your turn #8

art by dogboy

what a ride!

george lois, chermayeff & geismar, LOGO, bass' lesson, ed fella, jamie reid, PUNK, david carson's revolution,  the 2000's: sgameister, chris ware, eboy, ellery, barnbrook, shaoua, opara, bodkin, fanelli...

2x4

New York-based design firm 2x4 is credited with helping to redefine graphic design as one of the most inclusive and visible design categories. 2x4's sophisticated approach emphasizes critical thinking and research, and its projects encompass virtually all graphic media — print, motion graphics, and environmental design. The studio's design solutions are visually rewarding, employing rich but unexpected combinations of image, color, and pattern in work that is avant-garde yet rooted in the context of its subject matter. This exhibition illustrates the range of 2x4's design activity through books, custom wallpaper, and video experiences representing projects for clients as diverse as the Brooklyn Museum, KnollTextiles, and Prada (taken from SFMOMA). Michael Rock, principal of 2x4 is a winner of the National Design Award.

Imaginary Forces

Imaginary Forces: We research, we write, we draw, we design, we paint, we photograph, we sculpt, we program, we talk, we argue, we collaborate, we pitch, we imagine. What do we make? Film titles. Commercials. Interactive spaces. Television. Live action. Broadcast design. Virtual destinations. Experience Design. Graphics. Branding. The list goes on. Regardless of the project, though, we always want to tell a story. Simple or complicated, it doesn't matter. Whether it be a main title or a journey through an immersive architectural environment, complete with audio, video, giant puppets and acrobats - the story needs to be compelling and relevant. And however we need to tell it, we will (from Imaginary Forces' Website).

everything comes to an end: rise and fall of grunge

Hop on the nostalgia train for a second. Think back to the 90s. To Nirvana, Linklater’s Slacker, and the flannel-clad rebels on the run from the 80s. To skateboards and graffiti and toe rings and VHS tapes. Things were messy then. And type design was messy, too. Words were splayed and chaotic, letters blurred. Textures were thick and heavy. Concert posters looked like someone had splattered paint on paper and then scratched out band names. You may have noticed it, you may not have, but at its peak, this typography style, called grunge, was ubiquitous. Alternative music cds, videogames, and zines—all the aggregate products of a wayward generation—appropriated its unfinished and frenzied aesthetic, and it became the largest, most cohesive movement in recent font design history. It was everywhere—

and then it wasn't.

saul bass' sales pitch for bell system logo design

Each logo has a story

Here, the history of some of the most important company logos.

Corporate Design

In general, this amounts to a logo (logotype and/or logogram) and supporting devices commonly assembled within a set of guidelines. 

How the identity is applied and confirm approved color palettes, typefaces, page layouts and other such methods of maintaining visual continuity and brand recognition across all physical manifestations of the brand. 

Corporations have, need identity to run through all of their products and merchandise. Identity is the very SELF of the corporation. 

LOGO is a superobject, the future, the becoming of this corporation. LOGO is a soul.

Above: The CBS logo, by William Golden; The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad trademark by Herbet Matter; IBM by Paul Rand and Olivetti by Italian designer Giovanni Pintori.

Paul Rand book and then logo (as branding)

Paul Rand (1914-) is one of the most influential figures in American graphic design. He explored the formal vocabulary of the European avant-garde art movements and developed an unique and distinctly American graphic style which was characterized by simplicity, wit and a rational approach to problem solving. 

Educated in New York at Pratt Institute from 1929-1932, Parson's School of Design from 1932-1933 and the Art Student's League from 1933-1934, Rand was a major force in editorial design. He was art director of Esquire and Apparel Arts (later GQ: Gentleman's Quarterly) from 1935-1941 and designed covers for the Directions cultural journal between 1938 and 1945.

your turn #7

dizzy gillespie sextet, 1955 (album cover, vogue, mid 1950's)

alvin lustig, polish posters, cuban posters, go ahead!

In the 1980's young designers seemed to be parodying their modern teachers

"Laberynth" by Jan Lenica

Wasilewski Mieczyslaw

Mieczyslaw studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts & taught graphic design at the Department of Graphic Arts, Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.

1978

1981

your turn #6

stein brianhoff

the emigrés: zwart, pineles, bass, lubalin, cassandre. mondrian & de stijl, 1940's women's lib: jenny on the job, etc.

World War II Propaganda (& Big Brother in between)

what's borderland?

hi class. FYI: our own, arh 346's leah brown, has her MFA show up. she got a nice review in the the miami new times. 

 My process is very much about trying to get a philosophical or scientific understanding of dreaming through the examination of my own dreams. Dreaming is really kind of lost on science right now, it's something that's very much unexplained, and yet it's something that we each do every night, regardless of how much we remember. I think it's kind of a borderland, and that's why I called the show 'Borderland' - it's this area between something that is real and something that is not real."

it sounds interesting, it looks good.

i plan to go see it. you should, if you can. 

your turn #5

expressionism, dada, surrealism, constructivism's color "filters," the lesson of BAUHAUS, neue typographie, "marks" as art, propaganda vs. advertisement, photomontage, lissitsky, tshichold, Die Wissenhoffsiedlung, the total designer: beal, binder, brodovitch, matter, graphic design as art, etc, etc,  

 what's on your mind?

el lissitzky

lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation). he began his career illustrating yiddish children's books in an effort to promote jewish culture in russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its anti-semitic laws. 

over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. he worked with malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own. in 1921 he took up a job as the russian cultural ambassador to weimar germany, working with and influencing important figures of the bauhaus.

some works by lissitzky.

Moving posters: Man With a Movie Camera

Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera was produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU. It presents urban life in Ukraine and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, deployed or developed, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles (WKPD).

Art for the people?

Vladimir Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

40th secession exhibition poster, 1912

by Richard Harlfinger

what's unique about this design is the expressionist "S" enguls the lettering blocks within its rhythm. the letters are hand-drawn the design overwhelms any individual expressive quality. the weight of the negative space is expertly calibrated to strike a compact pulsing balance. this is both about abstraction and geometry. the organic motifs of the nouveau era have been left behind. the search for a universal language of form had begun.  

your turn #4

Csilla Kleyánzki

we have many themes:

designing romanticism,
koenig's steam press,
political satire,
daguerreotype,
photography as portrait of the famous (nadar),
photography as sience of movement (e. muybridge),
photography as art (pictorialism) 
erotica,
circus' "freaks,"
egyptian serifs,
photography as war reportage,
almanacs,
cards,

go ahead, see you in two weeks!
 

arh 346 important update

due to a previous personal engagement, i will not be able to come to class next thursday, feb. 13. please, post your comments as if we had our regular class. i'll see you thursday february 20th. 

your turn #3

The madness of Michael Mapes, via koikoikoi

Dear class, there's plenty to talk about.

What excites your fancy?

Garamond (hope you remember my board quick notes) maps, infamous books, Bodoni, L'Encyclopedie, newspapers (are they really "dying" or judst "morphing"?), Baskerville (and the design of "The Declaration"), Caslon, etc.

Nota bene: If I can ask something from the class is to try to be less casual about your comments and try to really ponder design in a deliberate manner.

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).