Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Discourse Two

http://hgd-mattpatteson.blogspot.com/2010/03/design-discourse.html

Lecture 9

Key Ideas:
Postmoderism - It is not a theory but a set of theoretical positions“movement” as understood in the linear
history of art.
Pop Culture and Politics
Revolution design and Anti-war
Individualism
Experimental alternative processing
Push Pin Studios
New Wave Typography
Wolfgang Weingart
Computer Graphics
Willi Kuntz
Rosmiare Tissi and Siegfried Odermatt
April Grieman
Paula Scher
Charles Anderson
Nevel Brody
Jacques Derrida
Normative/Deconstruct
David Carson
Fragmentation
High/ Low Juxtapositions



60s-70s produces type and design that went against everything Swiss meant, by allowing individuals to express themselves in their own way, not what is right but how they felt. Push Pin studios pushed that further by creating their own alternative publishing and processing styles. Weingart experiment and was pushed by others to break from norms and use a chaotic approach. Computers changes everything by allowing text to overlap and laser printing instead of lead. Text layouts changed to make them more of a piece of art than just a normal spread. Reading text and seeing image was the norm, but they challenged reading the image and seeing the text. Carson challenged what was professional and how to go about it. Postmoderism is the current, it's what we're are being trained in, it will change and thats the idea of design to form to the change not to fight it.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Lecture 8

Key Ideas:
Basel School of Design: Emil Ruder
Armin Hoffmann - Graphic Design Manual
Josef Muller Brockman - Der Film
Swiss Grid
Paul Rand - Corporate Design
Lester Beal
Saul Bass
Bradbury Thompson
Chermayeff and Geisman Associates
Vignelli Associates - Unigrid system
Knoll
Media revolution
George Lois
The New Advertising
Photo-typography
Herb Lubalin - "Typogram"



Swiss design started to rule and Armin thought that the design could be just as verbal as it is visual. The swiss grid became extremely popular with the "Der Film" poster with sans-serifs and mathematical layout paving the way for the corporate design by structuring space. Clarity and structuring of space is what design took from Swiss design. Paul Rand defined corporate design, rebranding became a new thing and is still popular because companies are always wanting a new look to appeal to a new crowd. Vignelli Associates defined the modular grid and information placement in more recent times. While Chermayeff and Geisman Associates defined logo design and branding. The media became the next frontier as more and more american homes got televisions. Editorial design was popularized and deemed the second age. Phototype allowed letters to overlap something that can't be done with metal latters. George Luis and Lubalin advance pop culture and polictical design. When the 1960s came around everything changed and will continue to change.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Lecture 7

Key Ideas:
ISOTYPE
Ladislav Sutnar
Design for Information
Herbet Bayer
Modernism
NY School/ American Design
Lester Beal
Paul Rand
Alexey Brodovitch
Age of Information
Claude Shannon
International Style
School at ULM
International Style of Typography
Early Swiss Design
Theo Ballmer and Max Bill
Anton Stankowski
Max Miedinger


Information started to become a design aspect in the later years, and design had to learn to adapt to large amount of information and organize it. Patters became more and more popular due to the repeating forms and consistency. Ladislav Sutnar created a spread showing different door nobs and organized it in a graphic way, many catalogs for hardware follow this same style showing icons and uses paired with information about the product. A need for international design became apparent because of languages coming together so design had to reflect the ideas of multilingual and by finding an universal language of form and typography, this led to Swiss Design. Swiss design started a rational approach to swiss design, by using concrete forms. Stankowski on the other hand used abstract forms. Clarity of means and forms were strongly important to Swiss Design, because it can be placed anywhere.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Laws of Media

Laws of Media: The Knife

1. The Knife extends the human body parts of the teeth and nails. The Knife is used for cutting and stabbing. It extends the human bodies physical aspects by allowing it save it's naturally sharp forms for eating and other more basic needs. It also helps the individual more so then the society because its made for one hand not many.

2. The knife replaces sharp stones and weighted objects that had to be combined to cut through materials. Like the arrowhead used by Native Americans, it's sharp and pointed for stabbing and cutting but is fixed with a handle so that a person can wield it without having to grab onto any part of the blade. The old objects become collector items for museums and have become rendered useless due to the advanced materials that allow the knife to last longer and stay sharper.

3. The Knife revies the ideas of caveman till whenever guns became the major weapon in war. Swords, spears, and axes are all similar to the knife. All of these are made from the same basic idea of sharp metal or stone, fixed with handle to protect the user. Not the victim. The knife also revives the idea of close combat relying on the user, not the weapon.

4. When fully pushed the knife will revert into war. Made for hunting and eating, the knife will become war after all it's other uses are exhausted.

The knife started out as a tool for man to hunt and survive, allowing man to kill animals and skin and gut them so they can eat only the parts they need. It also was adapted into arrows that allow them to be used at ranged, even more promoting the survivability of man. But time has found other uses for it such as hurting another or threatening.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Lecture 6

Tschichold
Dutch Modernism
Paul Shoetema
Hendrick N Werkman
Piet Zwat
Post Cubism and Art Deco
AM Cassandre
E McKnight Kauffer
Joseph Binder
WWII Propaganda
Ludwig Hohlwein
Herbert Matter
Art Deco Moderne

Todays lecture we continued where we left off with Tschicold and his progressions in type, his experiments are style around today with his purely visual communication. He created a new style that is prominate in swiss design. We then focused on some new emerging artist who invented a style that either has or will have another trend. Binder probably the most know Vacation poster designer truly invented a unique style that made everything appear futuristic but remaining in the current time, almost taking the flaws out of everything. We than looked at WWII proganda art that hitler would soon reject and ban. Ludwig Hohlwien pioneered the classic Olympic look that keeps being re invented each year the games are around. Matter created a new style of poster by using large images and then placing smaller ones behind creating a new style of depth that many people havent explored. The images look similiar to modern day movie posters or DVD covers that you would find in many big name production studios.

Design Discourse

The New Typography
-Communication in it's most intense form

-Legibility communication must never be impaired

-Zincography

-Film will replace literature

-Posters must act with immediate impact on all psychological receptalces

-The new typography is a simultaneous experience of vision and communication.

The new typography placed a strong view on clarity and legibility. But with this idea comes the backlash of everyone starting to produce the same work because of clarity and legibility because once something works and works well, it becomes standardized, destroying it's idea of difference. With film becoming more popular in design and just plain text losing it's strength, we have to look at how constructivism used photos to attack all senses which follows the idea of impacting the psychological receptacles. With planes in the air, you feel the power of war and the fist of the people relates to the you would fight for and their strength, all of this so you would do your part for your country. Not to mention that constructivism led the way for typography. Old books (including the 42 page bible) used to have excess flair and design around the type which led to them competing on the page neither would win, but new typography had to learn how to separate but make equal the legibility and clarity while still working with images.

Dematerialization of Screen Space
-Displacement (of the observer)
-Demarcation (of new boundaries)
-Dematterialization (of what is being observed) The computer monitor allows us to see what it on the internet, within a confined area (displacement). Outside the walls of our screen is so much more but accessing all of that at once, is impossible. The internet is alot like a camera, before the picture you see everything but as soon as you snap a shot, that idea becomes confined to a smaller area which has hard edges. If one was to the look at the internet, they would guess its constantly moving and changing, well the internet won't move unless you move in it. Pages upon pages while in still boredom until accessed by a viewer. The only item to understand this idea is "Tivo" the fact that it gave the show a rating for being "tivo'd" which is the same as if you had watched the show at it's correct time (dematerialization). The Tivo replaced the viewer but not his job.

What used to be "going out ole' Cali' way" has no become exploring the internet for it's an uncharted, cheap, expansive resource that California turned out not to be (demarcation). For moving out to California would make life easy because of the all the gold "in dem der hills" the internet has made life easier by allowing portable media to be accessed anywhere anytime, which woud take libraries and books to find out where nigeria is located, it takes 5 seconds on wikipedia for the same inforation.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Lecture 5

Architecture/Furniture- New international style
Dutch Design
Revolutionary design in furniture
Bauhaus
Weimar republic progressed in Russia
Moholy Nagy- Functionalism
Universal Type Face
The Bauhaus at Dessau
Herbert Bayer
Jan Tschichold and the New Typography- Functional
Dutch Modernism
White space

We started the lecture by watching a movie on the Bauhaus school, which all design and modernism took great strides thanks to the ideas of shapes and colors. Much what the school produced was based on function, which ruled supreme, so material beauty was outdone by functional beauty. As those ideas grew so the graphic side, the universal type face was created to make a font that had no flair but was functional everywhere, keeping with the idea of no external beauty but functionality. Clean lines and no excess is what made the school popular. All lead to modernism.White space became extremely popular allowing designers to play with position and the area around the texts that we now use as negative space. Architecture was revolutionized by Bauhaus in that modern houses have the same shapes and styling that building was designed in. Tschichold created the new international standard for type, the origins of swiss design.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Lecture 4

20th graphic design based on two styles: Suprematism and Constructivism
Minimalism- Pure Form
"Cubo-Futurism"
The emergence of the Constructivist Movement- 5 yrs between 1917 and 1922
Goals of Constructivism- Forge a new world of objects for a new social order.
Photographs become main idea in designs, which leads to photomontage
Lines, Shapes and Arrows used to direct eye around design.
Rodchenko and Lissitzky, both constructivist
Modern graphic language becomes characterized by geometric forms and high-contrast arrangements.
Late Constructivism was instrumental in placing the radical typographic forms
Theater design
“professional identity” for modern graphic design.
De Stijl
Mondrian

Without Soviet Russia, design would have gone nowhere. Pushing the boundaries of type and image helped progress the constructivist movement to new heights that no designer has done before. Lissitzky is by far one of my favorite artist through his use of minimalism and color, he was by far ahead of his time in that area, because that style is starting to reappear in modern times and very popular to the mass public now. Photos became more dominate in designs leaving behind hand drawn images. Sharp angles and strange rotations help promote the idea of strength. Mondrian who helped build upon the ideas that Lissitzky laid down as a foundation but he used his own style of grids which he is popular for. As time continues to go on constructivism still stands strong just like the idea that they were putting out at the time, design would not have progressed without the ideas from Russia and the designers that followed it.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Lecture 3

Key Ideas:
Pictorial Modernism
Cubism replaced a rendering of natural appearances with purely invented form.
Synthetic Cubism
Constructivist Movement
Plakastil/ Sachplakat used in propaganda for Axis powers.
Realism vs Abstraction
German Art absorbes Cubism, French advertising art, the lettering, typography and spatial origination.
Ludwig Hohlwein
Futurism/DADA/Cubism/Surrealism= Modern Art
Visual And Literary Materiality In Modern Art
Simultaneity
Duchamp
Iconoclast
John Heartfield/Photomontage
Surrealism-1924
Automatism

Lecture 3 started out with a quick run up on Plaskastil and how minimalism started become more popular. Followed by the cubist movement which changed the way everyone looked at art. Cubism lead the so many different genres of art, which is why it is my favorite genre. Design then changed toward to get the message across faster, which became even more popular when the war started. I've always been a big fan of propaganda style art and being able to see all the influences that impacted how the style grew up is really cool. After that graphic design began to get really strange and out there. Maybe too stange for my taste, though I did like some of the DADA style with their use of typography and image. That modern style is still around today and becoming a trend again in clothing styles and designs.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Lecture 2

Key Ideas from Lecture 2:
Scrap
Chromolithography
John Gamble/Lithographic
Monotype
Thomas Nast
Conventions of persuasive selling
Kelmscott Press
Art Nouveau
Modern Posters (Paris)- Led the way for Graphic Design
Taboo Designs
Beggarstaffs
Toulouse Lautrec- Created 1891 Moulin Rouge Poster/Cubism
Alphonse Mucha- Floral Design/ Birth of GE logo
Ornaments becomes structure
Functionalism
Vienna Secessionist- Geometric Patterning
Kunstlerhaus-Large negative spaces
Koloman- Rejects Art Nouveau
Alfred Roller- Cubism/Art Deco before hand
Hoffmann- Business card design
Glasgow School- Considered a counter movement to Art Nouveau/Abstract
AEG poster 1910
Standardization- Graphic Identity
Beck- Underground Maps
Railway Type

During lecture 2 we learned how fast the graphic world changed due to the Art Nouveau and the people who wanted to reject it. Logo designs start to be formed due to the geometric painting style. It's interesting to see how the world of adversting would be without the lithograph and monotype. These carried over to modern day when companies are recongized by certain types and logo. And without the advancement this ideas wouldn't be in place today.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Lecture 1

Important topics relating to the ideas introduced in lecture 1:
-Early mans forms of communication.
-First form of the alphabet and the different types of writing types.
-Hierarchy
-Chinese use of paper
-Douce Apocalypse, lead the way in designs for books to used for hundreds of years.
-Printed Text
-Use of color in text
-Transitional Type
-Monster Type from England open up a new door in font designs
-Metal vs Wood

The first lecture was very inspirational for me because I'm a big fan of Slab Serif and seeing how the design of how that certain type was formed, made me appreciate the style even more. Having taken latin in high school it was nice to have a refresher on the Roman alphabet and the road it paved for communication outside spoken words. Its cool to see how hand written font had left the picture and designers became engineers more than artist. The different methods of creating a type face with all the different grids shows how much we have progressed in modern times and how that impacts the fonts we can produce with computers as compared to just hand drawn, well hand drawn everything. I find that early men were ahead of their time in the idea of communicating and a shadow has been put over that time period and haven't been lifted. Just my thoughts.