Visual Research

Visual Research

1

Modernism

4

Helvetica & Grid System

2

3

Postmodernism

Magazine Research

5

6

Experimentation

Development

Samuel Barran

modernism

1

Fauvism is characterised colour, stoke and texture. It chooses colour over realistic values. This movement is very vibrant and use a variety of strong brush strokes.

fauvism

cubism

surrealism

Cubism is an art movement coined by picasso in the early 20th Century.

The artist analyses an object, breaks it up and then reassembles in abstract form.This is to represent the object from more than one view point.

The Bauhaus was founded with the idea of creating a “total� work of art in which all arts would eventually be brought together.

The bauhaus had a profound influence on all art forms including graphic design and typography.

Modernism is the depiction of art movements in the early 20th Century. It had a large effect on the development of art, design and architecture.The main focus of modernism was to distance itself from traditional art forms and create something new, movements that were created around this time included cubism, surrealism, fauvism etc.

bauhaus

futurism

de stijl

The aim behind surrealism was to resolve the contradictory conditions of dream and reality. Artists paint illogical scenes, create strange creatures from every day objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.

Futurism emphasizes speed, technology, youth and violence and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city. the idea of motion and movement really make this an interesting piece.

The boat can be seen in the distance but can’t be identified as it’s just a shape.

Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colours along with black and white. This movement has been applied to different disicplines even interior design.

modernism

1.1

wassily kandinsky Kandinsky taught the basic design class for beginners, he also conducted painting classes and a workshop in which he augmented his colour theory.

piet mondrian Piet was one of the contributors to the De Stijl movement. He uses the main primary colours seperated by black lines varying in thickness.

arti modernist

Josef Muller-Brockmann Well known graphic designer, most known for the creation of the typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk (Helvetica). His designs are normally simplicistic easy to read graphics using shapes, colours and text.

Giacomo Balla Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. He was signatory to the Futurist Manifesto in 1910.

ists

henri matisse Matisse made his reputation as the principal protagonist of Fauvism, the first avantgarde movement at the turn of the century. georges braque Braque’s most important contribution to the history of art was his role in the development of what became known as Cubism.

Also collaborated with Picasso especially between 1908-1912.

salvador dali Well known surrealist painter, often pictoralised dreamscapes and other weird scenarios to bridge the gap between the subconcious and reality.

kurt schwitters Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design and typography. He is most famous from his collages.

postmodernism

2

Algorithmic Abstract by Partick Gunderson. It’s a piece of contemporary abstract art. The work is bright and colourful. In my opinion it looks like a pastiche of fauvism.

contemporary art

post minimalism

Post Minimalism is usually the depiction of everyday objects, use simple materials, and sometimes take on a “pure”, formalist aesthetic.

The example shown is a minimal pastiche of Edvard Munch’s scream.

Marcel Duchamps “Fountain” which he made to ridicule the way art was perceived. He used his position and popularity to pass off a urinal as a piece of artwork. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art.

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? is a collage

by English artist Richard Hamilton. It was the first work of pop art to achieve iconic status. The collage consists of images taken fromamerican magazines to represent amercian culture in the 1950s.

pop art

Haroshi uses his in-depth knowledge of board anatomy to turn broken deck, trucks and wheels into works of art. Haroshi uses broken skateboards to create colourful, adaption of a leg, entitled “Screaming foot”.

installion

Post Modernism is the era that followed modernism, it’s characterised by the use of other techniques and the mixing of them. This era has been defined as the death of originality. Another characteristic of postmodern graphic design is that “retro, techno, punk, grunge, beach, parody, and pastiche were all conspicuous trends.”

kitsch

Duchamp

Andy Warhols Maryiln Monroe you lose the sense of Marilyn as a person and more of a commodity, her image is something that’s bought and sold. This is a great example of Kitsch, low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural icons. Kitsch generally includes works that are calculated to have popular appeal.

postmodernism

2.1

ron arad Arad has infused concrete with a stereo system. To me it seems like arad is trying to make a statement about technology and the now obselete stereo.

barnett newman An abstract expressionist who set precedents for color field painting, he is known for enormous solidcolor canvases broken only by one or more stripes.

arti

postmodernist

julian schnabel Schnabel was part of the neo-expressionism movement, this particular portrait is created out of broken plates. The artist uses something cracked and broken to create a abstract portait.

robert rauschenberg Rauschenberg was quoted as saying that he wanted to work “in the gap between art and life� suggesting he questioned the distinction between art objects and everyday objects.

ists

richard hamilton Richard William Hamilton was an English painter and collage artist. Hamilton mainly worked in the medium of collage and usually used american magazine imagery in some of collages.

frank stella Stella began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world.

andy warhol Andy Warhol was a influential pop artist and his work focused on mass produced items including marylin monroes image, Campbells soup and Coca Cola.

damien hirst Hirst is richest living artist and produces big installion art, most notably “the physical impossiblity of death in the mind of someone living� which was an exhibition of animals perserved in formaldehyde.

magazine research

3

Layout is the heart of any magazine publication, it is what the magazine consists of and has a very important role in doing so. When considering a layout for my magazine, I need to look at the legibility of the body of text, that the text and images work together through grid systems.

I also think using vector imagery is a useful tool for descriptive and artistic purposes. I will be looking at magazine layouts from Vice, GQ, Creativ.

GQ VICE CREATIV Q OTHER

As seen from the layouts i’ve chosen, some are very heavily imaged based or text and image. I love the “Contributors” design page really interesting and completely different from the things you’d see normally.

I do also like the use of big imagery that takes up the full spread with a box of information on it using opacity tools on photoshop.

masthead research

3.1

TIME

bazaar magazine

GQ magazine

V magazine

Mastheads are an important essence in any magazines arsenal of branding and image. It defines the magazine you are reading. For example, Time magazine has a very bespoke font, serif, looks professional, expensive.

With this they are appealing to a very obvious target market of well educated people. The font is placed at the top, in the centre, usually white or red, incorporated into the cover photo into and is the first thing you notice along with the trademark red border. Time magazine is very good at reaching it’s target audience in this way and is a perfect example of a masthead done right.

Creativ Magazine

Q magazine

VOGUE

front cover design

3.2

Heres a selection of front cover designs I’ve found intriuging and therefore effective. The front cover is based on the essence and content of the magazine, it’s a persausive tool used to make the target audience buy it. This combined witht the masthead gives the magazine a personal identity.

MODERN is probably my favourite design from the ones i’ve chosen just because the masthead and image work so well together. Other magazines use photography for the main part of the front , this is apparent with VICE’s syria issue which focuses on the powerful image to shwo the importance of the issue. BEople uses their masthead to cover the face of the model another interesting concept.

Creative Sugar & Print isn’t dead use borders to emphasise what’s in the middle, this is another interesting avenue to go down when desiging my own front cover. Magazines like Youth and 19 put the masthead in the middle, it becomes the main focus of the magazine. Both have opted to use an image behind, 19 is of a model but is intentionally blurred to draw focus on the relatively thin masthead design. Grafik & Nice use vector imagery and patterns which is also effective. They both appeal to creative people which is what their magazine is showcasing.

contents page

3.3

Contents pages are useful tools of navagation through any magazine. I never really thought about contents pages in relation to design but it’s interesting to see different interpretations of something like contents pages. They have to be clear and easy to understand but also have to be enticing and informative. Contents pages usually include page number references to articles sometimes with a small description of that article or even a photograph that accompanies it.

This particular contents page is unique because of it’s tile layout, each slide with the name of the artist followed by the subject of the article. This magazine then uses small triangle points pointing to the corresponding image. I liked the simple concept behind this and it’s ability to inform and navigate effectively. Barring “identity” every contents page I’ve shown contains photographs of the corresponding article to visually show what that article is about. In the case of “identity” they just use the masthead again with a simplistic table of contents. I think they’re are more interesting ways to design. I also like the cutting of the images used in “emDash” this is completely unique and one of my favourite designs from the ones shown here.

helvetica & grids

4 abc // ABC

After watching Helvetica film directed by Gary Hustwit and I was surprised at how applicable helvetica is and how much it’s used day to day. The film was filled with cut scenes of different places helvetica was found. The font was described as being the perfect font and the only typeface to dominate typography.

The film aims to show Helvetica’s beauty and illuminate the personalities that are behind typefaces. It also explores the rift between modernists and postmodernists, with the latter expressing and explaining their criticisms of the famous typeface.

In graphic design, a grid is a structure (usually two-dimensional) made up of a series of intersecting, straight guide lines used to structure content.

A grid can be used to organize graphic elements in relation to a page, in relation to other graphic elements on the page, or relation to other parts of the same graphic element or shape.

“The present volume on the function and use of the grid system is intended to provide the designer operating in two and three dimensions with a practical working instrument which will enable him to handle visual problems and solve them in terms of conception, organisation and design with greater speed and confidence.�

Grid Systems 1981 I tried to employ a grid system throughout my visual research especially with my magazine research (chapter 3). I found that it makes my designs look so much more professional and allows me to get to a clean visual solution easily and painlessly. It has influenced me to use this in the future, starting with the magazine.

mastheads

experimentation

5

NVL

NV new visual language

new visual language

New Visual Language

new visual language

New Visual Language New Visual Language

New Visual Language

VL

N

L VISUAL EW

NGUAGE

NL V NL V

new visual language

n

v

new visual language

new visual language

front covers

experimentation

5.1 NVL

New Visual Language AN EXPLORATION INTO MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

Started the looking at photography being my main background with a central logo so I tested out two of my masthead designs. I liked the colour and tint I could get by using transparency effects. I think the square logo looks best with the photograph.

I also experimented with a border similar to time magazine but instead of red I wanted white to make my work look more minimal and clean. I also did some experimentation without imagery and I was really pleased with the outcome.

I then chose my favourite masthead from the group and started looking at photographs I could use for the background. I decided that I needed a mostly dark photograph and thought that I’d use some of my previous work from a scannergram project.

I then looked at trying to design a front cover that didn’t use photography but just the words for the chapter and shapes from the logo.

NV

new visual language

6

new visual language

masthead

Visual Language

New Visual Language

New Visual Language New Visual Language

N VL

VL

NN

This was a strong contender for my masthead but decided against it in the end.

I didn’t think it was expressive enough to be a logo for an arts pulication. It would of worked better for a photography magazine.

VL

v

new visual language

L VISUAL L EW VISUAL

NGUAGE

new visual language

n

VL

L VISUAL EW

NGUAGE

new visual language

New Visual New Language

NGUAGE

development

new visual language

NL V N NL V NL V NL V NL V NL V

Language

n

n

n

v

EW

v

v

Another simple design, this design relies on the viewer knowing what nvl stands for and that’s why I didn’t choose it for my final masthead. I was close to choosing this mastheadbecauseitworkssowellincolour.

new visual language

new visual language

new visual language

new

newvisual visual language language

new visual language

new visual language

new visual language

new visual language

new visual language

This is my final masthead. I had already created something similar to this early on in the year so I used the same effect here. I then noticed the speech marks I could make with the shapes I had created. I thought speech marks would work well here because of the connotations to the language, especially visual language because it’s a shape we associate with someone talking. The final stage of progression was achieved by placing a copy of the outer layer behind and placed downnd right to give the masthead a 3-D effect.

front cover

development

6.1 New Visual Language An Exploration into Modernism & Postmodernism

I felt this masthead worked well with images and photographs. So I started to look at the placement on the page and where the logo would best fit. I think the masthead works really well with the photograph of the statue, the position is subtle and allows the photograph to breathe.

I liked the simplicity of this design. I use spaces made to write the title of the magazine and tried to incorporate the masthead but also wanting it to be the main focus. So I decided to change the logo to orange, I thought this made the masthead stand out.

front cover

development

6.2

I wanted to refine this idea because it worked the best with the masthead. I wanted to make it more than one colour so set out and changed the colours of each shape. Then when placing them in it accidently overlapped and I really liked the outcome so decided to look at what else I could do it it. I think this works so well because it’s so bright and colourful.

This is my final choice for my front cover design. I like this design because all the focus is on the masthead. The front cover has to be eye catching, interesting and unique. I designed the shapes to get bigger as they get further to the edge.

This implies that theres depth to my front cover. It also means that the front cover is consistent with the masthead. I was close to choosing the colour version with white underneath but decided against it because I felt the colour was detracting too much from my logo.

new visual language