Modernism
Modernism is used to decribe the many different Art movements and ideas which were brought about in the 19th century not long after The Russian Revolution and WWI. The world of art was stimulated by the thoughts on how old art styles had become outdated and there was a need for a new world with much more harmony / peace along with the emergence of the new Economical, social and political world. Many art and design styles were made with Modernism as the base, including Dada, Futurism and Cubism etc. all heavily influencing Typography, Graphics Design and Photography etc.
Dadaism
Dadaism would be the art movement from the European avant-garde, which happened in the early 20th century, claimed to have originated from Zurich of Switzerland in 1916. Starting in 1914 AD - World War 1, artists displayed their disgust towards the propaganda being forced down the throat of society and how in return, society simply took it all in with so little resistance to the lies. The artists displayed their feeling of disgust through the creation of many disturbing images that depicted the artist’s (often political) views. Many people view Dadaist as anarchist but Dadaism is just similar to anarchism in many natures because both of them are based on defiance of the society. Ernest, Dali and Miro were some of the most famous Dada artists that defined the “irrationality of the human nature� through their creations. Even though Dadaism has to endure so much criticism, it is an asset to our society and makes a great difference in how we think today.
Grid System
The grid system is a base for Modernism Art and Design, it is a 2D frame for people to work on, used to organise content placed onto a page, resulting in a final piece with order for every little part involved, heavily relied on by many deisngers around the world. A grid system would be a series of horizontal, vertical, diagonal and sometimes curved lines, intersecting at various points, producing many smaller boundaries within 1 area where the user of the grid system would place their work, text and images etcetera. A book titled ‘Grid Systems’ for explaining the usage of the grid system was created by the designer Josef MĂźller-Brockmann and has since been used by many other designers in training.
Post-Modernism
Post-modernism would be the Design movement, it had an evolution during the mid 1960s as opposed to the style and rules of Modernism movements. Unlike the style of Modernism which was full of rules, making much sense to the readers, Post-modernism is all about breaking the rules, being much more abstract, complex and having much more freedom than being constricted to gridsystems. From the 1970s onwards to the 1990s, Post-modernism brought to us a new self awareness about style. Post modernism’s style was mostly one where the audience would have a bit of trouble recognising the information recorded but somehow manage to understand with some effort and time for observation. Some of the styles here would include Neo-expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art and so on, etcetera.
Punk Movement
Having grown and changed in America and The United Kingdom during the mid 70s, subcultrure known as Punk has strongly influenced the world of art along with many members of of our newer generation. Punk existed in the mid 70s as an expression of the youth’s rebellion and anti-authority philosophy, in a sense it can be related to ‘Anarchy’. Back in the 70s, Americans would use Punk as a term, a genre to categorise some new bands, Speaking of ‘Punk Music’, at this time a new musical movement had been sparked with the bands such as ‘The Sex Pistols, ‘The Clash’ and ‘The Ramones’. It didn’t take long for ‘Punk’ to take it to the world with fashion, literature, visual art, films and dancing.
Pop Art Movement
Pop Art began in the 1950s - 1960s with British and American artists, within which the most famous would be no other than Warhol with his Marilyn Monroe piece. Pop Art challeneged Fine art by making usage of iconic images, examples being advertisements, movies and famed individuals (as mentioned previously, Marilyn Monroe would be one). It is also said that Pop Art was inspired by the Dada movement due to the use of collage in their works, examples would include the famous 1956 piece by Richard Hamilton ‘Just what is it that makes today’s society so different, so appealing?. Richard Hamilton was part of the ‘Independent Group’, a collection of British critics, artists, architectures and academics who had fascination in contemporary American mass culture.
Masthead Design
As part of designing our magazine, we are also required to design a masthead first, a logo to present the title of “New Visual Language”, or as some have chosen to work with “NVL”. Here are some masthead designs that I came up with, although apart from the 5 logos on the top right corner that was inspired by swiss design, all the others were created without inspiration from famous artist styles related to modernism or post modernism, just things that I had seen around me during the time I was thinking of ideas, for example, a dice was in mind when I thought of the logo on the top left, I saw a light bulb when I created the logo on the bottom left and I saw a polka dot hand bag when I was inspired to create the middle logo.
Production Process
Going in the order from left to right, this goes from the top ot the bottom, showing all the basic steps I had taken while making the logos / masthead ideas, however I do not feel the need to display all of the steps because this shows from the first logo to the eighth logo, the 9th one was simple font manipulation which anyone with the slightest experience on Illustrator is capable of. In the process of creating these logo experiments, I have mainly used the following list of Illustrator tools: Pen Tool Shape Tool Pathfinder Line Tool Type Tool > Create Outline Transform > Rotate / Reflect / Shear
A02
A01
A03
B01
A04
B02
C01
Cover Experiments
Here are the different Magazine cover experimental designs that I first made. The Row at the top, from A01 through to A04 is the initial ideas that I quickly tried out in order to see how the font I created would look had I used it as a base and incorporated it into my magazine cover, this did not come out as good as I had imagined and the very first ones that were only black and white were way too blande in my opinion. The second section including B01 and B02 are the experiments that I had made using the type and masthead that I had created along with the final pieces from 2 of my briefings. B01 involved the usage of my Wolfgang Weinhart style based font with part of my Street Graphics final, the font colour of the type I wanted to be the same and matching the final piece, which means a shade of colour frok black to white, but either way, one side was going to be less visible due to the final piece’s colour. B02 was scrapped because I could not make the masthead any bigger, it would not fit in the space left with my Earth Artifact piece, the sub heading also took attention away form the logo. C01 was a simple experiment with the font face Helvetica, replacing the letter O with my round Logo design based on Swiss design, this was scrapped in the process of elimination against my other designs.
D01
D02
D03
D04
D05
D06
Cover - Final Testings
These are the last experiments that I had done for my magazine cover experimentation, all inspired mainly by Hans Neuburg’s works that base off geometric shapes. From D01 to D06 are the orders which I made them before using the process of elimination to decide which one was the most appropriate for usage. The components of these designs are all very basic but when I have to put so many small shapes into mass usage, I have to pay attention to the small details, the size often strays off by so little as oo.oo1mm even when I simply copy then paste, when that happens, they no longer fit together properly so it does take longer than one would imagine. The font mainly used here is Helvetica, after typing it out, I create outline on them so it becomes easier to work with when manipulating size. The barcode includes the line tool with alternating widths and a line of random numbers with the date, volume of magazine (Vol.01) and the made up price of 2 pounds and 99 pence.
E01
E02
E03
E04
E05
E06
Cover Examples
I have been to the library and looked at the magazines on the third floor, these would be some of the ones that I thought may be of use to mymagazine’s design process, mainy looking at how the masthead / logo had been placed onto the front cover. These covers have inspired a bit more than just the front cover, as you can see now, the resemblance between E01’s masthead placement and the title of each of my internal page. The placement of the masthead and subheading on my magazine covers have a relation to E03 and E05 as one can now tell.
F01
F02
F03
F04
F05
F06
F07
F08
F09
Page Layout Examples
I have taken a look through several magazines on the third floor of the library and here are some of the page layouts which I found potentially useful. However, since I wanted evey page of my magazine t follow 1 format instead of making things overly complicated, I chose only one of these as main inspiration for my magazine’s pages. In the end, F05 was chosen because it gave a very clear view of the image in context the entire spread looked simple, crisp and clean without and type hindering the view of the image.