what we have so far...

taken from bibliotypes

words originate from gestures of the body. 

the first typefaces are directly modeled on the forms of calligraphy. 

typefaces are not bodily gestures, they are manufactured images defined for infinite repetition. 

the history of typography reflects a continual tension between the hand and machine, organic and geometric, human body and abstract system. 

immediately after gutenberg, typefaces reflected traditional heavy, gothic script. 

humanist writers rejected gothic scripts in favour of "lettura antica" classic hand writing. 

humanist scripts were used in prestigious books. Cursive type was used in cheaper writing shops. 16th Century printers integrated "Roman" and "Italic" forms into type families. Italics were not simple slanted versions of the roman typeface. 

with the advent of capitalism, advertisers demanded BIG BOLD letters, distorting anatomical elements of classical letters. so, the larger fonts required carved wooden letters. 

now relationships between letters became more important than the letters themselves. 

your turn #2

Gif by Gwion Christmas

hi, kids. for this second class we did lots of things (we left like 5 posts from yesterday's class for next class): 

under big names: Gutenberg, Tagliente, Ratdolt, Manutius, Griffo, Tory, Wolgemut, et al.

under things discussed: character-as-mark, the importance of calligraphy, movable type, type-face as architecture (floor plan, house, chair), Incunabulum, etc.

under typefaces: Textura (Textualis), Italics, Romain de Ratdolt, Griffo's Bembo, cancelleresca corsiva, etc.

under amazing books: Gutenberg's Bible, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Nuremberg Chronicles
Radolt's Euclid Elements, Book of Hours, etc.

pick your topic, go ahead.

Post for comment #1

via sam reddyhoff

welcome to arh 346! we had a good meeting.

here are some of the topics we talked about:

design is designing, period. all shows "design."
neolithic human marks, why?
typeface in general, font as body, font as house,
idea--->pictograph,
technology impacting style, you do what you're allowed,
minuscule or majuscule?  
steele vs. papyrus vs. vellum vs. codex vs. book vs. kindle
typeface, from Trajan to Times, etc, etc,

remember to sign your name at the bottom of your comments. write down your name (even if you used an alias to sign in). remember this is a for-point weekly assignment. 

go ahead!

technology

 a replica of Gutenberg's press

Style choices are not under the control of designers. they are related to the ways technology develops in a broader cultural sphere.

what's style?

Alfred Stevens, La parisienne Japonaise (1872)

 for example, japonisme, which explodes in France by 1864, then comes to America 20 years later.

the graphic design profession

Some ideas...

To understand graphic design, we have to look at:

1- the profession (how many of you are aware of John Baskerville or Mathew Carter or Zuzana Licko?).
2- technology (as technology advances, we need to understand its place and value).
3- style (what's your syntax? what makes your design yours?).
4- Cultural traditions (graphic design is a product of our age, we have to understand it).

tx for the company

urs fischer, in dubio pro reo, 2007

see you around. long live design!

Naohiro Ukawa

A jack of all trades and master at none, however, Naohiro Ukawa is an exception. His art combines sensuality of deep house, the experimentation of techno, the chaos of noise and the stylish cool of punk. Check some of Ukawa's videos here (Ukawa's Second from top marked with * for FinalExam).

your turn

strange world, jonathan calugi

your turn

your turn!

taken from AIGA's article on Criterion Collection

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.