Intro to Graphic Design Fall 2015 Favorite Designers Zine

FEATURING

L谩szl贸 Moholy-Nagy Jan Tschichold Alvin Lustig Cipe Pineles Paul Rand Elaine Lustig Cohen Massimo Vignelli Jacqueline Casey Tibor Kalman Paula Scher David Carson Stefan Sagmeister Jessica Hische

CO NT EN TS

2 8

László MoholyNagy DESIGNED BY

Dave Nagy

Cipe Pineles DESIGNED BY

Monique Johnson

16 22 28

Massimo Vignelli DESIGNED BY

Jimin Park

Paula Scher DESIGNED BY

Sungmin Lee

Jessica Hische DESIGNED BY

Rachel Yun

4 12 18 24

Jan Tschichold DESIGNED BY

Danny Varillas

Paul Rand DESIGNED BY

Jaeyoung Cheong

Jacqueline Casey DESIGNED BY

Isabella Batten

David Carson DESIGNED BY

Absalom Marshall

6 14 20 26

Alvin Lustig DESIGNED BY

Oona Amsden

Elaine Lustig Cohen DESIGNED BY

Iz Levin

Tibor Kalman DESIGNED BY

Jake Rodriguez

Stefan Sagmeister DESIGNED BY

Yeoeun Cho

100.01/X Fall 2015 is the first edition of a zine of MICA Introduction to Graphic Design students’ interpretations of the work of their favorite historic or currently practicing graphic designers. It is published as a black and white lo-fi print edition and a full-color digital edition available at URL. GD 100.01, Introduction to Graphic Design, Fall 2015 is lead by Sally Maier. Cover and table of contents design developed collaboratively by the members of 100.01 with lettering by Danny Varillas.

JAN

TSCHICHOLD

“Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.”

Jan Tschichold took his first gulp of air on the second of April, 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, when his parents Maria and Franz welcomed him into the world. Sign-writer by trade, Franz gave his son an introduction to the world of lettering—although not seeing it as his future, Tschichold learned the ins-and-outs of sign writing while assisting his father. His aspirations of becoming an artist were deflated when his parents thought otherwise. Not wanting their son to be an unfruitful artist, the family concluded that becoming an illustration teacher was a worthwhile option—it provided a creative outlet and a steady income. Tschichold as teacher began when he was 14 years of age and lasted a mere three years. The wheels of calligraphy and script began to turn in the mind of Tschichold two years prior to the start of his teaching post. It was the 1914 World’s Fair for Books & Graphics that left an impression. An interest in calligraphy formed, fueled by his personal studies of the books Tschichold poured himself into – especially those which covered calligraphy, ornamental script and writing.

At the age of 17, Tschichold threw his back against his life as a teacher and began his typographic studies. While he studied a range of creative endeavors, such as engraving, wood cutting and bookbinding, it seems as if his time of study didn’t involve a great deal of education. Simply, he knew it all. Because of his personal studies and passion, there wasn’t much he didn’t have a strong understanding of. The staff at the academy must have seen Tschichold as a contemporary rather than a student. His professor left him to his own devices, while the director of the academy saw a spark in the young man and, in 1921, had him begin to give classes in script writing.

Over the following years his passion and influences grew greatly. Up until 1923, Tschichold wasn’t developing clean, geometric san serif rich design. In fact, it was quite the opposite. He was mightily impressed by one of the first fonts of Rudolf Koch – Maximillian Grotesk. A very German black letter. He also made it a habit to collect the works of masters of script, such as Pierre Simon Fournier and would use his calligraphic skills on ads for which he was commissioned. It was a time of unevenness in the world of the printed word. Fonts were chosen almost at random, with little-to-no regard for the text. There was virtually no roman weighted fonts in use—an inheritance of the gothic.

Considering his work up to this point, the explosive impression left upon Tschichold when he visited a Bauhaus exhibition in 1924 must have been a sight to see. Here is this young, gifted man who had been influenced and passionate about black letter and scripts, now looking at letters with straight edges, made of simple shapes with no flare. The inquisitive smirk that moved his lips must have been joyously fixed for some time.In response to the sloppiness of the layouts of his time, Tschichold would become something else altogether. As if it happened over night, his layouts began to have such rigorous structure and composition, filled with white space, straight lines and thick rules.

“BISEAUTY TYPE

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

“

CIPE PINELES: ART DIRECTOR

By Martha Scotford

ineles is credited with the innovation of using fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications.

Important because it brought fine art and modern art to the attention of the young mainstream public, it also allowed fine artists access to the commercial world. Pineles commissioned such artists as Ben Shahn and his wife, Berarda Bryson, Richard Lindner, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, and Dong Kingman. Some young artists “discovered” by the magazine became well known: Richard Anuskiewicz and Seymour Chwast. An artist and illustrator herself, Pineles was the perfect art director: she left the artists alone. She asked them to read the whole story and choose what they wanted to illustrate. Her only direction was that the commissioned work be good enough to hang with their other work in a gallery.

Neither was Pineles averse to using her own talents. She had an affinity for food painting and used objects, furniture, and even her own large-scale country house as props and locations for many photographs in the magazine. In one instance, finding potatoes too ugly for photos to go with her story, the food editor turned to Pineles, who recalled: “I thought they were pretty, so I dug out my kitchen tools, bought ten cents’ worth of potatoes, painted them on a double-page size sheet of paper, indicated the type layout and left town. Total time, an hour and a half. Two weeks later, when finished art was needed, I went about the job more seriously. I nursed the potatoes, considered the type more carefully, and then tore the whole thing up. The rough was more fun. Total time, eighteen hours.”

The potatoes won her an Art Directors Club gold medal.

In Pineles’s hands, the design of Seventeen followed the more classical tradition of magazine and typographic design. For the fiction, the quiet and bookish typography supported the primacy of the artwork. For editorial and fashion pages, the type was more playful, even showing early tendencies in American figurative typography where objects replace letters as visual puns. Bear in mind, this was during the golden age of magazine

CHARM & UP Charm’s new presentation of fashion revealed its take on its readers. The clothes for working women were shown in use: at the office, commuting, lunchhour shopping, and as practical answers for quotidian problems. As Pineles put it, “We tried to make the prosaic attractive without using the tired clichés of false glamour. You might say we tried to convey the attractiveness of reality, as opposed to the glitter of a never-never land.” Pineles used modern architecture and modern industrial design as locations and props for the photo shoos. For a repeated series of cover articles called “She Works in [City Name],” Pineles designed entire issues to reflect each city theme. In the Detroit issue, for example, Pineles used the city as a backdrop for the fashion pages, constructing the layouts from photos of buildings and expressways.

A New Type of Ad Man Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Rand was creative from a young age. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Manhattan and practiced drawing constantly. One of his first jobs was laying out product spreads for Apparel Arts, a popular men’s fashion magazine owned by Esquire. Soon after that he started doing magazine covers. His work was instantly noticed. By his early 20s, Rand was considered one of the most important designers of his generation.

As art director and critic Steven Heller points out in his definitive monograph on the designer, Rand was one of the first American graphic designers to look to Europe for inspiration. As a student, he became obsessed with commercial arts journals from Britain and Germany, which featured cutting-edge work by graphic designers like A.M. Cassandre. Rand became a devotee of Swiss Expressionist Paul Klee. He absorbed new typographic theory from Switzerland and drank in the Modernist thinking on form and function coming out of the Bauhaus in Germany. These influences reflected in his work, which variously used—and often combined collage, montage, hand-lettering, drawing and photography to bracing effect.

RAND’S COVER FOR JAZZWAYS MAGAZINE

JACQUELINE COCHRAN AD FROM THE EARLY ’40S

In 1941, at the age of 27, Rand was named chief art director of the newly-formed ad agency William H. Weintraub & Co. American advertising at the time had changed little since the late 19th Century, especially in terms of how the ads were conceived.

Across the industry, Rand helped initiate a crucial shift in creative power from copywriters to art directors. He laid the groundwork for the so-called Creative Revolution the industry enjoyed in the 1960s. As one of his contemporaries later put it, Rand “brought ideas and intelligence to advertising where before him there was no semblance of thought.”

Note the shadows that give the simple composition an engaging depth.

Courtesy of Museum of city of NY/Private collection

“Before Paul Rand, the copywriter was the lead,” says Donald Albrecht, the curator of the new exhibition. The copywriter would supply the words—often times a great many of them—and the words would dictate the layout of the ad, often drawn from one of several templates or formats. The visuals would be filled in later by commercial artists, who typically just illustrated whatever the copy was describing. Creativity was in short supply.

Inspired by the bold graphic work being done in Europe, Rand brought a radically different approach to the job. As he saw it, an ad’s effectiveness lay in the way words and images were combined on the page. “Rand’s ads have words and pictures, but they’re all fused into one symbol,” Albrecht says. Rand introduced a crucial new ingredient into commercial art: form. By paring down copy and breathing white space into his compositions, Rand made his advertisements stand out from the dense copy surrounding them. He embraced wit and humor, developing friendly hand-drawn characters for spirit-maker Dubbonet and the cigar company El Producto. He used bold, arresting colors. He signed every one of his creations. “He thought he was bringing art to advertising,” He says.

Shows Rand’s approach to combining image and text.

Courtesy of Museum of city of NY/Steven Heller

In 1947, Rand published his first book, Thoughts on Design. It would remain influential for decades, making the case for the essential relationship between how something looked and what it accomplished. A good piece of commercial art had to be both beautiful and persuasive, Rand argued. As Heller notes, Rand “valued both aesthetic perfection and clear communication.” For Rand, advertising wasn’t a dirty job. It was a chance to instill a bit of beauty into peoples’ lives—just so long as that beauty was in service of selling the product.

Rand’s reputation continued to grow. An ad that ran in the The New York Times in 1953 gives some sense of his stature. “Wanted: Art Director with a modern, creative touch. Need not be a Rand but must be able to inspire an art department.”

‘Paul Rand, the Visionary Who Showed Us That Design Matters’ 2015

by Kyle Vanhemert

“He thought he was bringing art to advertising”

Elaine Lustig Cohen was awarded the 2011 AIGA Medal, the most distinguished honor offered by the AIGA, the American professional organization for design. The celebratory event and ceremony highlighted her exemplary design work and career, citing her as a “pioneering graphic designer, artist and archivist”. In all of these roles, Elaine has made lasting contributions to the visual profile of design, art and education. A recurring interest throughout all aspects of her career is early 20th-century European and Russian modernism – as an artist practicing painting and collage and as a rare book dealer, selling important ephemera of the avant-garde.

Elaine Lustig Cohen (1927-) is the pioneering female graphic designer who incorporated the aesthetic vocabulary of European modernism into American graphic design, during the 1950s and 1960s. After training as a painter, she developed her design skills working with Alvin Lustig (whom she married in 1948). Following Lustig’s premature death in 1955, she took control of the studio and between 1955 and 1961 produced a distinctive series of covers for publishing houses Meridan Books and New Directions.

With their strong concepts, abstract forms and typographic invention, they represented a break from the prevailing tradition of pictorial illustration in book-jacket design.

Her ability to summarize the content of text in the cover design was further aided when, working for architects including Eero Saarinen and Philip Johnson she produced signage schemes intended to express a building’s character.

She designed many posters and catalogues for New York-based arts organizations, including the American Center for the Arts, the Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Jewish Museum... In 1995 her contribution to graphic design was acknowledge by an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York.

Meridian Giants book jacket, 1956

Meridian Giants book jacket, 1956

E L A IN E L U ST IG C O H EN

JACQUELIN CASEY There are many women designers who deserve to be recognised for their immense contributions to the field of graphic design, but few so deserving as Jacqueline Casey (1927-92).

Casey’s visual language style was strongly influenced by the Swiss designers Karl Gerstner, Armin Hofmann and Josef Müller-Brockmann and the International Style.

Typography plays a fundamental role in Casey’s posters: a complete visual image can be created entirely from the message content and the image becomes the message.

‘My job is to stop anyone I can with an arresting or puzzling image, and entice the viewer to read the message in small type and above all to attend the exhibition,’ she told Liz McQuiston in Women In Design (Trefoil, 1988).

In each of Casey’s posters, a visual element attracts the viewer and the text provides information. She is at her best when she employs a visual metaphor, as she does so brilliantly with the use of a ‘blood splat’ as the solitary image for her exhibition poster ‘Goya: The Disasters of War’, where the interplay of visual and verbal ignites our imagination and encourages a more profound understanding of its subject.

NE

TIBOR M&Co.

COLORS

KALMAN 'Bad Boy' of Graphic Design T ibor Kalman, a graphic designer whose innovative ideas about art and society helped change the way a generation of designers and their clients viewed the world, died on Sunday at the Hyatt Dorado Hotel near San Juan, P.R. He was 49 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Kalman decided to spend his last days in Puerto Rico after losing a four-year bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, his wife, Maira Kalman, said. The founder of M&Co, a revolutionary New York design firm that became a social prod to his major clients as much as a graphics resource, Mr. Kalman was also the former editor in chief of Colors magazine, an art director and a director of music videos and television commercials.

He was the self-styled bad boy of the graphic design profession and a harsh critic of formulaic or what he pejoratively termed ''professional'' design. He wanted designers to take greater responsibility for how their work influenced the surrounding culture. As the designer Milton Glaser asserted, ''He emerged in such a short amount of time as a major influence on a young generation.'' Mr. Kalman described himself as more a social activist than a designer and constantly sought to use his work to promote causes like environmentalism and economic equality.

He opposed products that he considered harmful to the workers who made them, the environment or the consumer and never hesitated to tell his clients what he thought. After spending almost a decade building a business that he said sold ''design by the pound'' to banks, discount department stores and other institutions, Mr. Kalman reinvented M&Co in the mid-1980's as a conceptually progressive firm doing graphics, exhibitions, books, magazines and film titles primarily for cultural clients that included the rock band Talking Heads, the Times Square Redevelopment Corporation and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also founded M&Co Labs, which conceived and manufactured watches and clocks with quirky faces and rearranged numerals, products that helped start a fashion for such designer-made objects. Tibor Kalman was born in Budapest in 1949 and immigrated with his family

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler Schoo of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970. In 1972, she was hired by CBS Records to the advertising and promotions department. During her eight years at CBS Records, she is credited with designing as many as 150 album covers

Pentagram

Early Life

PA SC Buisness

In 1984 she cofounded Koppel & Scher with editorial designer and fellow Tyler graduate Terry Koppel. During the seven years of their partnership, she produced identities, packaging, book jackets, and advertising.

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“HELVETICA IS THE FONT OF THE VIETNAM WAR.”

“I l O IMM VE T H ER EDIA E BI . TH TE GS TH ING EY’R IMPA CALE S T E M CT A O D Y F OF ND AV PO ES O IGN RIT ST.” E

“IT’S THROUGH MISTAKE THAT YOU ACTUALLY CAN GROW. YOU HAVE TO GET BAD IN .”

ORDER TO GET SPIRIT S GOOD.” TYPE HA

“BEIGE IS THE COLOR OF INDECISION.”

“IT’S THROUGH MISTAKES THAT YOU ACTUALLY CAN GROW. YOU HAVE TO GET BAD IN ORDER TO GET GOOD.”

AULA CHER “IT TOOK ME A FEW SECONDS TO DRAW IT, BUT IT TOOK ME 34 YEARS TO LEARN HOW TO DRAW IT IN A FEW SECONDS.”

“I DON’T THINK OF DESIGN AS A JOB. I THINK OF IT AS AND I HATE TO USE THIS TERM FOR IT MORE OF A CALLING. IF YOU’RE JUST DOING IT BECAUSE IT’S A NICE JOB AND YOU WANT TO GO HOME AND DO SOMETHING ELSE, THEN DON’T DO IT, BECAUSE NOBODY NEEDS WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE.”

“THE BEST WAY TO ACCOMPLISH SERIOUS DESIGN... IS TO BE TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY UNQUALIFIED FOR THE JOB.”

d a v I D CA r S on

Carson became the art director of Transworld Skateboarding magazine in 1984, and remained there until 1988, helping to give the magazine a distinctive look. By the end of his tenure there he had started to develop his signature style, using “dirty” type and non-mainstream photographic techniques.

Steve and Debbee Pezman, publishers of Surfer magazine (and later Surfers Journal) tapped Carson to design Beach Culture, a quarterly publication that evolved out of a to-the-trade annual supplement. Though only six quarterly issues were produced, the tabloid-size venue—edited by author Neil Fineman—allowed Carson to make his first significant impact on the world of graphic design and typography— with ideas that were called innovative even by those that were not fond of his work, in which

Carson was hired by publisher Marvin Scott Jarrett to design Ray Gun, an alternative music and lifestyle magazine that debuted in 1992.

In one issue, he notoriously used Dingbat, a font containing only symbols, as the font for what he considered a rather dull interview with Bryan

Carson beca the art direc of Transwor

Austria native, Stefan Sagmeis-

I think that when it comes to looking

ter formed the New York-based

back, I’m quite a flag in the wind.

Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has

My ultimate judgement of a project

designed for clients as diverse as

we’ve done is dependent on how it

The Rolling Stones, HBO, and the

was received.

Guggenheim. He received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts

In my case, I copied everything from

in Vienna and a Master’s from Pratt.

M&Co, from doing an estimate to

Stefan has exhibited work around

sending the bill, right down to the

the world, teaches in the graduate

items that are on the bill. Of course,

department at SVA, and lectures

I asked Tibor and he said it was okay.

extensively. In 2012, Jessica Walsh

That gave me confidence when I saw

became a partner and the com-

others’ contracts that were 15 pages

Are you creatively satisfied?

my 2-page contract was okay. If I

The lame answer is sometimes. I

would have started a studio out of

think that while I’m doing some-

school, I would’ve been using one of

thing, I’m never satisfied. But there

those 15-page contracts. Of

are times I look at a project and

course, you can only give

recognize that it’s the best we can

advice from your own

do because it’s at the edge of what

experience; that’s been

we’re capable of in that moment. I

mine. That worked

think that’s about the best you can

well for me.

do. Later on, depending on how they’re received, some projects become a smashing success and I think, “I knew it was fantastic!” (both laughing) And some are utter failures and, of course, I knew that, too!

“My grandded wanted to b painter and designer, but w dad would have had a real guage, but was stopped. W a desire to become a graph not stopped.”

become a sign was stopped; mu talent for lanWhen I expressed hic designer, I was

I don’t think that’s a bad stance to have

Are there any projects you want to

as a designer. Ultimately, we are in a

explore in the next few years?

very audience-related profession, and I

Right now, I want to finish The Happy

think that’s good. If we design a music

Film. That’s the biggest thing. Having

video for The Rolling Stones and their

encountered all the difficulties of making

base audience thinks it’s bad, then it’s a

the film, simply because of the vastness

bad video, no matter if I think it’s great

of the theme, I promised myself that the

or not. By definition, there is a func-

next project will be about my toenail or

tionality in the things we do. While I’m

something really tiny. (laughing) I don’t

extremely aware, and even insistent,

know, but, ultimately, I have a couple of

that a piece of design can never be

directions. Even though I’m not a very

judged by functionality alone, I think it’s

secretive person, I try not to talk about fu-

ultimately inhuman to only see things

ture projects, simply because I’ve learned

for their functionality. We want things

that if I do, I live so much through them

a very Viennese trait. So many people sit in the cafes in Vienna and talk about the things they want to do and lose the desire to do them.

Also, while making the film, we put together The Happy Show, which was a very satisfying thing to do. It’s been in five cities and will be in two more. That has generated the most amazing feedback of any project I’ve been involved in. To use the language of graphics and the combination of images and words to express something more personal is a largely untapped direction that we got incredible audience feedback from.

Jessica Hische Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and eater of cake working in San Francisco. After graduating from Tyler School of Art with a degree in Graphic Design, she worked for Headcase Design in Philadelphia before taking a position as Senior Designer at Louise Fili Ltd. While working for Louise she learned a lot about letters while simultaneously developing her freelance career. In September of 2009, after two and a half years of little sleep and a lot of hand-lettering, she left Louise Fili to pursue her freelance career further. Jessica has been featured in most major design and illustration publications including Communication Arts, Print Magazine, How Magazine, The Graphis Design Annual, American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators. She was featured as one of Step Magazine’s 25 Emerging Artists, Communication Arts “Fresh”, Print Magazine’s New Visual Artists 2009 (commonly referred to as Print’s 20 under 30), and has been named an ADC Young Gun and one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design.

The Type Directors Club