Images

There are two images I enjoyed. The one above is from the website and there is one that my dad made. I liked the one above because of its simplicity. But with its simplicity it creates a very clear picture. With its contrasting black and white it boldly jumps out at you and really get the negative sights of war. When I first saw this image I thought that it was crows making the word stop. Which I thought was really dark and depressing which made it catch my eye. But after zooming in I realized it was bombers. Not quite as depressing and down but still very much so. The other image which I do not have is one my dad made a while back. It is an image of soldiers carrying an American soldier’s casket and it says “Support our troops.” Now my dad wasn’t saying he wants our soldiers dead he was getting to the point that we need to support our troops by not physically supporting their caskets. We need to bring them home.

I find it interesting how strongly people can express their feelings over war.

Technical Difficulties

I'll have my two designs up shortly. I am waiting for my neighbor to wake up so I can scan! But my first design is based off of the arts and crafts movement. There are a lot of flourishes and focus on nature design. The overall shape is actually in eyeball because I am designing design logos. I will personally say I do not really like the final design and will redo it within the next couple of days along with my second one. On that note my second design is a Victorian style with a very symmetrical look with focus on nature. Both of these are sans-serif fonts but if i were to do these on the computer they would be Serif. Both of these designs started with a eyeball and i started working off of that. In the second one I made a flower out of the eye which looks different but interesting. The fonts again are serif fonts. The First design I tried keeping the type a little bit more modern just because i didn't want to be completely pulled into this style. I am really looking forward to the more modern designs and hopefully some better designing! Scanner wasn't the best :/

Postcubist pictorial modernism

Post cubist pictorial modernism was post world war one. It brought new ideas that incorporated cubist ideas about “spacial organization and synthetic energy.” There was one important art movement that came from this and its called Art Deco. Art Deco uses geometric shapes incorporating Cubism with some influence from art Nouveau, Bauhaus along with De Stijil. During this reading there was one man whose work I enjoyed, Edward McKnight Kauffer. Edward mainly used the ideas of Cubism in his work and really focused on geometric shapes. Edward developed over 100 posters for London’s Underground using modern art styles. My favorite work by him was the Daily Herald poster. He used cubist ideas of geometric shapes and intertwined them to make this beautiful design from squares and triangles. Although the typography in the poster is off the design point and idea are both marvelous. For the most part this reading talks about designers who pushed new ideas from working with cinematic sequence to more use of vibrant colors, energetic lines. This was the ideas of modern art coming to poster design.

I find it interesting that you can start to see the modern art movement affect design.

Question: Was Bauhaus before this time or after or during?

Bauhaus and new typographic style

Alright so i am going to do this blog now because i have a lot of other ones to fix so i might as well do this while i am fresh (with my wonderful writing abilities *Sarcasm*) The Bauhaus movement was very interesting indeed. I finally felt as if i was looking at something that looked good to me. I felt that this style had something to it something different. It was clean and pushed ideas in new directions.

The Bauhaus is actually a school of design. I found this out the hard way because right before i started reading i was talking to my dad. He told me that he really liked the Bauhaus and I tried to sound smart saying yeah i think he's cool to (not knowing what to say) then he corrected me and i decided to read the chapter. But anyways the Bauhaus was a art school that started in Germany. The school itself was formed by a man named Gropius. Gropius wanted to merge applied arts with fine arts schools and when he did this he named it "Das Staatliche Bauhuas" his goal was to solve problems of visual design created by industrialism. One fact from the reading that i found interesting was that at the Bauhaus they made no distinction between fine and applied arts. But one person out of the many read about that i want to focus my blog on is a man named Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Who will be called Nagy by me for times sake. Nagy explored many new areas in design and photography, such as photomontage, photogram, kinetic motion, light, and transparency. Nagy also worked a lot with typography stating about typography " a tool of communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity" i found this interesting because it makes sense typography can get a point across in a very direct way and how you use it can change the way it gets to you. Nagy also started experimenting with photos in graphic design. using the mixture of typography with posters he used techniques such as double exposures, enlargement, distortion, montage. I found Nagy to be important because he began to see connections to get graphic design changing with new ideas. And nagy eventually re-opened the Bauhaus school in Chicago after the nazi party closed it down.

There are many more people that came from the Bauhaus like, Bayer who designed a type with all lower case letters in their simplest geometric form. and the Bauhaus influenced many people. One of these people include Jan Tschichold. He petty much said type should be in motion, he experimented with different designs with font and went crazy he would flush with the left margin with uneven line lengths with uneven symmetry and a wide variety of weights and fonts. But what this was, was the new typography. New typography focused on clarity mostly sans serif fonts. it developed form from the text. The rest of the reading talks about different people and different ideas introduced. such as the introduction to the modern map, new approaches to photography, and more designs by independent designers.

Overall this chapter was long and it took time to get through but i still enjoyed it. It is a style that is nice to look at it is clean and yet very interesting. my favorite thing from this whole chapter has to be the Isotype movement. which is best described by using pictures for words. The use of elementary pictographs portrayed information. The information was usually portrayed with graphs.

One question: why did the nazi party force the Bauhaus to close?

Post class

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The other day in class we talked about Pictorial Modernism. We heard a presentation and we even had the opportunity to play design pictionary where i attempted to draw a water bottle and a face to show the simplicity of the style of the time. I found this style interesting because of the simplicity of the work. The difference of American and European poster design was interesting to learn about. We talked about how Americans are still in the Victorian style with a focus on kids and family values.

One thing i found interesting in this class was when we talked about designing our posters now we still play off the idea of family values and emotion.

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The other day in class we talked about pictorial modernism. and we heard a presentation about it. and we even had a design dictionary where i attempted to draw a water bottle and a face to show the simplicity of the style of the time. I found this style interesting because of the simplicity of most of the work. and the difference of american and european poster design at the time. We talked about how americans are still kind of in the victorian style with a focus on kids and family values.

One thing i found interesting in this class was that when we talked about designing our posters now we still played off the idea of family values and emotion.

Old school style- A new language of form

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Cubo futurism was the term for cubism and futurism in Russia. This was the movement against czarist Russia. Suprematism was founded by Kasimar Malevich. This is a style of basic forms and pure color or an elemental geometric abstraction. Maevich opposed old art and the conservative ways of old art. But not everyone had the same view as Malevich. Most artists turned towards the view for industrial design and making posters. Such artists include Vladimir Tatlin & Alexander Rodchenko. Next, was Prouns a painting style introduced and developed by Lissitsky, a style that introduced three dimensional illusions

this is an example of Prouns i think this style is very interesting because it is abstract and it catches your attention it just pops out at you. (other artists explored with typography and color but did not have the structure as Lissitsky but they did use bold imagery)Lissitzky eventually led the russian revolution in 1917 to make artists and designers have a connection between art and technology. When Lissitzky moved to Europe he got to experiment much more with new media. his framework for books became an architecture framework for organizing the 48 page illustrated portfolio.

It was in 1917 in the Netherlands when the De Stijl movement was launched. Which focused on abstract geometric style. A painter during this time was Mondrian who focused on geometric abstraction and moved away from Cubism. he used primary colors with neutrals and straight lines and flat planes limited to rectangles and squares. here is an example of his work at the top.

I find it interesting that in this chapter the evolution of styles becomes more simple. you start off with cubism that has many planes then you have De Stijl which focuses on one plane with Straight lines with primary and neutral colors.

Question: Why did the De Stijl style die when Mondrian died?

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Pictorial Modernism

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This chapter we start to learn about poster design, influential designers along with the introduction of the art deco movement and war posters. I am going to talk about an influential designer by the name of Lucian Bernhard. Lucian was a 15 year old boy from London who became well know by accident. Lucian was designing a poster for a competition and he started painting a magnificent scene with matches, cigars and dancers. Then he did not like what he had so he painted over everything but the matches, and when time fell short all he had was matches so he wrote the company name on the sheet and sent it in. Lucian just moved design forward towards simplification and reduction of ideas. These ideas continued through World War One with the poster designs. Germany used these simple pictographic symbols in their poster to represent complex ideas. While the allies were more focused on the Victorian styles of using emotions in posters to get rallied up. Later we get to the movement of Art Deco which uses geometric shapes and ideas of cubism, Bauhaus, Vienna Secession, De Stijil, and Art Novoua. Edward McKnight was an influential designer who designed a poster for the Daily Herald using basic geometric shapes that made a scene of birds flying. Using basic interlocking shapes he created one of my favorite designs in the book.

I find it interesting that simple designs is what people like but we keep avoiding them.

Question-How come it seems like United states is so far behind in graphic design. It seems like many advancements happen in Europe? Is it better flow of information then there was no internet to share ideas and there are more people in Europe to share ideas with?

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I liked this chapter because it had a lot of focus on poster design and advertisement which seems real interesting to me. i like some of the styles used here and i dislike some of the styles. i like the styles that include the play of typography and i really like the underground posters that used collage like techniques to say "its warmer or colder down here" that was a cool design because of the color layout and the idea. here are my notes along with some questions and thoughts put inside them...

Chapter 14

Pictorial Modernism

James Pryde and William Nicholson were brothers-in-law and close friends, both respected academic painters they decided to open up an advertising design studio in 1894 and found it neccessary to adopt psuedonyms to protect their reputaution.they developed a new technique, later named collage. Often incomplete image challenged the viewer to participate and dechipher the subject.

Question: why did they decide to use fake names?

Plakatstil- The flat- color design school that emerged in Germany early in the twentieth century is called Plakatstil.

15 year old Lucian Bernhard painted two matches on a table with a cigar and ellaborate dances but painted over everything but the matches in the end and sent his poster in because he ran out of time and ended up winning the competition, he moved graphic communications one step further in the simplification and reduction of naturalism into a visual langauge of shape and sign.

During Berhands early years he used a sans serif lettering style painted in broad brushtrokes. His type became a typeface and his sense of simplicity was also applied to a trademark design.Once again a designer is doing architecture work. He had an emphasis on reduction and minimalist form. ( I like this guy )

The poster goes to war

World War 1- Govt turned to posters as a significant role in proprganda and visual persuasion. Klingler- war posters exspress complex ideas with simple pictoraphic symbols.

The allies used illusrtative approach rather then symbolic meaning. British posters stressed the need to protect traditional values, the home, and the family.

Alfred Leete- Created the britian poster with popular Lord Horatio Kitchner. Pointing directly at the viewer.

James Montgomery Flagg- Made the famous poster of uncle sam pointing. And uncle sam is actually Flagg because its a self portrait.

The maverick from munich

Ludwig Hohlwein- Howlein took great interest in reducing images to flat shapes, he applied a rich range of texture and decorative pattern to his images . He also combined simple powerful shapes with naturalistic imagery. (14-32)

`Howlien was a designer for hitler because his style matched hitler’s cocept of effective propoganda. Howlien moved to bold , heavy forms and strong tonal contrasts during this time.

Postcubist pictorial modernism

Post WW1 cubist ideas about spacial organization and synthetic energy inspired an important new direction in pictorial images.

Art Deco- term used to identify popular geometric works of the 1920’s and 1930’. To some extent an extension of art novoue, it has influenced of cubism, the bahaus, and the vienna secession comingled with De Stijl and suprematism as well as egyptian, Aztec, and Assyrian motifs. Streamlining, Zig-Zag, moderne and decorative geomety.

Ok so what doesnt it involve would have been easier is there an easier way to describe this.

Edward McKnight Kauffer- Paris- used cubism ideas in his work. Mde the daily herald poster with the birds, showed principles of modern art and cubism. He developed 141 posters for the london underground using modern art styles. He also achieved visual impact with landscape subjects on posters by reductive design, editing complex environments and interlocking shapes.

A.M. Cassandre-Ukraine- Bold simple designs emphasize two dimensionally and are composed of broad, simplified planes of color. He reduced his subjects to iconographic symbols. He has a love of letterforms he used cinematic sequence of word and image in print. (cool idea) he designed typefaces with daring idead such as the type bifur!!! I like this font I have used it before.

Question-How come it seems like United states is so far behind in graphic design . It seems like a lot of advancements happen in Europe? Is it better flow of information then there was no internet to share ideas and there are more people in Europe to share ideas with?

Carlu- “used feelings of ease, relaxation, and comfort with the use of curves. She “avoided the use of two lines where one would do” and “two ideas where one will deliver the message more forcefully”

Paul Collin- Vibrant Color, informal compositions, and energetic linear drawings exspressed joy in life.

Austin Cooper- Used cubism ideas and collage in his works my favorite examples of his work were the two underground posters saying “It is Warmer Down Below” and “It is cooler down below” using color spectrums to portray temperature.

Joseph Binder- Vienna - used various influences including cubism, koloman Moser and pictorial graphic design style with strong communicative power. He used basic shapes and forms to portray images, much like cubism. He developed a highly refined and naturalized style in posters and billboards advertising throat drops, beer, travel, and public services.

How did they print large billboards back then?