Mark Bittman's food columns in the NY Times have recently taken an ethical-gastronomical angle. The issue at hand is McDonald's new requirements that its suppliers of pork  provide plans for phasing out gestation crates. Bittman writes:

This is important for the animals and for the entire meat-selling industry. Let’s start with the sows: a gestation crate is an individual metal stall so small that the sow cannot turn around; most sows spend not only their pregnancies in crates, but most of their lives. For humans, this would qualify as “cruel and unusual punishment,” and even if you believe that pigs are somehow “inferior,” it’s hard to rationalize gestation crates once you see what they look like. (For the record, defenders of the system suggest that crates prevent sows from fighting in group pens. There’s no space to argue that here, but it’s nonsense.)

This is when you come in because "designing pork" impacts our food design in terms of that seldom explored food topic: animal cruelty.

Is it better to eat an animal that lives a more humane life?*
__________
*When it comes to animal abuse and neglect, "humane" is generally used. Few have stopped to ponder why. I find difficult to hold a moral standard which ultimately serves the very purpose of killing the animal being protected. It's like saying: "I'll keep you happy until it's time for you to die" so, 1- you taste better, 2- I feel less guilty for eating you and -on top- treating you miserably."

Designing (cyber) dependence

I find this interesting article in the New York Times by Pamela Paul entitled "Don't Tell Me, I Don't Want to Know" addressing informational overload:   

The entire world has become this Dickensian series in which you are not visited by three ghosts but by eight million ghosts,” said Sloane Crosley, author of “How Did You Get This Number.” “I feel as if I see things about people that I don’t necessarily want to see, and then it’s lodged like a piece of corn in my subconscious.” Whether it’s via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, e-mail or some other form of Internet connectedness, the latest headlines from your super-successful frenemy from high school, the boss who fired you and the awful 14-year-old boy your daughter is in love with are now in your face. Sometimes you don’t want to know about these people at all. Other times, you don’t want to know quite so much.

So, do we want it or not? Paul reluctantly acknowledges that our choice is caught in vicious cycle:

Let’s be straight: it’s not just that other people’s minutiae bombard us regularly. Sometimes, we seek it out despite ourselves. Whether you call it low-buzz stalking, cyberstalking or the unsettling new term “creeping,” people can now browse around the edges of former intimates’ lives, learning much too much about them:

In other words, the bombardment works!, which is why we're bombarded in the first place. In case anyone ever thinks of personal (cyber)fulfillment, Paul cites that,

A study published last month in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking found that the more time people spent on Facebook, the happier they perceived their friends to be and the sadder they felt as a consequence.

In the end one feels Paul's title could be revised: "Don't Tell Me, I Don't Want to Know."

Your turn #4

 Auguste Belloc & Félix Jacques Antoine Moulin, Femme sur un lit, 1856

Plenty to discuss: photo as reportage, as art. Illustration as fashion, as natural science, as social mores, as war reportage, as the exotic. Harper's cultural contribution. Victorian design and Pre-Raphaelite design. And the emerging Arts and Crafts.

Next week I'll talk about a huge market for 19th century erotica illustrations, daguerreotypes and early photography: EROTICA!

Your turn #3

Koo-koo, "the bird girl"

Great class. There is plenty to talk about: communities of belief, early newspapers, charts, Blake, Romanticism, daguerreotype, political satire, photo-portraiture.

Pick your favorite topic!

Linotype Machine

Your turn #2

Incunabula by William Morris (1834-1896)

Hi. This class consisted of a more detailed survey of the history of graphic design right after Gutenberg and into the Counter-Reformation. We examined the impact of the new technology for 1- standardization, 2- new forms of reading, 2- a new market, 3- division  of labor, etc.

Simultaneously, one can see a stylistic development in typeface as such, which has two aspects: the inherent technological advance makes possible a different production of typeface styles as well as the proliferation of regional differences (for example, why is it that Gothic becomes so popular in Germany shortly after Gutenberg where as Rotunda, a similar sharp-cornered yet slightly more rounded script is created in Bologna?).        

(as we saw, some designers, such as Ratdolt, who worked in Venice, are good at both) .

We also talked about the book as a kind of architecture. Once we have printers and regional styles, we get a sort of "made in" constant. So we get, incipit, rubrication, border, frame, column, marginalia & illustrations, all aspects of standardization of the profession:

example of illustration inside the page using metal engraving, copper plates, an intaglio method

so-called column, they are explanatory notes around the text of the laws, in fact the type is set so that notes are arranged to surround the text in incunabula

Pick any of these themes or any variation of it. 

Beliefs were (and still are) formed by exposure to graphic representations

Emblematum liber, circa 1500's

Spicy Adventure, 1935

DC Comics, late 1950's

Your turn #1

Illustration by Ricardo Leite

Again, welcome to my class. Nice first meeting. There is plenty to talk about:

1- Design as individual mark, as communication, as expression, as lebeswelt. The importance -and effect- of technology, the good and the bad of it  (forgot to mention global warming, an obvious effect of human -involuntary- design).
2- Style as form, personal stamp, as methodology, as performance, etc.
3- The relativity of epoch and the idea of obsolescence (i.e., purposeful decay built into the design).
4- How design is relative to materials, i.e., language, alphabet gets inscribed in stone, papyrus, vellum, paper, or digitalized ( i-pad, kindle, etc). The idea of books as objects, media, memorabilia, etc (I made a case for a future Kindle that is 3-D, and feels like a analog book). I find a peek into the immediate future of tablets here (in fact we commented this possibility):

McIntyre also predicts that tablets, and not just smart phones, will become more like digital wallets, replacing the need to carry physical currency or identification. She suggests that identity will be vouched by “voiceprint” (speech verification) or software that can analyze an individual’s keystroke patterns.

 5- If there is anything else worth saying, go ahead!

I am closing this post next Thursday at 4pm.

15,000 used phones per day!

Waste Management Design

Bioplastics

Take a look at this link, Fecal Face.com, it has plenty of information. You'll meet a couple of the artists we talked about yesterday).

Your turn #9 (your last)

 drawing by KRSN

Hi. Remember I'll close this post next Tuesday at 4pm. Please, have your all your comments by then. I'd like to read from them next -our last- class.

Nagi Noda's peculiar aesthetics

Born in Tokyo, director, art director Nagi Noda has established herself as one of Japan's most prominent young designers. She rose to prominence as an art director designing print advertising, book designs and CD sleeves before turning to larger clients such as Nike and the famed Laforet Harajuku. Her commercials have won a host of prizes in Japan. Nagi has also shot several highly acclaimed and inventive films, including her short film "FITNESS VIDEO for being appraised as an EX-FAT GIRL" featuring exercising poodles, and music videos: her stunning and much-loved promo for Yuki entitled "Sentimental Journey" exemplifies her work's inventive left-field visual sensibility and poignant emotional colorings.

Res Sapiens' interactivity

The Res Sapiens project merges the digital world with the physical. It connects them seamlessly, treating both entities equally. It asks questions not only to us, but also to itself.

Res Sapiens refers to thinking physical objects, from products to architecture, that surpass their visual representation and display their meaning, role and status in society. The continuous stream of (public) digital data and information form the energy on which the Res Sapiens can live. It builds the oil fields of the future, where an ever growing digital heritage increases our understanding and knowledge and, most importantly, creates a stronger collective consciousness.

List of topics and movements for Final Exam

Bauhaus: School of design, architecture, and applied arts that existed in Germany from 1919 to 1933. It was based in Weimar until 1925, Dessau through 1932, and Berlin in its final months. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius. The curriculum trained students equally in art and in technically expert craftsmanship, so it sought to end the schism between the arts and the applied arts. Graphic artists: Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Herbet Bayer, Johannes Itten.

De Stijl: (Dutch: "The Style"), group of Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917, including the painters Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and the architect Jacobus Johannes, Pieter Oud among others. Its members, worked in an abstract style, seeking laws of equilibrium and harmony applicable both to art and to life. As a movement, De Stijl influenced painting, decorative arts (including furniture design), typography, and architecture, but it was principally architecture that realized both. Graphic artists: Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld.

Swiss School of Graphic Design: developed in Switzerland in the 1950s. It emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces.The style used photography instead of illustration. The idea was to improve communication, learning the principles of space and proportions. Graphic artists: Jan Tschichold, formulator of The New Typography and Josef Müller-Brockman, Anton Stankowski, Armin Hoffman.

The Polish School of Design: After years of Social Realism being all-pervasive in art, Polish artistic life suddenly exploded in the 1960s with a new syle based on avantgarde contributions such as Surrealism, dada, collage etc. The Polish Poster style swept through Europe in the 1960s and the 1970s. Graphic artists: Roman Cieslewicz, Wiesław Wałkuski, Waldemar Swierzy, Jan Lenica and Franciszek Starowieyski.

"The New York School": The first wave of modern design in America, imported by talented immigrants from Europe. It introduces Americans to European avant-garde. While borrowing freely from the work of European designers, Americans added new forms and concepts to the tradition of graphic design. Graphic artists: Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Cipe Pineles, Alexey Brodovich, George Lois, Ivan Chermayeff, Alexander Liberman, Herb Lubalin.

Grunge typography (1990s):  David Carson, the acclaimed graphic designer who created Ray Gun magazine, is the so-called Godfather of Grunge. His method was simple: you don’t have to know the rules before breaking them, and never mistake legibility for communication. Carson’s technique of ripping, shredding, and remaking letters touched a nerve (THE AWL)

Maximalism: (1990-today) as a genre in the arts said to emphasize work-intensive practices and concentrates on the process of creation itself. Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich. Maximalism is generally figurative, politically aware, socially inclined, usually erotic, ironic and humorous, both in concept and form.

Sorry about the canceling the class, but

I lost my wallet this afternoon right before class. I barely had time to go to LC 180 and let you know what had happened. Luckily, it occurred to me to go back to Student Union's "lost and found" and there it was. A nice soul had returned it, including a $100 bill. It was already 5:20pm.

Please, finish posting your comments and I'll see you next week. Thanks for your understanding.

Your turn #8