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exploring 3 key influencers in design during the
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In an era when materialism and capitalism were shunned and music festivals, psychodelics and free love were embraced, so came a new wave of graphic design. 2
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WES WIL SON
Wes Wilson is mostly known for for his psychedelic poster art and popularising melting psychodelic typography.
Wilson was born in 1937 in Sacramento, California and is generally acknowledged as being the father of the ‘60s rock poster. The arts was not his first choice in career, as he was originally more interested in nature and the outdoors, studying forestry and horticulture in school, and later majored in philosophy before dropping out of school. Despite this, it turned out he had a natural talent for art. Wilson’s first poster was selfpublished and was created in 1965 and is popularly known as the “Are We Next” poster. It featured a swastika within an American flag, a protest by Wilson in reference to the increasing U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War. Not long after, Wilson began creating posters for events and shows and became more known and sought after. Wes Wilson pioneered what we now know as the psychedelic poster, his style filling all available space with fluid, flowing lettering.
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ROY LICH TENS TEIN
Roy Lichtenstein is known for bringing to light chromatic colour schemes, thought bubbles and repetitive dot stencils.
Lichtenstein was one of the first American “Pop” artists to achieve widespread acclaim and also became a lightning rod for criticism of the movement. He
King of cool: Lichtenstein in 1968 Getty Images
began his training in 1940, taking painting classes from Reginal Marsh at the Art Student’s league where he produced work similar to Marsh’s social realist style. He then entrolled at Ohio State University where he studied drawing and design. His mature Pop style was inspired by comic strips was often criticised for lack of originality, banality and even copying. Despite these accusations, his method of creating images blended aspects of hand drawing and mechanical reproduction involved considerable alterations of the source images. Lichtenstein played a crucial role in overthrowing the skeptical views of commercial art and by embracing “low” at such as comic books, he became one of the most important artists in the pop art movement.
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ANDY WA R HOL
Andy Warhol is best nown for bridging the gap between pop culture and the middle class and combining commercial and literary art in his work.
Born in 1928, Warhol was born into a working class home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When he was a child he was a disease of the nervous system called Sudenham’s choria, which caused involuntary movements of the extremeties and is said to have lead him to become a hypochondriac and to develop a fear of hospitals and doctors. This meant he spent a lot of time home bound with his mother. In this time he would draw, listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie stars which he kept around his bed. He later described this time as being very important to the development of his personality and tastes. Warhol began to gain fame from his whimsical ink drawings of
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Andy Warhol © Greg Gorman
shoe advertisements which lead him to be hired by RCA records, alongside another designer, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and other promotional materials. It was during the 1960’s when Andy Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American objects, most famously Cambell’s Soup, Coca-Cola bottles and celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Marlon Brando, to name a few.