Your turn #8

 

Anton Stankowski's example of meta-design

Dear class: There is plenty to talk about: 

* Star designers of the 1930s, like Herbert Matter, Joseph Binder & Ladislav Sutnar. 

* Avantgarde stars like  Alexander Rodchenko, Malevich's geometric Suprematism, Marinetti's onomatopoeic graphic designs.  

* Nazi's Propaganda,  Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will (included in my announcement). 

* Graphic design developments like 1930s Neue Typographie and 1950s Swiss International Design, Constructivist posters,  

* The nine principles of Swiss typographic style.

* What are you, a less-is-more or a more-is-more advocate? 

Go ahead. Avoid echo chambers, even any form of A.I. copy & paste (shhhh, remember, I can tell). 😈

In the meantime, in the US (the sophisticated style of Alexey Brodovitch)

brodovitch cover, harper's bazaar, 1952

alexey brodovitch exerted significant influence on American graphic design and photograph during his 25 year tenure as art director of Harper's Bazaar. his use of asymmetrical layouts, white space and dynamic imagery changed the nature of magazine design.

Mock-up spread for Harper's, late 1940s?

Brodovitch exposed Americans to the European avant-garde by commissioning work from leading European artists and photographers, including A.M. Cassisandre, Salvador Dali, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Man Ray.

spread for harper's, late 1930s ("if you don't like full skirts")

what's brodovitch style? elegance!

 The Audry Hepburn Cover, 1956

1- while fashion magazines showed the whole garment, brodovitch would crop images unexpectedly or off-center to bring a new dynamism to the layout.
2- the form lies in the photograph or illustration as a cue for how to handle the shape of the text, whether splayed out on the page or in the shape of a fan,
3- only two images per page,
4- a suggested surrealist content, i.e., female figures in blurry forms to communicate this new way of sharing information, torn edges on photographs, or pages, as if they had been torn through with a woman's figure stepping out of them. or covers and spreads of harper's in the form of lips, hands, and eyes. 

swiss typographic style (9 principles)

1- nothing left to add, nothing left to remove,

2- uniformity and geometry,

3- white space, let the text breath,

4- grid systems that are logical, meaningful and consistent,

5- structured information,

6- drop the serif,

8- font size for legibility, impact and rhythm,

9- photography, YES

During the 1950's a design movement emerged from Switzerland and Germany that has been called Swiss Design or more appropriately, The International Typographic Style

Max Huber:

Mixed unframed flat photographic and typographic elements with strips of color to convey a certain feeling of dynamism and speed. He used recognizable elements in his design, without having them tell a story. His work concentrated on photographic experiments and clear type combined with the use of bold shapes and primary colors.

Anton Stankowski:

We already explored Stankowski in a post before, but he’s a school onto himself. His photographic and typographical work developed into a prototype for a contemporary advertising style, later called “constructive graphics.” 

Eric Nitsche:

 Josef Müller-Brockmann:

1- The formal organization of the surface by means of the grid, 2- knowledge of the rules that govern legibility (lines length, word and letter spacing and so on) and 3- the meaningful use of color. It all makes for a rational economic order.

Armin Hofmann:

image + positive negative (Neue Typographie) + typeface as movement

and,

The style is driven by communication. Hoffmann used photo-typesetting, photo-montage and experimental composition plus his heavily favored sans-serif typography.

Siegfried Odermatt:

and,

Rudolph DeHarak:

To understand de Harak's influence on graphic design during the Sixties it is necessary to know that the McGraw-Hill paperbacks were emblematic of that period. They were based on the most contemporary design systems, and were unique compared to other covers and jackets in the marketplace.

At this time the International Style and American Eclecticism were the two primary design methodologies at play in the United States. The former represented Bauhaus rationalism, the latter Sixties exuberance. De Harak negotiated both, simplicity and accessibility.

Cipe Pineles

cpie pineles, above, in her studio.

cipe for seventeeen, 1948

The graphic design career of Cipe Pineles (pronounced SEE-pee pi-NELL-iss) began when she was installed by Condé Nast Himself in the office of Dr. M.F. Agha, art director for Condé Nast publications Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden.

Through the 1930s and early 1940s, Pineles learned editorial art direction from one of the masters of the era, and became (at Glamour) the first autonomous woman art director of a mass-market American publication.

She is credited with another "first" as well: being the first art director to hire fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications; the first woman to be asked to join the all-male New York Art Directors Club and later their Hall of Fame.

After experimenting on Glamour, she later art directed and put her distinctive mark on Seventeen and  Charm magazines, until her death in 1991. Cipe Pineles continued a design career of almost sixty years through work for Lincoln Center and others, and teaching at the Parsons School of Art and Design (AIGA).

 pineles' cover for charm, 1955,

what do we see here?

1- Pineles' style is groovy, authentic; young women saw themselves in it (the polls prove it).  

2- she is the first designer to use fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications, which brought modern art to the attention of the young mainstream public.

3- let the epoch guide the design. 

4- typeface can be organic.

Alexander Lieberman, the VOGUE master (1950s-1960s)

Alexander Lieberman (1912-1999) was a russian-american publisher, painter, and sculptor. born in kiev, he was educated in paris, where he began his publishing career with the early pictorial magazine Vu. 

After emigrating to NYork in 1941, he began working for Conde Nast Publications, rising to the position of editorial director, which he held from 1962-1994. liberman used photographers such as Penn, Beaton and Miller, contributing to a new look at Vogue. later he was appointed editorial director to all Conde Nast publications until his retirement.

 
See how graphic design turns into sculpture. 

Is this the same Lieberman? 

or this?

 yes, it is. 

the great Herbert Matter

In 1936, Matter was offered roundtrip passage to the United States as payment for his work with a Swiss ballet troupe. He spoke no English, yet traveled across the United States. When the tour was over, he decided to remain in New York. He went to see Alexey Brodovitch, who had been collecting the Swiss travel posters (two of which were hanging on Brodovitch's studio wall). Matter soon began taking photographs for Harper's Bazaar and Saks Fifth Avenue. Later, he was producing covers and inside spreads for Vogue.  

 für schöne autofahrten die schweiz, 1934

During World War II, Matter made striking posters for Container Corporation of America. In 1944, he became the design consultant at Knoll, molding its graphic identity for over 12 years.

 

 or,

 or,

As Alvin Eisenman, head of the Design Department at Yale and long-time friend, points out: "Herbert had a strong feeling for minute details, and this was exemplified by the distinguished typography he did for the Knoll catalogues."

he practically invented the face up poster,

In 1952, he was asked by Eisenman to join the Yale faculty as professor of photography and graphic design. "He was a marvelous teacher," says Eisenman. "His roster of students included some of the most important names in the field today." At Yale, he tried his hand at architecture, designing studio space in buildings designed by Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolf. "He was good at everything he tried to do," continues Eisenman. In 1954, he was commissioned to create the corporate identity for the New Haven Railroad. The ubiquitous "NH" logo, with its elongated serifs, was one of the most identifiable symbols in America.

check herbert matter's website.

the "standard" elegance of Ladislav Sutnar (1930s-1950s)

Ladislav Sutnar became one of the leading graphic design forces of the 1940s-1950s. His style has an avant-garde flavor and dynamism without hindering accessibility. His basic structure is rational: juxtapositions where scale and color become curiously abstract.

Sutnar used geometric forms to build signs that would attract and guide the eye from one level of information to the next. Repeating symbols and forms helped him express an industrial sensibility.

For magazines he developed strict, though mutable, typographic grids, framing sans-serif modern typefaces with white space in a way that prefigured the precise, architectonic compositions of post-war Swiss design. Sutnar was a constructivist in the purest sense.

much later, an elagant designer in the new international swiss typography (more of this in a couple of classes)

meanwhile in Germany & Austria: Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity, circa 1926)

Otto Dix, The Jeweler Karl Krall, 1926

Max Beckmann, portrait of a Turk, 1926

Otto Dix, Sylvia von Harden, 1920s

George Grosz, The Poet Max Hermann Neisse, 1927

Otto Dix, Self-Portrait, 1928

Barthel Gilles, Self portrait with Gas Mask, 1930

George Grosz, Portrait of Felix Weil 1926

Jeanne Mammen, Schaccista, 1929

Christian Schad, Self-portrait, 1927

Otto Dix, Alfred Flechtheim, 1926

Otto Dix, Portrait of Hugo Simmons, 1925

1- Neue Sachlichkeit artists embraced realism in defiance of trends towards abstraction,
2- they renounced the idiosyncratic subjectivities espoused by early German Expressionists.
3- they combine their realism with the biting protest of the Dada movement.
4- this realism is not traditional, rather it's a distorted and dark realism to expose the moral degradation in German society.
5- you see portraiture, and self-portraiture,
6- there's a tension in the portrait between the individual being represented and the type, role, that people plays in society.
7- the portraits exhibit unflattering details or unsettling psychological effects,
8- there is intimacy,

9- caricature &

10- Kriegstrauma,