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)

do you know camera obscura?

principle of camera obscura and camera obscura box

light from an external scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface inside, where it is reproduced, inverted (thus upside-down), but with color and perspective preserved. the image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation.

vermeer amazing view of delft (above) was done using camera obscura.

or these drawings by canaletto:

printers learned their trade through an apprentice system, whereas training in the design of printed material was informal

1- newspapers are aimed at a broad spectrum of readers, 2- usually geographically defined, 3- some focus on groups of readers defined more by their interests than their location

there are daily and weekly business newspapers and sports newspapers.

more specialist still are some weekly newspapers, usually free and distributed within limited areas. these may serve communities as specific as certain immigrant populations, even the local gay community.

romanticism took flight, partly as a negative response to industrialization

 romantic landscape with ruined tower, thomas cole, 1832

lloyd's (the wall street journal of 18th century)

This is a 'Lloyd's List' of exchange rates, 1740. 

See that the exchange rates are given for individual ports rather than for countries. 

The prices of Bank (Bank of England), East India and South Sea stock are listed. The high tide is also noted. A bit rudimentary, but this is an early example of design for commerce!

the public sphere is this virtual arena where opinion is created and legitimized

the solid gray stream of news was soon broken into columns and then departments, separating local and foreign reports

the first newspaper according to modern definitions was the Strasbourg Relation, in the early 17th century. 

the term newspaper became common in the 17th century, but germans had newspapers since the 16th century: 

1- they were printed & dated, 

2- appeared at regular and frequent publication intervals, 

3- and included a variety of news items (unlike single item news mentioned above).

steps in the process of modern paper

paper remained expensive through the centuries, until the advent of steam-driven paper making machines in the 19th century, which could make paper with fibres from wood pulp. 

although older machines pre-dated it, the Fourdrinier papermaking machine became the basis for most modern papermaking. Nicholas Louis Robert of Essonnes, France, was granted a patent for a continuous paper making machine in 1799. At the time he was working for Leger Didot with whom he quarrelled over the ownership of the invention. Didot sent his brother-in-law, John Gamble, to meet Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, stationers of London, who agreed to finance the project. 

here are the steps:

1. PULPING-forming section, commonly called the wet end, is a continuous rotating wire mesh which removes water from the paper by sucking it out of suspension via vacuum.

2. press section, where the wet fibre web passes between large rolls loaded under high pressure to squeeze out as much water as possible.

3. drying section, where the pressed sheet passes partly around, in a serpentine manner, a series of steam heated drying cylinders. 

4. size-press section, where the semi-dried paper is applied with a thin layer of starch and/ or other chemicals to improve several paper properties reduce dusting and air permeability, increase stiffness, bursting strength and short span compression.

5. calender section: where the dried paper is smoothened under high loading and pressure. only one nip (where the sheet is pressed between two rolls) is necessary in order to hold the sheet, which shrinks through the drying section and is held in tension between the press section (or breaker stack if used) and the calender. extra nips give more smoothing, but at some expense to paper strength.

6. reel section, where paper coming out of the machine is wound onto individual spools for further processing.

Voila!

your turn #3 (typeface is to design what the atom is to physics)

gazetta di mantova, 1664 the oldest surviving newspaper

it was good to meet and get a feel of the class. nothing like the real thing. 

we left the low middle ages, moved to high middle ages, right now bordering pre-renaissance. we're at the point of Gutenberg's pivotal invention. the epoch is pregnant for a paradigm shift. 

again: pick a theme and develop it. look for something that strikes your fancy (the more particular the better). research. no echo chamber. 

this is a history class. we look at the past to learn about the present.   

1. exhibit utmost curiosity (you absorb everything) 

2. don't judge (your 2022 glasses don't work)

3. immerse yourself with the common folk doing what they do on a daily basis (start from the bottom to understand the top) 

design is about marks. graphic design's mark is, well, typeface. thus,

typeface is to design what the atom is to physics.