Moving posters: Man With a Movie Camera

Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera was produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU. It presents urban life in Ukraine and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. The film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invented, deployed or developed, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, animations, and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles (WKPD).

Art for the people?

Vladimir Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed the huge Monument to the Third International, also known as Tatlin's Tower. Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower (it was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

40th secession exhibition poster, 1912

by Richard Harlfinger

what's unique about this design is the expressionist "S" enguls the lettering blocks within its rhythm. the letters are hand-drawn the design overwhelms any individual expressive quality. the weight of the negative space is expertly calibrated to strike a compact pulsing balance. this is both about abstraction and geometry. the organic motifs of the nouveau era have been left behind. the search for a universal language of form had begun.  

your turn #4

Csilla Kleyánzki

we have many themes:

designing romanticism,
koenig's steam press,
political satire,
daguerreotype,
photography as portrait of the famous (nadar),
photography as sience of movement (e. muybridge),
photography as art (pictorialism) 
erotica,
circus' "freaks,"
egyptian serifs,
photography as war reportage,
almanacs,
cards,

go ahead, see you in two weeks!
 

arh 346 important update

due to a previous personal engagement, i will not be able to come to class next thursday, feb. 13. please, post your comments as if we had our regular class. i'll see you thursday february 20th. 

your turn #3

The madness of Michael Mapes, via koikoikoi

Dear class, there's plenty to talk about.

What excites your fancy?

Garamond (hope you remember my board quick notes) maps, infamous books, Bodoni, L'Encyclopedie, newspapers (are they really "dying" or judst "morphing"?), Baskerville (and the design of "The Declaration"), Caslon, etc.

Nota bene: If I can ask something from the class is to try to be less casual about your comments and try to really ponder design in a deliberate manner.

what we have so far...

taken from bibliotypes

words originate from gestures of the body. 

the first typefaces are directly modeled on the forms of calligraphy. 

typefaces are not bodily gestures, they are manufactured images defined for infinite repetition. 

the history of typography reflects a continual tension between the hand and machine, organic and geometric, human body and abstract system. 

immediately after gutenberg, typefaces reflected traditional heavy, gothic script. 

humanist writers rejected gothic scripts in favour of "lettura antica" classic hand writing. 

humanist scripts were used in prestigious books. Cursive type was used in cheaper writing shops. 16th Century printers integrated "Roman" and "Italic" forms into type families. Italics were not simple slanted versions of the roman typeface. 

with the advent of capitalism, advertisers demanded BIG BOLD letters, distorting anatomical elements of classical letters. so, the larger fonts required carved wooden letters. 

now relationships between letters became more important than the letters themselves. 

your turn #2

Gif by Gwion Christmas

hi, kids. for this second class we did lots of things (we left like 5 posts from yesterday's class for next class): 

under big names: Gutenberg, Tagliente, Ratdolt, Manutius, Griffo, Tory, Wolgemut, et al.

under things discussed: character-as-mark, the importance of calligraphy, movable type, type-face as architecture (floor plan, house, chair), Incunabulum, etc.

under typefaces: Textura (Textualis), Italics, Romain de Ratdolt, Griffo's Bembo, cancelleresca corsiva, etc.

under amazing books: Gutenberg's Bible, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Nuremberg Chronicles
Radolt's Euclid Elements, Book of Hours, etc.

pick your topic, go ahead.

Post for comment #1

via sam reddyhoff

welcome to arh 346! we had a good meeting.

here are some of the topics we talked about:

design is designing, period. all shows "design."
neolithic human marks, why?
typeface in general, font as body, font as house,
idea--->pictograph,
technology impacting style, you do what you're allowed,
minuscule or majuscule?  
steele vs. papyrus vs. vellum vs. codex vs. book vs. kindle
typeface, from Trajan to Times, etc, etc,

remember to sign your name at the bottom of your comments. write down your name (even if you used an alias to sign in). remember this is a for-point weekly assignment. 

go ahead!

technology

 a replica of Gutenberg's press

Style choices are not under the control of designers. they are related to the ways technology develops in a broader cultural sphere.

what's style?

Alfred Stevens, La parisienne Japonaise (1872)

 for example, japonisme, which explodes in France by 1864, then comes to America 20 years later.

the graphic design profession

Some ideas...

To understand graphic design, we have to look at:

1- the profession (how many of you are aware of John Baskerville or Mathew Carter or Zuzana Licko?).
2- technology (as technology advances, we need to understand its place and value).
3- style (what's your syntax? what makes your design yours?).
4- Cultural traditions (graphic design is a product of our age, we have to understand it).

tx for the company

urs fischer, in dubio pro reo, 2007

see you around. long live design!

Naohiro Ukawa

A jack of all trades and master at none, however, Naohiro Ukawa is an exception. His art combines sensuality of deep house, the experimentation of techno, the chaos of noise and the stylish cool of punk. Check some of Ukawa's videos here (Ukawa's Second from top marked with * for FinalExam).

your turn

strange world, jonathan calugi

your turn

your turn!

taken from AIGA's article on Criterion Collection

it's your turn

Roman Cieslewicz, Katastrofa, 1961

it's your turn

Rodchenko's photomontage of Mayakovsky (1923)

Gertrude Stein reading!

Digital advertising is 20!

Re-imagining advertising:

Jan van Krimpen

Above, Jan van Krimpen's pages from Deirdre and the Sons of Usnach, by Roland Holst, Paladiun Series, 1920. Van Krimpen received an art education at the academy of art at The Hague. An early interest in poetry led him in 1917 to publish the poetic works of his friends in a series for which he designed the format. He received a commission from the Dutch post office to draw the lettering for a special commemorative stamp to be printed by the prominent firm of Enschedé in 1923. The success of the design led Enschedé to invite him to design a new typeface for the firm.

The typeface he produced, Lutetia (the Roman name for Paris), was the official lettering for an exhibition of Dutch art in Paris in 1927, and its reception led to his lifelong association with the firm. In addition to Lutetia, van Krimpen's well-known faces include Antigone Greek (1927), Romanée (1928), Romulus (1931), Cancelleresca Bastarda (1935), and Spectrum (1943).

His types became well known in the United States through the Limited Editions Club and in England through the Nonesuch Press.

have a nice spring break!

if you have any questions about the midterm

Aida, 1915 by Marcelo Dudovich

post them here.

at the suggestion of a diligent student as to whether you should know the full name of an artist, my answer was: "of course." writing "morris" instead of "william morris" doesn't make any sense (there are thousands of morrises in england). sure, there are household names like gutenberg or picasso, but that isn't generally the norm.

Designing decadence

Egan Beresford, Flowers of Evil, 

It's difficult to grasp decadence without this provisional list of books and characters.

The Master:
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal, (bilingual translation)

Pleasure & deviations:
Oscar Wilde, Portrait of Dorian Gray,
Andre Gide, The Immoralist,
Leopold Sacher Masoch, Venus in Furs,

Preciousness, snobism:
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice,
J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, 
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle Maupin,

Evil:
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw,
George de Maurier, Trilby,

Hysteria, phobia, ennui, pain:
Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina,
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground,
Franz Kafka, The Trial,

Monsters:
Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis,

Dreams:
Sygmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,

Artists:
Aubrey Beardsley, (illustrator)
Egan Beresford, (illustration)
Gustave Moreau, (painter)
Fernand Khnopff, (painter)
Gustav Klimt, (painter)
Rodolphe Bresdin, (engraver, illustrator)
Alfred Kubin, (illustrator)

your turn #5

to keep in mind

in my syllabus (on course contents and grades):  

Post comments amount to 25% of the final grade. 

your turn #4

honoré de balzac, photo by nadar

in-between epochs

another one by the talenccentric Mark Addison Smith

your turn #3

illustration adam lilfuchs fuchs

what is the dynamic between typeface and layout (grid)?

reinassance, dante's inferno

carl linnaeus, systema naturae, 1758

since the aesthetic effect of letterforms depends, in part of layout?