Your turn #3

It was nice to hear your comments! We'll keep that comment/discussion section as part of the regular lectures. Go ahead!

I'm closing this post Friday, February 18 @ 11pm.

Your turn #2

What's on your mind? We've covered more than 200 years since Gutenberg!

Your turn #1

So, for this initial post, I'd prefer you to pick a theme from all the different topics we talked about in class last night. Take advantage of this comment to ponder and briefly research a particular topic.

How to build your 150-word comment: Whether general or particular, try to be informative. Think through your point. Try to produce an argument. Please, avoid slang, capital letters, exclamation signs. Don't merely agree with an existing comment. Add something meaningful.

I'd recommend you start with Word. Open a file, elaborate your comment, spell-check it, polish it a bit and then cut and paste it onto the comment box. It's better to have it saved in case you loose it in the publishing process (accidents happen). Remember add your identity and become a friend of our blog!

I'll close the comment box next Thursday, Jan. 27 at 11pm. 

Miniature of Beatus of Fernando I & Sancha

Shortly after the Arab conquest, on the eve of the Carolingian era, a monk from Santo Toribio Monastery by the name of Beatus wrote certain Commentaries on the Apocalypse that deeply affected all of Europe.

The copies (made over the centuries and illustrated with expressive miniatures), are known today as “Beatus”. The magnificent Facundus Beatus, completed in the year 1047, is perhaps the finest example of the millenarian sentiment of this period. Commissioned by royalty, no expense was spared in its manufacture. Its lavish images marked the start of one of the most prodigious iconographic traditions of the entire history of western art.

Lascaux Caves

In terms of design, what do we learn from the Lascaux Caves? These early paintings point to early rituals of sympathetic magic. For the purpose of our course, they represent a process of abstraction from the real world ---> realm of ideas. The execution of these abstractions as symbols whether isolated ideograms or so-called petroglyphs exhibit an remarkable simplicity and economy.

La Villa Savoye de Corbusier

Luis: consulta este link excelente, para fotos de la Villa Savoye.

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FINAL EXAM TUESDAY 11 @ 5PM

Diego Singh: STALKER

Diego Singh's STALKER at Miami Bourbaki.

Ghariokwu Lemi

Ghariokwu Lemi is a Nigerian artist and designer who is most renowned for providing many of the original cover images for the recordings of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. His work involves a variety of styles, often using vibrant colours and individuated typefaces of his own design. More than 2,000 album covers have been designed by Lemi, including covers for Bob Marley, E. T. Mensah, Osita Osadebe, Gilles Peterson and Antibalas (WKPD).

Ghariokwu's art oozes soul-drenched rawness with every stroke of the pen, creating a whole new language of album cover art that bristles with social and political criticism.

Eduardo Marin (Cuba)

EM is a member of the group Nudo (Knot). The images are filled with references to the less-than glamorous printed matter of everyday life in Cuba. Marin believes in satire as a way to convey seriousness.

"My work is a kind of archeology"

Gabriel Martinez Meave (Mexico)

Gabriel Martinez Meave is a self-taught graphic and typographic designer, illustrator, calligrapher illustrator, educator and author from Mexico. His sketches and letters, including Darka, Mexica, Rondana and Economista are distributed worldwide by Adobe. Currently he is a professor at the University of Anahuac in Mexico City.

Non-Format

Kjell Ekhorn (Norwegian) and Jon Forss (British) have worked together as the creative direction & design team Non-Format since 2000. They work on a range of projects including art direction, design, illustration and custom typography for arts & culture, music industry, fashion and advertising clients. They have art directed the independent music monthly The Wire and also Varoom: the journal of illustration and made images.

"We are trying to add expression to topography"

Markus Dressen

Markus Dressen has developed a unique aesthetics which runs through every page of his book. Dressen works are objects to unfold, touch, handle and see, as well as to read. He is a former student at the famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig.

Your turn #12

 New Acropolis Museum, by Bernard Tschumi (Athens, Greece).

As you've sen, design is an important medium of communication which expresses the values of the system within which it functions. Design inevitably perpetuates the ideology of the system it serves. In the 21st century the system is represented by the capitalist economic framework of mass production and mass consumption. This is less a result of design's intrinsic characteristics than of its necessary rapport with the cultural system that sustains it.

What's your thought? This is the last assignment for comments. Go ahead!

Air pollution (the China chapter)

Urban solutions

Perfect (re)touch

Adbusters

Recycling to Africa

Sustainable architectural design

Green homes

Your turn #11

What should we do with our trash? In the NYTimes.

But these next-generation incinerators, known as waste-to-energy plants, have not caught on in the United States, where most garbage is still hauled to distant landfills. What stands in the way of the U.S. adopting more of these advanced technologies?
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The NYTimes article brings to mind the idea of technology. For example, technology as the arm driving design.

Is technology a tool or has it taken (sort of independently of any subject's overall direction) a 'life' of its own? 

Don't be naive: Technology has become something to react to, rather than direct -just try directing your latest word processing package outside its parameters, setting up a new television set without its pre-loaded instruction, or servicing your own brand new car. Such technologies have been designed with an embodied 'will' of their own that designs the users' and the technicians' relations to them.

For further reference, see Tony Fry's A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing (University of South Wells Press, 1999).

Die Gestalten Verlag

DGV books canonize the ephemeral, rather than considering ‘what excellent design is really capable of: elegant, functional, and at times beautiful and surprising communication’. Robert Klanten, DGV’s editor-in-chief, told Nadel he saw ‘no need for commenting in the traditional 1980s pre-digital way. I try to let the designers explain themselves in their language and not in the teacher’s voice.’ In other words, this is visual culture in the post-literate age; and if you need it explained, it’s probably not for you the first place. There’s another more interesting question that hangs over DGV books: are they spotting design trends or are they making them? There’s a temptation to see DGV as a sort of black-polo-necked style lab manufacturing ready-made fads that sweep through the world of design and fashion, thus reinforcing its status as graphic design’s premier cool hunter. It was certainly the first publisher to spot the arrival of the new digital decorativeness with Romantik (2003); while it did not invent the trend for cartouches and flourishes that has infested visual communication in recent years, it certainly contributed to its promulgation.

Blek le Rat

Your turn #10

There's plenty to talk about. Below, my Design Manifesto, an alternative way of looking at design. Take any theme you like.

Your turn #9

Between the 1930's and the 1950's, these are some of the new developments:

Graphic design took on the intangible and lent it visual form,

System approaches became a pervasive metaphor for design,

Universal Signs became familiar (design goes international),

Graphic design moves to Hollywood and becomes a fluid medium,

Design means sophistication and affluence,

Go ahead!

Your turn #8

Well, there's a lot to talk about, geometric abstraction as a sign of functionality, the thin line between fine and applied art, more importantly, DESIGN AS A DISCIPLINE! Go ahead.

De Stijl

Die Stijl, ("The Style") included a group of Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917 (such as painters Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Pieter Oud, and the poet A. Kok). Its members, working in an abstract style, were seeking laws of equilibrium and harmony applicable both to art and to life. De Stijl's most outstanding painter was Mondrian, whose art was rooted in the mystical ideas of Theosophy. Although influenced by his contact with Analytical Cubism in Paris before 1914, Mondrian thought that it had fallen short of its goal by not having developed toward pure abstraction, or, as he put it, "the expression of pure plastics" (which he later called Neoplasticism). In his search for an art of clarity and order that would also express his religious and philosophical beliefs, Mondrian eliminated all representational components, reducing painting to its elements: straight lines, plane surfaces, rectangles, and the primary colours (red, yellow, and blue) combined with neutrals (black, gray, and white). Van Doesburg, who shared Mondrian's austere principles, launched the group's periodical, De Stijl (1917-32), which set forth the theories of its members.

Your turn #7

 

Besides Dada, my favorite, we reviewed a shower of Twentieth Century "isms," Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Suprematism, what are your thoughts? 

Grace Barnes rightfully calls my attention to my mixing up Hans Arp's gender. It's a HE. Es tut mir leid. It's not the first time I mix up Arp with this British sculptor  whose work I love.

Now, this is my contention: 20th century art until the 1960's was pretty much female-less art. Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Constructivism are phallocentric (though Surrealism is pretty "soft"). Even in America, are there women abstract expressionists? Bourgeois, and Nevelson were more like outsiders. 

During the 60's & 70's a bunch of female artists started exploring alternative materials. Schneeman and Ono, and later Mendieta and Abramovic explored the body. Bourgeois' soft forms were seen as a viable alternative. Then, Eva Hesse opened up a whole gamut of forms and materials. Plastics, fabrics, textiles, ceramics, and "soft" forms, were important explorations in female art. Have to go now... (to be continued).    

List of visuals for the Midterm exam

This is the list of images for the midterm exam. From this list, I'll pick a smaller selection of about 18 images.

1. Cristophe Plantin's Biblia Polyglotta, (1569-1572).
2. Hans Holbein's Imagines Morti, (The Dance of Death)
3. Aldus Manutius's Hypnerotomachia poliphili, (1499).
4. Erhardt Ratdolt's Euclid's Elements of Geometry, (1482).
5. The Nuremberg Chronicle (above) is one of the best documented early printed books (and, being printed in 1493, is an incunabulum).
6. Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, (1450's).
7. Vesalius' De 8. Humani Corporis, (1543).
9. Bodoni's Epithalamia Exoticis Linguis Reddita, (1775).
10. Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature, (1844–1846).
11. Felix Nadar's photo of Sarah Bernhardt (the poster girl of the mid-1800's).
12. Walter Crane's Railroad Alphabet, (1865).
13. Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament, 1856).
14. Charles Dana Gibson's The First Quarrel, (1914).
15. Howard Pyle's No Haid Pawn, (1887).
16. Ford Madox Brown's Work, (1852-1865)
17. John Everett Millais' Christ in the House of His Parents, (1850).
18. Charles Rennie Mackintosh' s Glasgow school of Arts (1897-1909).
19. A. H. Mackmurdo's chair, (1882).
20. Jan van Krimpen's Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach, (1920).
21. William Morris' The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, (1896).
22. Jules Chéret's Le Pays des Fées, (1889).
23. August Endell's Atelier Elvira, (1898) façade and interior.  
24. Alphonse Mucha's Gismonda, for Sarah Bernhardt's play, (1895).
25. Henri Privat Livemont's Rajah Coffee poster, (1899).
26. Jan Toorop's Psyche (1898).
27. Marcello Dudovich's Poster for Campari, (1901).
28. William H. Bradley's poster for The Chap Book, (1895).
29. The Beggarstaff's Kassama, (1901).
30. Peter Behrens' The Kiss, (1898).

List of Terms for Midterm Exam

This is the list of terms for the midterm exam. Each has a link to Wikipedia. Go by the definition in the first paragraph.

For instance, under Incunabula we have: Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum, plural incunabula or incunables, is a book, or even a single sheet of text, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe.

Incunabula
Xylography
Moveable type
Imagines Morti (Danse Macabre)
Humanism
Chromolithography
Punch Magazine
Daguerrotype
Harper's Weekly
The Yellow Book
Arts and Craft
Jugend Magazine
Art Nouveau
Deutscher Wekbund
Futurismo
Plakatstil 
Aestheticism

Surrealism (3)

Though there are some similarities between Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, the styles are perceptibly different. Dali used figuration in his landscapes while Tanguy preferred a quasi-abstract anthropomorphic renditions.

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The painting immediately above is Tanguy's Indefinite Divisibility (1945), a Visual for the Final Exam.