it's your turn

Roman Cieslewicz, Katastrofa, 1961

it's your turn

Rodchenko's photomontage of Mayakovsky (1923)

Gertrude Stein reading!

Digital advertising is 20!

Re-imagining advertising:

Jan van Krimpen

Above, Jan van Krimpen's pages from Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach, by Roland Holst, Paladiun Series, 1920. Van Krimpen received an art education at the academy of art at The Hague. An early interest in poetry led him in 1917 to publish the poetic works of his friends in a series for which he designed the format. He received a commission from the Dutch post office to draw the lettering for a special commemorative stamp to be printed by the prominent firm of Enschedé in 1923. The success of the design led Enschedé to invite him to design a new typeface for the firm.

The typeface he produced, Lutetia (the Roman name for Paris), was the official lettering for an exhibition of Dutch art in Paris in 1927, and its reception led to his lifelong association with the firm. In addition to Lutetia, van Krimpen's well-known faces include Antigone Greek (1927), Romanée (1928), Romulus (1931), Cancelleresca Bastarda (1935), and Spectrum (1943).

His types became well known in the United States through the Limited Editions Club and in England through the Nonesuch Press.

have a nice spring break!

if you have any questions about the midterm

Aida, 1915 by Marcelo Dudovich

post them here.

at the suggestion of a diligent student as to whether you should know the full name of an artist, my answer was: "of course." writing "morris" instead of "william morris" doesn't make any sense (there are thousands of morrises in england). sure, there are household names like gutenberg or picasso, but that isn't generally the norm.

Designing decadence

Egan Beresford, Flowers of Evil, 

It's difficult to grasp decadence without this provisional list of books and characters.

The Master:
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal, (bilingual translation)

Pleasure & deviations:
Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray,
Andre Gide, The Immoralist,
Leopold Sacher Masoch, Venus in Furs,

Preciousness, snobism:
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice,
J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, 
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle Maupin,

Evil:
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw,
George de Maurier, Trilby,

Hysteria, phobia, ennui, pain:
Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina,
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground,
Franz Kafka, The Trial,

Monsters:
Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis,

Dreams:
Sygmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,

Artists:
Aubrey Beardsley, (illustrator)
Egan Beresford, (illustration)
Gustave Moreau, (painter)
Fernand Khnopff, (painter)
Gustav Klimt, (painter)
Rodolphe Bresdin, (engraver, illustrator)
Alfred Kubin, (illustrator)

your turn #5

to keep in mind

in my syllabus (on course contents and grades):  

Post comments amount to 25% of the final grade. 

your turn #4

honoré de balzac, photo by nadar

in-between epochs

another one by the talenccentric Mark Addison Smith

your turn #3

illustration adam lilfuchs fuchs

what is the dynamic between typeface and layout (grid)?

reinassance, dante's inferno

carl linnaeus, systema naturae, 1758

since the aesthetic effect of letterforms depends, in part of layout?

your turn #2

 marija tiurina's egg soldier @ juxtapoz

incunabula, gutenberg, gothic typeface, lower vs capitals,  imagines morti, the big star designers (plantin, manutius, ratdolt,  tory). then we discussed the types of the renaissance: tory and manutius' "new" roman, the bembo, the garamond, the bastarda. (we'll come back to tyndale's bible, maps and vesalius next week).

what's your take?

Erhardt Ratdolt's Euclid's Elements of Geometry

Erhardt Ratdolt's Euclid's Elements of Geometry (1482), a dazzling white-on-black design brackets the text, and incredible fine line diagrams in the wide margin visually define Euclid's terms.This is an interesting page on Ratdolt. Here the borders and initials are used as design elements. Pictor (Bernard Mahler) is supposed to be the designer. But ornamentation aside, Ratdolt is still aware that geometry is the main design here. 

your turn #1

nice class! for my first lecture i tried to present "design" as a more comprehensive way of life. we need to revise our preconceptions and start looking at these "samples" from the past not as archaic, worn-out objects, but instead as wonderful examples of how we design our lives. 

by the way, read the last posts, from "decretals" on, which i didn't cover.

remember, your comment (150 word minimum) can deal with any theme covered in my lecture. you can comment using your google id, but remember to "sign" at the bottom of your comment. if you post anonymously (without an id) you should sign your name as well.

advice: it's better to write your comment in a "word" file, save it and then just cut and paste it on the comment box when you're ready to post. in case something could happen while trying to post and you end up loosing your comment after having invested time and effort.

go ahead!

the new power of arthoodication?

Stephen Kornhauser’s glass jar of cotton balls used to clean the museum’s Jean Arp 

sculpture 

the new power of arthoodication at m. bourbaki:

The general purpose of curators and critics is to enthuse the public the into consuming art. Art is culture. Culture is good for you. But culture, as Donna Haraway suggests, can be a logic of "domination of a necessary but dangerous instinctual nature." Unfortunately, artists, the other party in this game, are too concerned mimicking & negotiating with what's already sanctioned out there in their Weltanschauung (incidentally, a systemic organism digesting symbols in the same redundant manner). The jar exhibits a categorical problem: How to explain this uncanny passage from objecthood-to-arthood unless it undergoes a process of arthoodication? Is it really about a magic-friction-factor? Is it proximity of contact or q-entanglement whereby the cotton balls and Jean Arp's museum sculpture become a part of the same phenomenon?). 

P.L.E.A.S.E. don't forget the student evaluations!

Each year you have the opportunity to evaluate our job. The evaluations for ARH 346 are up. Don't forget to leave your opinion. Thank you.

See you next week.  

The child consumer

Are children under excessive commercial pressure to be seen buying and wearing fashionable brands?

YES. The average American child watches an estimate between 25,000 to 40,000 television commercials per year. In the UK, it is about 10,000 $15-17 billion is spent by companies advertising to children in the US. Over $4 billion was spent in 2009 by the fast food industry alone. The marketing seems to be worth it. For example, Teens in the US spend around $160 billion a year Children (up to 11) spend around $18 billion a year “Tweens” (8-12 year olds) “heavily influence” more than $30 billion in other spending by parents, and “80 percent of all global brands now deploy a ‘tween strategy.’” Children (under 12) and teens influence parental purchases totaling over $130-670 billion a year. 

The Journal of the American Medical Association has said that children between the ages of two and seventeen watch an annual average of 15,000 to 18,000 hours of television, compared with 12,000 hours spent per year in school. Children are also major targets for TV advertising, whose impact is greater than usual because there is an apparent lessening of influence by parents and others in the older generation.… According to the [Committee on Communications of the American Academy of Pediatrics], children under the age of two should not watch television at all because at that age, brain development depends heavily on real human interactions.

A nice website here.

End of suburbia

You can watch the whole documentary here.

First World vs. Third World realities

Water predicament

Where does our dumping go?

Try to make buildings imitate ecosystems

Issues in Contemporary Design

Manipulation
Sustainable design
Waste and waste management
Social consciousness
Buddhist Economics (Gross National Happiness)
Poverty
Critical design
Environmental design
Recycling
Propaganda
Business ethics
Occupational safety
Design redundancy
Consumer protection
Social engineering
Obsolescence

Suburban sprawl

Green Design

Overconsumption

Your turn #11

Raoul Ubac, 1910-1985, via Juxtapoz.

What do you have in mind? Think outside the box.

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Design is History

A very good website for graphic design history here. You get a time table on the left hand side and a scroll down menu of schools & figures. A nice bio with clear images informs the artist or school. It's a work in progress!