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)

your turn #5

Aubrey Beardsley, Illustration for Oscar Wilde's Salomé, 1894

dear class, there is plenty to talk about: Art Nouveau, Aestheticism, Pre-Raphaelites,  Arts and Craft, Gesamtkunstwerk, then the artists: Toorop, Wilde, Beardsley, Mucha, Livemont, Cheret, Gaudí, van de Velde, Charles Mackinstosh and Margaret McDonald, Morris, Thomas Nast, (even my arts & craft manifesto). remember, no echo chamber, research a bit, be original.

go ahead.

your turn #4

Chromolithographs above, by David Ferland, circa 1850

i had fun with your presentations. thanks! guess what, i'll bring your typeface projects to class next wednesday, so you can take pics & send them back to me for a digital exhibit here. 

we are approaching 19th century fin-de-siècle.  there's plenty to talk about yesterday's class: gutenberg, political satire (punch, charivari, puck), newspapers, postcards, children's books, daguerrotype, camera oscura, pictorialism, dana gibson, talbot's pencil of nature, 19th century fashion, the dandy, etc. 

pick a theme and develop it, no echo chamber, no derivative comments (be meaningful).

this is a history class. my focus is epochal & anthropological. the trend today is to revise history without proper focus. they miss the epoch's weltanschauung! our 2022 glasses don't work in 1822.  

click here for my discussion on the anthropology of myths (this is the deep level i referred to that we all share. cultural differences are very important, but they represent surface level. karl jung called this deep level collective unconscious.  

is punk the other "romantic"?

 
there are punk & romantic connections. like romantic, punk is an urban working class manifestation of informal anti-establishment sensibility. 

in the early 1970's british punks expressed their nihilistic views with the slogan drawn from the title of the sex pistols' song No Future. 

a bit anti-modern punk is nihilistic in that is not concerned for the present with a deep disaffection from "both middle and working class standards". punk nihilism was expressed in the use of more self-destructive, consciousness-obliterating substances like heroin.

trends include:

anarchism,
anti-authoritarianism,
environmentalism,
vegetarianism,
psycho-billy death-rock, horror punk, goth, etc.

the examiner (circa the spanish/american war)

Editorial cartoon by Leon Barritt for June 1898 issue of 'Vim' magazine, showing Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst both attired as the Yellow Kid comics character and competitively claiming ownership of the war.

The Yellow Press, an illustration from 1910 depicting William Randolph Hearst as a jester tossing newspapers with headlines such as “Appeals to Passion, Venom, Sensationalism, Attacks on Honest Officials, Strife, Distorted News, Personal Grievance, and Misrepresentation” to a crowd of eager readers.

Detail from Honor to McKinley! (1898), showing Pulitzer and Hearst, caricatured as a parrot and monkey respectively, battling it out amid a flurry of pages from the Yellow Press. The rest of the picture shows President McKinley below them ignoring their cries for war. 

Instead, he reads a paper entitled “The People of the United States have full confidence in your Patriotism, Integrity, & Bravery. They know you will act justly and wisely: decent press”. 

Atlas Joe, or, The Fearful Responsibilities of a Self-Appointed Manager of the Universe (1896), note the message hanging on the wall: “Our Motto – Sensation! Sensation! Sensation!!”

Uncle Sam’s Dream of Conquest and Carnage – Caused by Reading the Jingo Newspapers (1895)

List of Images for the Midterm Exam (Spring 2024)

Lucien & Esther Pisarro, a page from Ishtar Descending to the Netherworld, 1903.

Image, color, and ornament combine to generate intense expressionistic energy.

2.

Paul Rieth, Jugend, illustration for magazine cover, 1915. 

Jugend became known for showcasing the German version of Art Nouveau. It was also famed for its shockingly brilliant covers, radical editorial tone, and avant-garde influence on German arts and culture for decades, ultimately launching the eponymous Jugendstil.

3.

Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, a poster featuring Sarah Bernhardt, 1894. 

Gismonda is Victorien Sardou's four-act play, which premiered in the autumn of 1894 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. Placing her life-size figure on an arched platform, Mucha rendered the beauty and dignity of her personality onstage rather than representing her realistic features or the story.

4.

Hector Guimard, Art Nouveau entrance for the Metro, Paris, 1900. 

The sinuous, organic lines of Guimard’s design and the stylized, giant stalks drooping under the weight of what seem to be swollen tropical flowers, but are actually amber glass lamps, made this a quintessentially Art Nouveau piece. 

5.

The Beggarstaffs, Kasama Corn Flour, poster, 1894. 

In the Belle Epoque age of excess, this poster stands out in is expert simplicity. Their works significantly impacted the course of British graphic design; the bold, simple and eye-catching works marked a shift from the often fussy, contemporary Victorian designs used for such advertising. 

6.

Antoni Gaudí, Casa Milá, Barcelona, 1906-1910. 

Gaudí designed this masterpiece around two large, curved courtyards, with a structure of stone, brick and cast-iron columns and steel beams. It has a total of five floors, plus a loft made entirely of catenary arches and two large interior courtyards, one circular and one oval. 

7.

Henri van de Velde, Tropon food concentrate, poster, 1899.

This famous poster was issued for the German food manufacturer Tropon. It moves from realism to more abstract forms, emphasizing a pattern. Here he evokes the shapes and colors of the egg white and yolk, as well as the trademark of the manufacturer, three sparrows.

8.

   Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hill House, 1904. 

Every item of furniture, textile, and decorative feature in the house was custom-made by Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald, a well-established artist in the Arts and Crafts movement who was also his wife. The end result, finished in 1904, is a sophisticated blend of the latest international fashion for Art Nouveau and local Scottish traditions.

9.

Randolph Caldecott, Babes in the Wood, cover illustration, 1879. 

Caldecott created a world where dishes and plates are personified, cats make music, children are at the center of society, and adults become servants. His drawings became prototypes for children's books and later for animated films. 

10.

William Morris, The Works of Geoffry Chaucer, book print, 1896. 

Morris combined a system of types, initials, borders, and illustrations to create the dazzling Kelmscott style. 

11.

Thomas Nast, The American River Ganges, illustration, Harper's Weekly, 1871. 

Nast was the first journalist who did not own his newspaper to play a significant role in shaping public opinion. He is considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon."  

12.

Ford Madox Brown, Work, painting, 1852-1865. 

Brown's famous work erupts into proliferating details from the dynamic center of the action as the workers tear a hole in the road – symbolically, in the British social fabric, with each character representing a particular social class and role in the modern urban environment.

13.

William Blake, Dante's Inferno, illustration, 1824. 

Blake’s illustrations (done in watercolor over black ink) evoke nightly hallucinations and ghostly visitations – something he claims he experienced from a very young age. His art combines Miltonian themes with gothic themes.

14.

Eugene Grasset, Three Women and Three Wolves, print, 1900. 

Grasset produces a scene with magic expressionist overtones. Three young witches dressed in transparent robes fly in a panic through the enchanted forest. The main witch's facial expression and undulating hair contrast with the black wolves lurking behind red spruce trees with blinding eyes.

15.

Prive Livemont, Rajah Coffee, poster, 1899. 

Livemont produces a catchy design where the steam of the coffee cup and the product name become intertwined in a fascinating interplay of forms.

16.

Arthur H. Mackmurdo, chair, 1881. 

This is a dining chair, as suggested by its shape and practical leather upholstery, which is a copy of the original covering. The chair combines two completely different styles. While the legs and seat are both based on Georgian furniture of the 1780s, the serpentine design of the back is highly innovative, a harbinger of Art Nouveau. 

17.

Jules Cheret, Les Girard, lithography poster,  1877. 

A master of lithography, Cheret’s charming, frivolous Harlequins, columbines, and Pierrots, his girls and boys in masks and fancy dresses, were a delight to the eye; his brilliant yet delicate colors danced like flickering sunbeams over the gray stonewalls of Paris. He influenced artists like Lautrec and Degas.

18.

John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents, painting, 1850. An essential piece of PreRephaelite art. 

The public reaction to the picture was one of horror, and Millais was viciously attacked by the press. The Times described the painting as "revolting" and objected to how the artist had dared to depict the Holy Family as ordinary, lowly people in a humble carpenter's shop "with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness." 

19.

Dana Gibson, The Weaker Sex II, illustration, 1903. 

A capable illustrator, Gibson is best known for the "Gibson Girl," an iconic representation of the beautiful and independent Euro-American woman at the turn of the 20th century.

20. 

Edward Steichen, Pond, manipulated photography, 1904. 

Pictorialism was an international style that dominated photography during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph to create an image rather than simply recording it.

21.

Margaret MacDonald: White Cockade Tea Room Menu, 1911. 

This menu design for a tea room at the Glasgow Exhibition shows the evolution toward geometric and modular forms. The composition of motifs, borders, and delicately defined solid volumes established a language of interlaced lines and flat shapes that works abstractly. The attention to order and arrangement of forms moves from the illustration dramatically, although the female face, rose, and hand hint at sensuality. The degree of abstraction of this work indicates the readiness for the repeatable modularity essential to design in an industrial context. 

22.

Walter Crane, Railroad Alphabet, illustration, 1865. 

Crane was one of the most influential designers of children's books. Before the Victorian era, children tended to be treated as "little adults." Victorians developed a more tender & didactic attitude through the development of "toy books" for preschool children.

23.

Richard Doyle, Punch Magazine cover, illustration, 1916. 

A British weekly magazine of humor and satire, Punch was most influential in the 1840s and 1850s when it helped to coin the term "cartoon" in its modern sense as a humorous illustration. 

24.

Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, 1851. 

Paxton's construction was a cast iron and plate glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. It has 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space to display examples of technology developed during the Industrial Revolution.

25.

Jan Toroop, binding for Psyche, by Louis Couperus, 1898. 

This is an excellent example of Toorop's "whiplash" lines; the lettering blends in with the illustration, especially on the spine. Toorop adopted the batik style from the design of the Dutch East Indies.  

26.

A. H. Wald, cover for Harper's Weekly, 1864. 

This cover, engraved after a sketch by a visual journalist in the field, is a forerunner of the newsmagazine coverage of so-called "current events."

27.

Herbert Horne, title page for Poems, by Lionel Johnson, 1895. 

Symmetry, outline type letterspacing, and alignment are superb & the letter form is a perfect companion for the illustration.

28.

Will Bradley, cover for The Inland Printer, illustration, 1895. 

Bradley achieves a design where figures are reduced to organic symbols in dynamic shape relationships. 

29. 

Rafael Nadar, Eugene Delacroix, photo, 1857. 

Nadar is famous for posing his subjects in natural, relaxed positions with sympathetic, atmospheric lighting. He became famous (and wealthy) for his ability to capture the character of his sitters, not just their physical resemblance. His portraits were typically full-face, searchingly frank, without any of the epoch's conventional trappings, drapes, or formal costumes.

30.

Henry Fox Talbot, Pencil of Nature, photo, 1844. 

This is considered the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs, a milestone in the book's art since Gutenberg's invention of moveable type.

31.

Johannes Gutenberg, Bible, 1450.  

First major book printed using moveable type. The superb typographic legibility, generous margins & excellent presswork make this first printed book a canon of quality that has not been surpassed.

32.

Codex Sinaiticus, Greek Bible, 4th Century AD  (found in 1841). 

Biblical scholarship considers the Codex Sinaiticus one of the most important Greek texts of the New Testament, along with the Codex Vaticanus. In the biblical uncial style, the words are written in scriptio continua, without separation between characters.

34.

Geoffroy Tory, a page from Champ Fleury, book, 1529. 

Tory contributed diacritics, cedillas, and apostrophes, as well as "grave" and "acute" accents to the French language. This work undoubtedly decided Francis I to choose Tory as his official printer in 1531. 

35.

Aldus Manutius, pages from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, incunable, 1499. 

The woodcut images represent the best illustrations of their period and are exquisitely blended with the typography, producing a book of serenity and grace.

36. 

Erhardt Ratdolt, Euclid's Elements, book, 1482. 

Ratdolt's design uses a large outer margin. Small geometric figures whose sheer delicacy of the line represents a technical breakthrough are placed in the margins of the supporting text. 

37.

Hartman Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle, book of world history, incunable, 1493. 

The large workshop of Michael Wolgemut, Nuremberg's leading artist in various media, provided an unprecedented 1,809 woodcut illustrations.

38.

Book of Kells, Christ enthroned, illuminated manuscript, 800 AD. 

This book represents the culmination of Celtic illumination.