BANKSY

Banksy needs little introduction. There is substantial public uncertainty about his identity and personal and biographical details. According to Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier engineer, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s." His artworks are often satirical pieces of art that encompass topics such as politics, culture, and ethics. His vandalism, combines graffiti writing with a distinctive stencelling technique similar to Blek le Rat, who began in 1981 in Paris to work with stencils. His art has appeared in cities around the world.

Laurent Fétis

Laurent Fétis is a graphic designer. Born in 1970 in Orsay, France he studied at the College of Architecture in Versailles and the National College of Decorative Arts in Paris. In 1999 he set up his own studio where his work enters a number of fields including music, art and design. He has collaborated with M, Tahiti 80, Mellow, Hideki Kaji and the labels: Emperor, Norton, Minty Fresh, Escalator, Trattoria, Emi, Virgin, Universal, East West. His work has been seen in Les Inrockuptibles, Jalouse, The Face, Studio Voice, and Escape. He collaborated on Roman Coppola's first full-length film, CQ. He is represented by Kreo Gallery in Paris, and his work has been presented at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, the Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, and has been the subject of several publications. Laurent Fétis teaches visual communication at the National College of Art and Design in Reims.

eBOY (2)

Stephan Sagmeister (2)

Typolution

Your turn #10

Your turn #9

Roger Cook and Don Shanosky, signage symbol system for the U.S. Department of Transporation, 1974. The poster introduced the 34-symbol to a wide audience. Above, Otl Eicher's pictographs for the Munich Olympiads, 1972.

The Bernbach revolution: If Paul Rand had developed a bellwether approach to advertising integrating words and pharases in a freer organization, using visual metaphors* and puns seldom seen in ads, Bernbach removed the boundaries from verbal and visual communication and evolved visual/verbal syntax: word and image fused into a conceptual expression of an idea so they became completely interdependent.

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* A visual metaphor can be defined as the representation of a new system by means of visual attributes corresponding to a different system, familiar to the user that behaves in a similar way.

Alvin Eisenman combined serendipity, curiosity and tenacity to move from a boyhood love of a printing plant to the helm of the first graduate school in graphic design in the United States, at Yale University. For forty years he assembled diverse and brilliant classes to be taught by the legends of design history, and left the imprint of his interests on several generations of designers. Recently he retired amid much fanfare at a gala party. When pressed on current plans, he said, "All I know is I won't make a firm appointment if it's a nice day to go to a museum." Yet, his calendar is dotted with trips to Silicon Valley to see new products unveiled, with meetings at the Morgan Guaranty Trust—where he is a design consultant—and sessions at his computer to finish his account of how graphic design came to be and his speculation on where it is going (AIGA).

Henry Wolf was known for his bold yet simple use of expressive typography, surreal photography and conceptual illustration. Rather than accept the typical role of an acquiescent layout artist, he closely collaborated with editors to define their magazines' personalities. He selected typefaces; commissioned pictorial features from well-known or newly discovered photographers and illustrators; and decided what to feature on covers. Wolf taught magazine design and photography at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union and the Parsons School of Design. He received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1976 and was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1980.

George Tscherny

George Tscherny's success as a designer can be traced back to his childhood, adolescence and early professional years when his resolve to overcome the vicissitudes of fate proved to him how important tenacity can be. For the Uris Buildings Corporation, which during the late 1950s and early 1960s was one of the major construction firms in New York, he designed a black-and-white annual report cover showing a few artless building blocks asymmetrically composed—a decidedly abstract yet playful idea, which he says "sneaked its way through because one man was convinced that it was the right symbolism." For Millipore, an manufacturer of scientific instruments for which he designed the identity, Tscherny determined that a style manual—the sacred bible of corporate communications—had little value because "bad designers will use it improperly, and good designers should not be constricted by too many rules." Instead of a typically elaborate and costly system, Tscherny produced a series of "corporate identity samplers" which concisely describe the graphic parameters within which the designers should work. Again, his corporate mentor saw the logic in this strategy (AIGA).

Your turn #8

Your turn #7

I've posted a little late (Monday). This post covers from Dada to Constructivism. Go ahead!

Above a reduced version of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. "Everything else outside of ourselves is unreal and first becomes reality, when we turn it into reality by virtue of the power of the mind." Expressionists had an urge to create the world anew, which bears a similarity to that characteristically animistic attitude of the Expressionist poets and playwrights who create in their texts an alternative world of selfhood in which figures and events are meaningful only as essences or as correlatives of consciousness, and in which “the mind forms reality according to the idea.

Your turn #6

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Your turn #2

Celtic book design

In the Book of Durrow (bottom) each Gospel begins with an Evangelist's symbol - a man for Matthew, a lion for Mark, a calf for Luke and an eagle for John. The next page is a carpet page, followed by the initial page. The first letter of the text is enlarged and decorated, with the following letters surrounded by dots. Parallels with metalwork can be noted in the rectangular body of St Matthew, which looks like a millefiori decoration, and in details of the carpet pages. There is a sense of space in the design of all the pages of the Book of Durrow. Open vellum balances intensely decorated areas. Animal interlace of very high quality appears on one page. Other motifs include spirals, triskeles, ribbon plaits and circular knots in the carpet pages and borders around the Evangelists. The Book of Kells (top) is the high point of a group of manuscripts in what is known as the Insular style produced from the late 6th through the early 9th centuries in Ireland. One characteristic of these medieval manuscripts is horror vacui, a design principle of thelogical connotations.

Banksy mural sells for 208,100£!

I thought this was of interest for you graphic designers: A street mural in West London by British maverik, graphic designer, "art terrorist" and provocateur Banksy, sold on eBay for a whopping $407,000, after a total of 69 bids. To top it off, the vendor estimates that the cost of removing the painting could be close to $10,000, which would have to be paid by the buyer (Via Juxtapoz).

Your turn #1

Hi. I've posted some of the main "design" developments for sections 1-6 of our textbook. For your 150-word comment, you may pick any one of the seven posts below. Let's emphasize historic design aspects, which is our main pursuit here. In addition to your main comment, you may add comments as responses to other comments (discussions are always a plus!). If necessary, I may interject and make a suggestion here and there. Please, don't sign in with an alias. Remember, you have until next Wednesday night to input your comments. Good luck! 

ART BASEL MAP

You want to Basel this weekend?

Other famous logos: Rob Janoff for Apple; the McDonald's logo created by Jim Schindler in 1962 (to look like new arch shaped signs on the sides of the restaurants). Above, the current official Microsoft logo created by Scott Baker (1987) and Nike, originally developed by Carolyn Davidson in 1971 (She was one of 35 people who made suggestions as to what logo to use for the organization).

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Perhaps the most famous and influential of all silent films, Metropolis had for 75 years been seen only in shortened or truncated versions. Now, restored in Germany with state-of-the-art digital technology, under the supervision of the Murnau Foundation, and with the original 1927 orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz added, Metropolis can be appreciated in its full glory. It is, as A. O. Scott of The New York Times declared, "A fever dream of the future. At last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927." Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of these two societies is realized through images that are among the most famous of the 20th century, many of which presage such sci-fi landmarks as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Lavish and spectacular, with elaborate sets and modern science fiction style, Metropolis stands today as the crowning achievement of the German silent cinema (taken from www.kino.com/metropolis).

Your turn #8

An excerpt from a Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). Over the course of a career that has spanned nearly two decades and 25 films, both short and feature, filmmaker Guy Maddin has provided his viewers with more than their fair share of unique, cinematic moments. To provide just one example, in Tales, his first feature film, the audience is allowed to watch as one of the director's many eccentric characters, a male who is attempting to make himself more attractive to the ladies relaxing on a nearby beach, disappears behind a dilapidated building, troubled that his hair is dry and in such a mess. At this point, the audience may expect that some grooming is in order, but most first time viewers could never predict how such a grooming process will eventually unfold. Out of sight from the women, the character manages to find a shiny, dead fish, which he then squeezes frantically over his head, until its guts are wretched open, spilling fish oil all over the man's hair. The character soon reemerges, hair slicked back and full of fish oil. He is now ready to properly swoon the ladies still lying on the sands of Gimli beach (Senses of Cinema).