By: Alexandra K i t n e r
i o t n a m r o
Inf ign Des
The Ag e Of
Ch. 18 Ernst Keller Taught at Zurich school of applied arts, starting in 1918. Developed professional course in design and typography.
Theo Ballmer
Max Bill
Swiss designer who studied at Bauhas. Influenced by Van Doesburg, and developed style based on mathematical structures by using arithmetical grids of horizontal and vertical alignments.
Bill constructed layouts of geometric elements organized with absolute order. Mathematical proportion, geometric spatial division, and the use of Akzedenz Grotesk type are features of his work of this period.
Anton Stankowski German deisgner whose work after serving in World War II started to crystallize into the creation of visual forms of communicate invisible proccesses and physical forces.
Designed poster for Rietburg Museum. Demonstrates his interest in symbolic imagery, simplified geometric forms, expressive edges and lettering, and vibrant contrasting color.
Ballmer’s lettering is more refined and graceful than ungainly types of Doesburg. Ballmer’s “Norm” poster the grid is openly displayed.
Exhibition poster, 1945. Based on a diagonal grid, note that some of the images fill up more than one square in the grid, allowing for flexibility in design.
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Cover for Berlin-Layout, 1971. Derives from a Stankowski painting.
International Typographic Design Style Also called swiss design. Practiced in Switzerland in the 1950’s-70’s.
Adrian Frutiger
Characteristic of style
Creater of the 21 Univers font diagram. All in the same family, but all different weights and widths. Used by Swiss designers so they could have different weights on a page, but stil have design unity.
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Edouard Hoffman and Max Miedinger
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Design should be neutral, should let the content speak for itself, and should be universal and impersonal. Overall unified design Underlying mathematical grid structure-creates unity San Serif typefaces in a variety of weights-less decorative and emotional Left justified, ragged right edge text Use white space as a design element Objective photography (instead of illustrations)
Created the typeface Helvetica. Designed for Swiss type foundry, named Helvetica for the latin name for Switerland when released in Germany.
Diagram of the 21 Univers fonts, 1954. Frutiger systematically altered the forms of fonts located onthis chart above, below, and to the left or right of Univers 55.
Rudolph DeHarak DeHarak adaped attributes from the Swiss such as grid structures, and asymmetrical balance.
Helvetica Helvetica Narrow Helvetica Bold Helvetica Bold Oblique
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During the early 1960’s DeHarak initiated a series of over 350 book jackets for McGraw-Hill publishers using a uniform typographic system and grid. Each books subject was implied and articulated through visual configurations ranging from elemental pictographs to abstract geometric structures.
Ch. 19
Bradbury Thompson Thompson emerged as one of the most influential graphic desigers in postwar America. Worked for printing firms. Worked for printing firms for serveral years before moving to New York. Designed for Westvaco Inspirations, four-color publications demonstrating printing papers. Westvaco used letterpress plats of art and illustrations borrowed from advertising agencies and museums.
The New York School Loose group of American designers working in NY in 1950 to develope their own modernist approach.
Characteristics: • • • • •
More flexible in layout and use of type than Europeans Looser approach to organization and layout Still interested in form and content Combine images and words Trying to convey message and illustrate ideas
Paul Rand
Thompson used the typecase and print shop as his “canvas, easel, and second studio”. Large, bold organic and geometric shapes were used to bring graphic and symbolic power to the page. Rand sized upon college and montage as means to bring concepts, images, textures, and even objects into a cohesive whole. Jazzways yearbook cover, 1946.
American designer that initiated an American approach to modern design. His ability to manipulate visual form (shape, color, space, line, value) and skillful analysis of communications content, reducing it to a symbolic essence without making it sterile or dull, allowed Rand to become widelyinfluential while still in this 20’s.
Cover for Direction magazine. The red dots are symbolically ambiguous, becoming holiday decorations or blood drops.
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Pages from Westvaco Inspirations 216, 1961. Complex typography interpreted the American Civil War; combinations of four-color process printing plates appear behind the large letters
Ch. 20
Saul Bass
CBS
Bass moved from New York to California in 1950, and he opened a stupid there two years later. Paul Rand was a huge inspiration to Bass. But while Rand’s artwork used complex contrasts of shape, color, and texture, Bass fequently reduced his designs to a single dominant image.
The Columbia Broadcasting System of NYC moved tothe forefront of corporate identity design as a result of WIlliam Golden, CBS art director for almost two decades.
Bass had a remarkable ability to express the necleus of a design with images that become glyphs, or elemental pictorial signs that exert great graphic power. Motion picturs how long used traditional portraits of actors in promoting firls. Producer/director Otto Preminger commissioned Bass to create unified graphic materials for his films. Including logos, theater posters, advertising, and animated film titles.
A coorporate philosophy emered in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Advertising was created not by an outside agency, but by internal staff. Started a high level of artistry compared to typical newspaper and trade publication advertisements of the period. Elliot Noyes was IBM’s consulting design editio in the late 50’s. He said that to expess the extremely advanced and up-to-date products, they were not looking for a theme, but for a consistency of design quality which will in effect become a kind of theme, but a very flexible one. Paul Rand designed IBM logo out of a rare typeface-city medium. Updated in the 70’s with stripes.
Saul Bass, poster for Exodus, 1960. The struggle of Israel’s birth is expressed by two levels of reality: the two-dimensional logo and the photographically frozen moment when this image is engulfed in flames.
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Visual Identity Chermayeff and Geismar has produced more than one hundred corporate design programs, including the NBC logo. Paul Rand-1986. The four letter name is separated into two lines to startle the viewer y giving a common word and uncommonimage Paul Rand -The continuing legacy of the Bauhaus and Herbert Bayer’s universal alphabet informs this trademart, in which each letterform is reduced to it’s most elemental configuration
Chermayeff and Geismar Associates. Consistent use of the mark, color, and typeface built recognition value through visual redundancy.
One of Chermayeff and Geismar’s most far-reaching corporate design programs was for Mobil Oil, Executed in an elemental geometric sans-serif typeface, the Mobil Oil trademark is the ultimate in simplicity.
Saul Bass & Associates compuer graphics animation identification tag, 1984. Bass designed the new mark to reposition the firm as “a global communications company” rather than “the national telephone system” with information bits circling the globe.
Lester Beall, international paper company trrademark. Initials, tree, and upward arrow combine in a mark whose fundamental simplicity-an isometric triangle in a circleiassures a timeless harmony
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The Conceptual Image
Music Television Logo
Ch. 21
MTV first went on air in 1981. Partners Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky, and Patti Rogoff designed the logo. Design firm reccomended turning the name from Music Channel to Music Television (MTV). During the design process, Gorman felt Olinsks sketch of a bold, three dimensional sans-serif M needed further development, so she scrawled a large, graffiti-like tv on it’s face, creating a memorable and influential trademark.
A moment of insight occured when the designers relized the logo, with the broad flat surface of the M and the bigorous tv, could through infinite variations of color, decoration, material, dimensionality, viewin angle, and motion could assume different personalities, participate in animated events, and e demolished.
After WWI graphic designers started to re-invent the communicative image to express the age of the machine and advanced visual ideas. Images started to not just convey narrative information, but ideas and concepts.
Testa effectively used more subtle contradictions. Such as a hand made of synthetic materials holds a plastic ball in a distinctive and appropriate image for this trade exhibitiono
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Poster for Pirelle, 1954. The strengths of the bull elephant is bestowed on the tire by the surrealist technique of image combination
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Armando Testa used metaphysical combinations to convey elemental truths about the subject. In his posters and advertisements, the image is the primary means of communication, and he reduces the verbal content to a few words of just the products name.
Milton Glaser Over the course of several decades Glaser “reinvented himself as a creative force” by exploring new graphic techniques and motifs. During the 1960’s he created flat shapes formed by thing, black ink contour lines, adding color by applying adhesive color films
Woody Pirtle Pirtle was a texas designer who epitomizes the originality of texas graphics.
Posters started to make statements about social viewpoints rather than spreading commercial messages. Media and general public related these posters to antiestablishment values, rock music, and psychedelic drugs, they were called Psychedelic Posters.
Inspired by the oriental calligraphic brush drawing and picasso aquatints, Glaser began making gestured silhouette was drawings that tease by only suggesting the subject, requiring the viewer to fill in the details from their own imagination.
Milton Glaser Bob Dylan poster, 1967. Transcending subject and function, this image became a symbolic crystallization of its time.
1996. Visual and verbal meanings are explored by manifesting a hat as a photograph, a shadow, a word, a pictrograph, and a written definition
Woody Pirtle, poster for Knoll furniture, 1982. A hot pepper becomes a red and green chair, signifying the availability of Knoll’s “hot” furniture in Texas.
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Psychedelic Posters
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Pter Max, “love” poster, 1970. Max’s split fountain printing resulted in colors lyrically dissoling into one another.
Ch. 22
Tadanori Yokoo
During the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s Yoko’s design vocabulary and range of art and printing techniques became increasingly uninhibited.
Japanese Design During the postwar period technological leadership and an awareness of Western social patterns and lifestyles raised philosophic issues for Japanese graphic designers as they sought to maintain national traditions while incorporating international influences.
Yusaku Kamekura Tokyo Olympics logo and poster, 1964. Three simple symbols, the red sun of the Japanese flag, the Olympic rings, and the word. Combined into an immediate and compelling message.
Yusaku Kamekura and Osamu Hayasaki, Tokyo Olympics poster 1964. A meticuloysly planned and lit photograph becomes an emblematic expression of the footrace.
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“The sixth international biennial exhibition of prints in Tokyo” poster combines a variety of techniques: a halftone group portrait in pink; a sky with an airbrushed brown band across the top and a red one at the horizon; calligraphic writing on verical bands, as found in earlier Asian art; and a monumental montage figure towering over a lighthouse on a bank across water.
Ch. 23
Wild Plakken Plakken accepted or rejected commissions based on the client’s ideological viewpoint; the group believed a designer hould match his or her beliefs tothe content of his or her graphic designs.
Weingart’s design process involved multiple film positives and masks that were stacked, arranged, then explosed with carful registration to produce one negative, which went to the printer.
Gert Dumbar Dumbar developed a technique he called staged photography, consisting of still lifes and environments incorporating found material and papiermache figures and objects sculpted or assembled for the project.
Plakken, poster for the antiapartheid movement of the Netherlands, 1984. The multiracial unity of all women is signified by photographs split into dark and light skin color.
Wolfgang Weingart
Paula Scher
Russian constructivism provided important typographic inspiration. Scher did not copy the earlier constructivist style but used its vocabulary of forms and form relationships, reinventing and combining them in unexpected ways.
Weingart exhibition poster, 1982. Modulated patterns of overlapping colored dots warp and modulate the space.
Poster for the Mondrian collection at the Haags Gerneentemuseum, 1971.
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Poster for CBS records. The synthesis of contradictory sources of inspiration, in this case Russian constructivism and 19th century wood type posters.
Ch. 24 Rudy vanderlands Vanderlands began to edit, design, and publish a magazine called Emigre. Emigre’s experimental approach helped define and demonstrate the capabilites of the new technology, both in its editorial desis and by presenting work and interviews with designers from around the world whose work was too experimental for other design publications
Cover for Emigre, no. 11. Three levels of visual information are layered in dimensional space
Robert Slimbach Slimbach was a master calligrapher. He saught inspiration from classical typefaces as he was designing text faces from digital technology. He also created vibrant fonts based on calligraphy and hand lettering.
Adobe Garamond Myriad
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