History of Graphic Design

-Postmodernism
-Distinctions in culture and politics
-Communities o opinion and belief
-Experimental alternative publishing
-Push Pin Studio
-Wolfgang Weingart
-New Wave
-Fragmentation, layering, randomness, unpredictability
-April Grieman
-Paul Scher, appropriation or "to quote" vs. plagiarism
-Charles Anderson
-Nevel Brody
-Jacques Derrida
-Cranbrook, ecplored post-structuralism and the language games of Derrida's Grammatology
-Distinctly unsystematized
-Deconstruction
-Roll of Fontagrapher
-"Citational grafts"
-Attention to the role of language and "texts" in our construction of reality and identity.



Postmodernism stands in opposition to the ordered rationality of Modernism, is not a style, but a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings. It's not a theory but a set of theoretical positions. Skeptical of truth, unity and progress what it seed as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity. Suspicious of public norms, inherent values, given hierarchies, authoritative standards, consensual codes or traditional practices.
Savvy consumers had outgrown the message mode of graphic design. Style of graphic design appeal to the counterculture youth, and the dizzying euphoria of the era.
Wolfgane Weingart, rejected the right angle, intuitive design, richness of visual effect, broad technical knowledge. Anti-functional, deliberately chaotic and averse to message driven forms.
Postmodernism, appropriation, to copying styles, was no longer naive nostalgia but calculated because the past itself was considered invented.
Nevel Brody, work was plundered and plagiarized as his distincitive work was quickly assimilated around the world in part through the advent of computer and scanning technology.
Words are not merely codes, using them in a behavior, and the behavior alters their meaning.
Post-Structuralism, challenging hierarchies, tentativeness, slipperiness, ambiguty and the complex interrelations of culture and meanings.

Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture
By Jessica Helfland, John Maeda

The New Illiteracy

Riyong Wang March 3rd 10:59pm

- Design principles are not the real problem, but more resonant issue is the degree to which we have come to accept this sort of ill-defined, anything-goes expressionism.
- Design principles like good sentence structure, editing techniques, or the ability to articulate an original idea seem to have little if any tangible value.
- The issue is the degree to which we have come to accept this sort of ill-defined, anything-goes expressionism: messy and myopic, part stand-up comedy and part soapbox-proselytizing, a "medium" that is more likely to ricochet from personal issues than respond to public ones, in the end, verges on illiteracy.
- “Angry Websites make people feel good: but are they god or people? ”
- There are no rules.



The new illiteracy is an incubator for anger a breeding ground for self-importance. Designers these days tend to use childlike grammar, “kinda”, “gottta”, and horrifyingly precious misspelling of the word “cuz”. It’s nothing compared to the warped perception of inflated self-worth evidenced in this writer’s final posting: “I’m gonna write a book.”



On the website the opportunity to say anything is both seductive and eminently achievable. “Undecipherable type and vibrating colors as if to day: I’m angry, and my site says I’m angry too, so don’t mess with me.” Design tells designer's mood.


There are no rules, anybody can do, say, think, be anything, so is design principles. Every designer has experience, so everyone should be able to learn more about the problem of creating.

- The Basel School
- Point, Line, and Plane
- Harmony of opposing forces
- Josef Muller Brockman
- Der Film poster
- Swiss Movement
- “Good design is good business.”
- Brandbury Thompson
- Chermayeff and Geisman Associates: abstract form unto itself, free from alphabetic, pictographic, figurative connotations.
- Vignelli Associates
- Media revolution, “The Society of the Spectacle”
- Wolf’s vision
- Typography unified with photography by locking text or display tightly with image.
- George Lois: new advertising
- Photo-typography
- “New flexibility”
- “Type talks”


International style flourished during the 60’s in the two Swiss cities: Zurich and Basel. The Basel School of Design was laboratory of the international style, graduates spread the style to educational institutions around the world. Emil Ruder, Armin Hoffmann, and Josef Muller Brockman were associated with the school and its education, they all published books to establish their design philosophies. Josef Muller Brockman, treated image as objective symbol, gaining impact through scale and camera angle, created a visual counterpart to the structural harmony of music.
The Swiss Movement had a big impact on American Graphic Design and the emerging field of corporate graphics. Critics of Swiss design claim it suppressed the role of content and the “voice” of designers producing a rigid and severe style that had inflexibility at and sameness of form.
Paul Rand, understood value of invented forms for both symbolic and communicative ends, through skillful analysis of the context. Branding was seen as a major way to shape a reputation for quality and reliability. Along with Saul Bass, Paul Rand helped define a new American Graphic design that turned away from European sources. Form and essence of a message and playful symbolism.
Brandbury Thompson, expanded the range of design possibilities throught a thorough knowledge of printing and typesetting and an adventurous experimental spirit.
Standards for format sizes, typography, grid systems, paper specifications, and colors realized tremendous economics in materials and time.
George Lois was a advertising genius, his concepts were dominated and text and images became completely interdependent. The role of art director was expanded into editorial deliberations. The new advertising: visual statements used simple images, talked intelligently to there audience, focus on the benefits of a product.
1940-1960, social conventions and standard design thinking was challenged as new conceptual approaches emerged from advertising and the advent of photo-typography.

Unite3: part 1

- The Isotype Movement
- ISOTYPE=International System of Typographic Picture Education
- Pictorial language
- Rudolph Modley
- Metaphor for design
- Principles: Optical Interest, Visual simplicity of image and structure, Visual continuity
- The first wave, European transplants.
- Lester Beal-self taught American modernist.
- Art of construction
- Paul Rand
- “Ruthlessly pragmatic and startlingly visionary.”
- “Make the familiar unfamiliar.”
- Alexey Brodovitch
- The International Style
- School of ULM
- Theo Ballmer and Max Bill



The Isotype movement is a pictorial language to help pubic understanding of social issues related to housing, health, and economics after WWI. Designers use simple pictographs to convey information about directions, events, and objects that have complex relationships in space and time. The Isotype movement led to the extensive use of pictographs in signage, identities and information graphics later in 20th century.
Lester Beal is a self taught designer, his posters for rural electrification Administration message in elemental Constructivist forms.

My little thoughts for the movie:
Helvetic is a very common use font, it’s everywhere until it got very boring for some designers. This quote came to my mind when I was watching the movie, “Make familiar “unfamiliar”.” It’s interesting to see how other designers made, transformed the most common font into a new face.

4 laws of media:
Enhance, Reverse, Retrieve, Obsolesce

Cellphone:
Enhance-communication, easier to reach other people, even they are on the other side of the world.
Reverse-radiation, bad for your health.
Retrieve-letters, don't have write letters. Telephone, cellphones these are touch screen, no more buttons.
Obsolesce-telephone, many families got rid of telephones because everyone uses cellphone, it's smaller, easier to carry.

Cellphone retrieve writing letters, it saves paper, time, and you can get a hold of the people in seconds instead of days. And the wireless technology is easier for people to travel and still communicate in places. Most of the cellphones these days have the abilities to connect with people by voice or text, and get on the internet almost anywhere.

Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture
By Jessica Helfland, John Maeda

Electronic Typography: The New Visual Language

- A digital age, the relationship between design and sound, particular between the spoken words and written words.
- Visual language has been a source of inspiration to artists and writers.
- For designers, there has always been an overwhelming interest in formalism, in analyzing the role of type as medium, message, and muse.
- Typography as the physical embodiment of such thinking, has quite a way to go.
- Typography’s early appearance on the digital frontier does not bode well for design.


The talking Barbie, Jessica thinks that was her first computer. You can pull a little string to make her talk. If you held the string back slightly as she was talking, her voice would drop a few octaves, transforming her from a chirpy soprano into a slurpy baritone. But between back then and today, the spoken words and written words go far beyond puling a string. The change was brought by recent advances in technology indicate the needs for designers to broaden their understanding of what it is to work effectively with type.




“One cannot speak a capital letter.” Adolf Loose. This is how he explained the expressive limitations of the western alphabet.





“Written words are the symbols of spoken words.” What happens when written words can speak? When can they move? When an they be imbued with sound and tone and nuance, with decibel and harmony and voice?





The New Illiteracy

- Design principles are not the real problem, but more resonant issue is the degree to which we have come to accept this sort of ill-defined, anything-goes expressionism.
- “Angry Websites make people feel good: but are they god or people? ”
- There are no rules.


The new illiteracy is an incubator for anger a breeding ground for self-importance. Designers these days tend to use childlike grammar, “kinda”, “gottta”, and horrifyingly precious misspelling of the word “cuz”. It’s nothing compared to the warped perception of inflated self-worth evidenced in this writer’s final posting: “I’m gonna write a book.”


On the website the opportunity to say anything is both seductive and eminently achievable. “Undecipherable type and vibrating colors as if to day: I’m angry, and my site says I’m angry too, so don’t mess with me.” Design tells designer's mood.


There are no rules, anybody can do, say, think, be anything, so is design principles. Every designer has experience, so everyone should be able to learn more about the problem of creating.

Dutch Master of the New Typography
Rodenhenko
Art of Construction
Piet Zwart
Dutch Modernism partners with German Plakastil
Abraham Games
Post Cubism and Art Deco Moderne
AM Cassandre
Art Deco Quality- Streamlining, zigzag, moderne and decorative geometry
Synthetic Cubism
Propaganda
Suspicion motivates
Continue of Mythical Realism
“Uncle Sam”
Herbert Matter- International Typographic Style
Between the wars Germany became cultural hub


The printing arts perform as an expressive tool means and methods of commercial reproduction become tools of creativity in Dutch Modernism, designers in Holland demonstrated the implications of the new typography as playful expressive forms plus dynamic organized communication. Like Tschichold and the new typography masters, Dutch design believed in dynamic interplays between asymmetrical typographic elements should form a field of tension on the page. “Typography and photography was integrated in a total structure using overprinting.” Paul Shoetema. Photos has a power illustrations could not compare, designers used it as an expressive tool. Hendrick N Werkman represented a new look at methods inspired by Modernism and art of construction. Like Lissitzky, Bayer and Tschichold, Piet Zwart used collage technique with parts from the typecase to expressed the working process of the new typography, he diverse elements unified into a design system consistently applied regardless of subject matter. 1942, post cubist pictorial space and forms; Commonplace images elevated and combined to inspire the audience for war.
The art deco moderne, expressed the desires of a modern era and a passion for geometric decoration for a machine age. AM Cassandre, one of the great illustratiors of 20th century who also had great typography skill. E. McKnight Kauffer, best know for his London Underground posters of the 30’s.
German art absorbes Cubism, French dvertising art, he lettering, typography and spatial origination from the Russian Constructivism and Dutch de Stiji movements. Mythical Realism, promoted patriotism at all levels of society thru national symbols full of realism. Herbert Matter, fullest expression of type and image during the 30’s. he expanded the role of extreme contrasts of scale in photography for European poster style.