New Visual Language

n.v. l ISSUE 1 FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION AN EXPLORATION IN TO MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

CITY IN FLUX

EARTH ARTIFACT

TYPE TRANSCRIBED

Contents

Modernism

El Lissitzky

Postmodernism

1

3

5

Barbara Kruger

City in Flux

Earth Artifact

7

9

Type Transcribed

13

11

The term modernism was used in graphic design itself since around the 1925-1930, as once economic conditions improved designers had to reassess their work, adapting it to a mass markets, and sometimes even to the demands of fascism. Initially before this time modernism was only largely experimental but then moved from the sketch board to the real world. Modernism has survived for all this time and still remains a powerful force of the design world of today.

It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity.

That’s what modernism means to me…

- Paul Rand

During the early 20th century movements included Fauvism (led by Matisse and Derain), Cubism (pioneered by Pablo Picasso), Expressionism (this movement was inspired by The Scream by Edvard Munch) and Futurism (founded by Marinetti). After World War 2 the USA became the focal point of new artistic movements with the emergence of Abstract Expressionalism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimal Art and Photorealism to name a few. Modern ideas in art and design started to appear in commercials and logos.

Probably the most recognisable logo of this period is that of the London Underground which illustrates the need for clear and memorable visual symbols.

The Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in early 20th century Germany was the birthplace of a revolution in modern design.

Founder Walter Gropius’ form follows function philosophy transformed advertising, typography, architecture, people’s living spaces, and the public’s aesthetic expectations in fundamental ways.

Futurism embraced technological progress and celebrated the potential and dynamism of the modern age. The widely influential typography of Marinetti abandoned traditional grammar, punctuation, and format, to create vivid pictorial typographic pages.

It was Inspired by the mechanism of war which led to war being glorified in resulting works.

1

Modernism

3

“Less is a bore�

Postmodernism

Collage by Charles Wilkin

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism, which it believed had not fulfilled it’s promises of designing a better world. Also postmodernism was a response to the world wars. The complete opposite of modernism, it dissolved hierarchies and questioned how things ‘should be done’, rejecting grand narratives and binaries.

It opposed legibility and simple motifs and combined and mixed styles. Postmodern design often featured collage, deconstructed type, historical figures and signs aswell as encouraging diversity and complexity. Kitch imagery was also used as well as highly political and satirical material.

Postmodernism didn’t have much impact on graphic design until the middle of the 1980s. Initially, many designers thought it was just undisciplined self-indulgence. A hodgepodge of styles, with no unifying ideals or formal vocabularies, dreamed up by students in the new graduate programs. But in fact it was a new way of thinking about design, one that instigated a new way of designing. Designers began to realize that as mediators of culture, they could no longer hide behind the “problems” they were “solving.” One could describe this

5

shift as a younger generation of designers simply indulging their egos and refusing to be transparent (like a crystal goblet). Or you could say they were acknowledging their unique position in the culture, one that could have any number of political or ideological agendas.

The vernacular, high and low culture, pop culture, nostalgia, parody, irony, pastiche, deconstruction, and the anti-aesthetic represent some of the ideas that have come out of the 80s and informed design practice and theory of the 90s. After the 80s designers may still choose to be anonymous, but they will never again be considered invisible. We are part of the message in the media. In the postmodern era we are not just mediators of information, but individuals who think creatively and visually about our culture.

Postmodernism

Barbara Kruger Postmodernist

Feminist

Conceptualist

Associated with postmodern Feminist art as well as Conceptual art, Kruger combines tactics like appropriation with her characteristic wit and direct commentary in order to communicate with the viewer and encourage the interrogation of contemporary circumstances.

The economy of Kruger’s use of image and text facilitates a direct communication with the viewer. Within a short declarative statement, she synthesises a critique about society, the economy, politics, gender, and culture.

Kruger merges the slick facade of graphic design with unexpected phrases in order to catch the viewer’s attention using the language of contemporary publications, grapic design, or magazines. Rather than attempting to sell a product, her works aim to sell an idea to the viewer that is meant to instigate a reconsideration of one’s immediate context.

Kruger uses black and white images and often red text in much of her work. The text in her work in the 1980s included phrases such as ‘Your comfort is my silence’ 1981, ‘I shop therefore I am’ 1987, ‘You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece’ 1982. The concept behind her work is to question the viewer on feminism, consumerism, desire and classicism, however the very source she obtains the images from are the ‘mainstream’ magazines which promote everything which she is challenging. Her concept involves robbing the associations we make as a society and using that as central to the irony and questioning she puts across as a challenge to the viewer.

“I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty”

Barbara Kruger states, ‘I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t.’ This quote from Kruger is a good example of how her ideas fit in with that of the postmodernist movement, postmodernism was about questioning the social constructs of the world and challenged the use of such classifications such as ‘male vs female,’ ‘black vs white’ and ‘straight vs gay.’ It was a reaction to society and its constraints, its new found consumerism, technology and its priorities, Kruger herself is reacting to these things within her work. As a conceptual artist her work is very much about the ‘big ideas’ but in my opinion she not only has a meaningful, challenging concept behind her work, it is also visually successful as a piece of art. I did not choose to write about one piece of her work specifically but to instead, look into how her ideas fit into the concept of postmodernism.

7

Barbara Kruger

City In Flux The City in Flux brief was the first brief of the year that we were given, and initially I found it quite a challenge to come up with ideas given how open the brief was.

Eventually after researching artists and designers who have taken the city as inspiration for their work, as well as looking at writers takes on ‘the city’ I came up with the concept of ‘travel and tourism’ within a city and looked at how landmarks signify major cities all over the world and influence where a tourist will go in a city.

I created experiments mainly illustration based, centred around this concept taking inspiration from illustrators such as Mae Chevrette, Zoe More O’ Ferrall and looking at the photography of Jen Gotch and Stephanie Jung. The cities I chose to look at were London and New York as I have visited both places and so could use my own photos when creating experiments.

My final outcome was two concertina books, one with London imagery in and one with New York imagery in, with the purpose being to promote the positive aspects of these cities. The book also featured quotes about cities in general on alternate pages from writers I had researched such as Charles Baudelaire, Roman Payne and Rebecca Solnit. Overall I feel my final outcomes could have been better thought out and I had carried through another idea I had which was to create postcards, which I think would have reflected my travel theme better and the purpse would have been clearer. .

9

City

in Flux

Here are some piece of my work from the Earth Artifact brief, which were included as pages in my final book. The scan of the A

B

C

D

E

F

G

Russian dolls was part of my ‘Life on Earth’ topic and reflects a piece of humanity and also has cultural significance as well. For

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

this I looked at Peter Tonnigsen’s work with scanning random objects as inspiration. The illustration above also was part of the ‘Life on Earth’ topic and was inspired by photographer

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

Steve McCurry’s portraits of people all over the world - as I felt it was important to show the diversity in human life. The illustrations are pencil drawings digitally coloured.

V

W

X

Y

Z

The design above is the alphabet shown in sign language. I thought it would be good to include different form of communication that people use around the world and felt that the hand as a illustrated symbol would make an effective yet simple design.

Earth Artifact The second brief of the year was the Earth Artifact brief, which was based around the Golden Voyager records sent in the 1970s by NASA in to space in the (somewhat unlikely) event they will be recieved by extra terrestrial life or future humans.

We were asked to create a contemporary version of the golden record presented in a visual media channel of our choice be it a book, physical object , poster or animation.

It was not to be a slavish reproduction of the original - and this would have been impossible due to the sheer amount of information about Earth included on the record.

One thing I stuggled with on this brief was the fact that there is so much information about Earth that you could focus in on I felt I didn’t know which bits to focus on and which to assume unimportant. Also, I found the communication element of this brief challenging, firstly because there are so many languages in the world and to ignore this and just use one would not be representative of Earth, and secondly because I kept thinking ‘my target audience is aliens’, what do I do with this? I think if I had not read in to the brief so much I may have come up with a good idea sooner.

The three concepts I came up with were a book featuring different aspects of Earth (Life on Earth, Communication, Science, Technology) , Informational ‘flash cards’ and text-light infographic posters. In the end I decided on creating a book featuring my own photography, illustrations and typography based around the aspects of Earth I chose to represent.

In my research I looked at photographers, illustrators and designers, which I felt could be applied to the aspects of Earth I was looking at. I took some photos of natural and manmade textures inspired by photographer Samantha Gibbons, and also scanned some objecs taking inspiration from the work of Peter Tonningsen .

One element I looked at was communication and thought about different forms of communication there are in the world, so I looked at braille and came up with a design for that saying ‘Greetings from planet Earth’ which was a feature of the original golden record. I also looked at sign language, but found that signl language is not universal as there are different alphabets in use in different countries around the world A compromise I came up with when creating designs for the communication aspect and looking at languages was to use the most spoken languages in the world, which at least gives better representation than only showing one language.

This was something I created an infographic on in the form of a barchart showing the number of speakers there are in the world for each most spoken language.

11

Earth Artifact

Type Transcribed

From the Typography in Graphic Design first session I looked at five different pieces of work from five different artists, including El Lissitzky’s ‘Proun’ piece (above) which I then transcribed letterforms from by observing the different shapes within the artwork to determine possible letters, uppercase or lowercase, focusing on creating letter designs for the letters A, N, E, S, G. Once I had done this for all the pieces of artwork I was looking at I then selected the letterforms I’d transcribed from El Lissitzky’s work to take forward to task two, which was to create three rough alphabets.

For the third task I then chose my best letters from each alphabet, and drew up a final alphabet on graph paper to get measurements right. Once I was sure the letters all worked well together I re-drew them on Illustrator using guides, to get the letters the same size and the widths of the lines roughly the same size.

After I had completed my final alphabet I experimented with adding colour to the letters, using the same colour palette used in El Lissitzky’s piece of work. Overall I am quite pleased with the final outcome of my alphabet.

13

Ty p e Tr a n s c r i b e d