your turn #6 (due on tuesday March 28)

Gustav Klimt, Woman in Gold, 1907

Hi class, today, Tuesday, March 21, you received an announcement regarding our class next Tuesday, March 28, which I’ll attend. I will be there to teach the class@ 5pm. I’m sorry for the mixed messages. Everything else stays the same. Here's the homework in place of my absence. 

There's plenty to talk about: Gesamtkunstwerk, Symbolism in its three variants (check the post), Vienna Secession, Behrens, Dudovich, Hoffmanss' Stoclet Palace, Wiener Werkstätte, the Deutscher Werkbund, the mark of Analytic Cubism, the mark of collage, how today's "Installation Art" is just an evolution from Gesamtkunstwerk, 

1. Instead of the usual 150 words, let's produce 200 words for this specific homework. 

2. Research the topic and avoid the echo chamber syndrome. 

3. When we get together, I expect to have a lively discussion on your comments.

Go ahead.

your turn #5

Chromolithographs, circa 1850

Dear class, there's plenty to comment on: William Blake, Crystal Palace, Art Nouveau, Pictorialism, the Pre-raphaelites, and their heroes: Mackmurdo, Morris, Owens, Evertt Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Morris's Kelmscott Press, etc. 

Go ahead.  

your turn #4

 The Crystal Palace, 1854, (perhaps the the symbol of Victorian design)

Dear class: please, take a look at this link for typeface development from 15th to 19th century!

We had to move fast, so there is plenty to comment about typeface development: from Gutenberg to Jenson to Manutius, Griffo, Caslon, Baskerville, Didot (influenced by Baskerville), and Bodoni. It's a fascinating story of design influenced by climate, language, and culture, and by "culture" I mean religion, politics, ideas, etc. In the end, you could see it as a struggle between north and south, Humanism vs. Conservatism, Protestantism vs. Catholicism, etc.   

Erotica, take a look at these works (it's all in Wikipedia) 

Here are the graphic design highlights: 1. newspapers, 2. magazines, 3. the advent of "community of interests" (gardening, mechanics, children's books, music printing, postcards), 4. 19th-century posters: fairs, circus, nightlife in general, etc. (this is for next class).  

In terms of technological development, we had: the advent of photography and how it changes how a culture sees itself: landscape photography, portraiture, natural science, war reportage, anthropology (Talbot's Pencil of Nature), etc.  

In terms of movement, we briefly talked about Romanticism and Victorian design (by the way, forgot to talk about this).

your turn #2

 

Hypteronomachia Polyphili (Trophy of Roman arms) This is the most celebrated book of the Renaissance, 1490s

(amazing) map of Venice, 1546 y Jacopo de Barbari

We've moved on to the late Middle Ages & the beginning of the Renaissance, right before Gutenberg's moveable type invention in 1450. There's plenty to discuss. You may go back and pick any theme from the last class: Decretals, cartography, the printshop, Ratdolt, The Nuremberg Chronicles,  life in the scriptorium, how the mark changes itself, design in the middle ages, even cheese production!  Research your topic; no echo chambers.

Go ahead.

your turn #1

chichen itza, mexico, 1200 AD

Yesterday's class was fun. 😀

To bring home this idea of the mark, it would be nice to think of a mark that has made a difference in your life. 

So, think of anything, man-made, that contains design and purpose in it, that means something to you (for whatever reason). It could go from trivial to mind-boggling. Search and try to connect the dots between the mark and your mind. 

150 words minimum. 

To leave a comment, click the word "comment" next to the pencil. A comment box appears. Write your comment in the box, sign with your name, and click "post comment." 

Better to write down your comment first, and cut and paste it into the box. If there's a glitch, your comment may disappear. 

Go ahead.      

the mark in all its three dimensional beauty (the trajan column)

the column itself, quite a marvel for first century ad. standards. the structure is about 30 metres (98 feet) in height, 35 metres (115 feet) including its large pedestal. the shaft is made from a series of 20 colossal carrara marble drums, each weighing about 32 tons with a diameter of 3.7 metres (12. feet). the 190-metre (620-foot) frieze winds around the shaft 23 times. inside the shaft, a spiral staircase of 185 steps provides access to a viewing platform at the top. the capital block of Trajan's Column weighs 53.3 tons, which had to be lifted to a height of 112 feet. which makes it a feat of architecture and engineering. so, the design as a mark obliges technology, production of coins,

excavations around the column court indicate that there were preexisting roads and buildings on site. the column shaft was an artificial unit of 100 Roman feet, increased and adjusted by the pedestal and other elements,

the crowning statue and the helical frieze both elevate the princeps and advertise victory over the dacians which financed the forum. Trajan is presented as a paternal commander, exhibiting the formulaic ruler-ship qualities of pietas, clementia, liberalitas, etc, control of a disciplined, multi-cultural army,

on the frieze itself (and keep in mind the freeze wraps around the whole column we see history unfolding before our eyes... trajan army forces presented as disciplined and technically accomplished, held in reserve during battles, but active in hi-tech sieges. here romans become acculturators, spreading mediterranean culture and architecture through their construction of military installations, clearance of forests and road-building,

the art becomes extremely detailed, key historical and topographical points were presented on vertical axes to improve viewer comprehension and to emphasise cardinal achievements (victory between wars, the danube bridge, capture of treasure, death of Decebalus, the presentation of his severed head, etc). these key episodes and symbolic elements were strung together with logically organised generic images (march, construction, adlocutio, sacrifice, battle, siege, submission), always subordinated to panegyric intent of the whole, the lesson? 

PROPAGANDA EXISTED BEFORE 20th century!

by presenting the veristic and ethnically specific barbarian spolia on the pedestal reliefs victory beyond far imperial frontiers was given detailed immediacy. trajan’s triumphs, triumphal games and coin issues had already educated the audience about warfare events, barbarian peoples and barbarian material culture,

here are two angles, one from from the balcony with the lower elevation reconstruction of the Basilica Ulpia and the asymmetric positioning of the Equus Traiani base, the two most prominent statues of Trajan in his Forum were intervisible.

a clear appreciation of the magnificence of the whole Forum complex was facilitated. see that beyond the confines of the Forum a number of Trajanic building projects were also viewable to advantage from the balcony, notably the Thermae Traianae on the Oppian Hill to the east-south-east, dominating the Amphitheatrum Flavium and the Thermae Titi (many of these buildings have disappeared).

DEAR CLASS, DON'T FORGET TO EVALUATE THIS COURSE

it has been a great pleasure to be with this smart, driven, talented, group. 

whatever you say about this course is important for for me & for the ARH program.

make the time, it takes a few minutes. 

thank you!

nicole martinez (under 30)

 

nicole martinez is from miami florida. she works from miami beach.

the dead good young, website project.

excuse me while i kiss the sky, illustration.

juri zaech (under 30)

juri zaech is a Swiss Art Director, currently living in Paris, France. He works in advertising while doing other projects on the side, which is what you're looking at.

Nils chair.

Telemark typeface.

leslie david (under 30)

David is a Paris-based illustrator and designer who got her start at the fashion-forward French ad agency Petronio Associates. There she had the opportunity to apply her background in design and illustration to the agency’s biannual fashion and culture magazine, Self Service, as well as projects for clients like Colette, Chloe, Pucci, and Miu Miu.

Illustration for Bromance Records

tomi um (under 30)

new york times sunday review

Born in the year of the monkey, Tomi Um studied fine arts and received an undergraduate degree at Parsons School of Design. She is a textile designer at Tom Cody Design by day and a freelance illustrator by night & weekend.

new york times, sunday magazine

I have loved drawing since I was a kid, but although I did fine art at university I spent a lot of my college time not working very hard at all, to be honest, I came to what I wanted to do at a pretty late stage. I was 26 and travelling around Korea after graduation when I saw some beautiful illustrations in the New York Times online – and thought “I’d like to do that!” When I got home I signed up for a silk screen class at a continuing education college – and that was where I created my first portfolio.

aaron koblin (under 30)

As Aaron Koblin walks me through the two floors of cereal bars, scooter parking, and conference rooms in Google’s New York office, he apologizes. “I wish I could give a better tour,” he says. “But it’s just so huge.”

the sheep market

Using the Processing programming language, developed by his UCLA thesis adviser, Casey Reas, with Ben Fry, Koblin turns the messiest sets into beautiful, if equally complex, images. These days he’s playing with Mechanical Turk, an Amazon.com crowd-sourcing tool that pays tiny sums for menial tasks. 

For his project the Sheep Market, 10,000 users drew left-facing sheep for two cents each. The human error made it interesting. “Six hundred and sixty-two of them didn’t meet sheeplike criteria,” Koblin says, so he cut them out. 

But in another project, Ten Thousand Cents, he left the mistakes in—one contributor wrote “$0.01!!! Really?”—to see if the data, warts and all, could resolve into a convincing image. It did.

ten thousand cents

For Koblin, order hides even in chaos. Which is why his new job as technology lead of Google’s experimental marketing department, Creative Lab, is tinged with irony. “The first thing you realize here,” he says, “is that you’re never going to understand the entirety of everything.” (taken from print magazine).

jean jullien (under 30)

jean jullien is best known for creating cheerful characters that he cuts out of paper and captures in photographs. his simple, appealing scenes got a big break on the website Manystuff in 2008 while he was still in art school, and since then his work has appeared in The Guardian and The New York Times, and on a host of design blogs.

jullien studied graphic design at the french school Le Paraclet and then at Central St. Martin’s, and is now enrolled at the Royal College of Art. he comes by both his visual inclinations and his fascination with three-dimensional forms honestly: his mother is an architect and a curator, and his father is a town planner. he says that he and his brother, a musician, were “always shown design and art.”

katrin schacke (under 30)

from the series clothing as food

Katrin Schacke is an interdisciplinary artist, freelance graphic designer and photographer in Offenbach am Main.

for Vitra

Her fields of work include the one of the classical areas of graphic design, such as editorial design, book and magazine design, and information and event design, corporate design and screen/web design. In addition, she develops visual concepts for three-dimensional illustrations,

Brian Chippendale's NOISE DESIGN

As a vocalist for Lightning Bolt and Mindflayer, Chippendale eschews the usual microphone stand and conventional microphone, instead using a contact microphone. The microphone is then run through an effects processor to alter the sound further (this says a lot about Chippendale's ways of design).

Brian Chippendale is a new post-post modernist hybrid between music and art. 

his work embodies a kind of visual/noise aesthetics, influenced by punk, trash & DIY philosophy.

click here for Chippendale music (he's an accomplished drummer),

your turn#10 (last post for comment)

dear class: follow the instructions I sent via announcement. there's plenty to discuss. this is basically the developments of graphic design during 1980s-1990s.

 

PHAIDON

 

Phaidon here,

your turn #9

hi class, sorry, I'm posting this on Sunday. I won't close the comment box. 

Neurath, Helvetica, Fukuda, Propaganda, Advertising, Saul Bass, the amazing Polish School, Punk, New Wave (April Greiman), Sussman, the 80s: Dunbar aesthetics, 80s' trends, 

go ahead, plenty to talk about,

Saul Bass- Style is Substance

your turn #8

more stuff to talk about: you have it all there, on our blog's right hand side (of published posts, from your turn #7, up to "what's in a logo" post).  

go ahead. & please, make your comment meaningful.  

Bob Noorda & Vignelli's signage for New York Transit (1960s)

Though they have been modified over the years, the signs New York subway riders see today are essentially the work of Mr. Noorda and Mr. Vignelli, from the bold, clean type to the color coding used to identify the system’s many train lines.

What do we see?  

1- identifiable codes,
2- few words,
3- friendly, consistent colors,
4- functionality,
5- familiarity

Lester Beall (1950s)

geometric, simple, direct, photo, primary colors.

even in the 1950s Beall didn't change much.

graphic designers took on the "intangible" and lent it visual form

Will Burtin, cooper corporation, 1950s

Here technology and human figures are compared. Bodies compared with machines, brains with computers. Technological intervention at a microscope placed test-tube babies and miracle cures in the same world as polymers. All had properties unheard of before synthetic processing. Visualizing scientific processes was critical in the context of research where the ability to conceptualize a problem was often directly related to the model according to which it could be represented. Burtin's capacity to design scientific findings for broad public consumption accounted for the wide circulation of his imagery.

your turn #7

 

Dorothea Tanning, Family Portrait, 1954

we had a nice class this wednesday. we're moving on, covering a veritable explosion of movements in the first half-century (almost at the point of world-war two): 

we discussed the expressionist graphic contribution, Futurism (with Depero & Marinetti's work), Constructivism (Rodchenko, Moholy Nagy), Paul Klee, DADA and its two graphic developments (political and metaphysical --though I didn't address Max Ernst, will do next week), BAUHAUS (and try to cover some of its many facets), Neue Typographie, German New Objectivity, Plakatstil, 

go ahead. please, no echo chamber & research your point.      

Designers were quick to embrace the aesthetic of reportage

your turn #6

                                                        kandinsky, composition 5, 1911

Hi class. On my last lecture (before the midterm) I presented the first Twentieth-Century developments in design. We covered important designers, like Hoffman, Dudovich, Behrens, Klimt, the Viennese Secession, Simplicissimus, The Wërkstatte, Deutscher Werkbund, Adolf Loos, Gesamtkunstwerk, Symbolism, Cubism (Analytic and Collage), Der Blaue Reiter (Munich) and Die Brücke  (Dresden).

Go ahead, leave your comments, 

See you on Wednesday, March 30.

photography becomes womens' "hobby"

Early Kodak Camera, recommended for female cyclists (1880's)