Interesting Information on Visual Communication

_The term “lithography” dates back to the end of the 18th century, when Alois Senefelder invented the technique of printing with stone plates.

_This novel method - originally intended for the reproduction of music notation - quickly spread throughout the art world.

_Munich became the center of this printing technique, which was to be come extraordinarily important for 19th century art and for advertising of the age as well.

_Lithography refers to a printing process that uses chemical processes to create an image. For instance, the positive part of an image would be a hydrophobic chemical, while the negative part of an image would be water. Thus, when the plate is introduced to a compatible ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive image and the water will clean the negative image. This allows for a relatively flat print plate which allows for much longer runs than the older physical methods of imaging (e.g., embossing or engraving).

_Within a few years of its invention, the lithographic process was used to create multi-color printed images that held all manner of cropped, embedded and bordered images as well as free running type, a process known by the middle of the 19th century as Chromolithography.

_A separate stone was used for each colour, and a print went through the press separately for each stone. The main challenge was of course to keep the images aligned (in register). This method lent itself to images consisting of large areas of flat colour, and led to the characteristic poster designs of this period. Many fine works of chromolithographic printing were produced in America and Europe.

Lithography press for printing maps in Munich…

http://www.xs4all.nl/~maxb/ftf1964.htm

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/klue0027/Graphic%20Duhsign%20three/manifest.pdf

First things first 1964 Manifesto:

_The First Things First manifesto was written in 29 November 1963 and published in 1964 by Ken Garland.

_It was backed by over 400 graphic designers and artists and also received the backing of Tony Benn, radical left-wing MP and activist, who published it in its entirety in the Guardian newspaper.

_Reacting against a rich and affluent Britain of the sixties, it tried to re-radicalise design which had become lazy and uncritical.

_Drawing on ideas shared by Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School and the counter-culture of the time it explicitly re-affirmed the belief that Design is not a neutral, value-free process.

_It rallied against the consumerist culture that was purely concerned with buying and selling things and tried to highlight a Humanist dimension to graphic design theory.

First things first 2000 Manifesto:

_It was later updated and republished with a new group of signatories as the First Things First 2000 manifesto. It was an updated version of the earlier First things first 1964 Manifesto. it was published in 2000 by some of the leading lights of the graphic design, artistic and visual arts community. It was republished by Emigre, Eye and other important graphic design magazines and has stirred controversy (again) in Graphic design.

_This was massively influential on a generation of new graphic designers and contributed to the founding of publications such as Emigre magazine.

Emigre magazine (Emigre Graphics) :

_Is a type foundry in Berkeley, California, founded by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko.

_It also published Emigre magazine between 1984 and 2005.

_Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents. Emigre was founded in 1984 as an independent foundry, developing typefaces without an association with a typesetting equipment manufacturer. Through a good part of the late 1980s and most of the 1990s, some of the most cutting-edge typefaces were developed or released by Emigre.

_Its magazine, in the meantime, provided an outlet showcasing the potential of its typeface designs, and was well known for its graphical experimentation. Emigre has also published a number of books related to graphic design.

Emigre magazine: Issue covers and spreads…

_In stark contrast to the oppulence of Art Deco was the poverty generated by the Great Depression in the United States.

_Interestingly enough, some of the most beautiful graphic design work comes from the WPA, which was a work relief program that provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States.

_It built many public buildings and roads, and as well operated a large arts project.

_Until it was closed down by Congress in 1943, it was the largest employer in the country; indeed, the largest employer in most states.

_Only unemployed people on relief were eligible for most of its jobs. The wages were the prevailing wages in the area, but workers could not work more than 20-30 hours a week. The main purpose was to learn a new profession.

_Before 1940 there was no training involved to teach people new skills.

The silkscreen posters of the WPA…

_According to Hume, eclecticism is “the borrowing of a variety of styles from different sources and combining them”.

_Significantly, Eclecticism hardly ever constituted a specific style in art: it is characterized by the fact that it was not a particular style.

_In general, the term describes the combination in a single work of a variety of influences mainly of elements from different historical styles in architecture, painting, and the graphic and decorative arts.

_Eclecticism was an important concept in Western design and architecture during the mid and late 19th century, where oriental and particularly Japanese wood printing was suffused into existent western art traditions, Eclecticism reappeared in a new guise in the latter part of the 20th century.

_Thus much of postmodern art is characterized by eclecticism.

Plaza de Cibeles, Madrid, Spain …

_Is a style which does not result from European history alone.

_It is of experimental character, a mixture of baroque, oriental and classical elements, in parts strongly influenced by japanese art, wanting to express the break with traditional forms, on one hand reflecting the spirit of the Belle Epoque and influencing it at the same time.

_Characteristic for Art Nouveau is the absence of any straight line and any right angle. The lines seem to bend infinitely, the forms swell and contract.

_It is the nature serving as model: Being a decorative art by origin, the artists preferred ornamental structures imitating flowers and leaves.

_Most works of the Art Nouveau resemble living organisms. The curved vegetable lines create an impression of lightness and charm. Many artists of the Art Nouveau used these curved forms of vegetation: The most favourite flowers were the lily, the iris and the orchid, but they also used oriental subjects such as palm branches, papyruses, seaweed.

_Stylistically represented were animals, too, especially insects and birds abounding in colours: dragonflies, peacocks, swallows, swans. Moreover, the artists appreciated the female body as a decorative element, especially with long open hair, flowing in long and soft waves.

_Art Nouveau arose at the end of the nineteenth century and persisted until the First World War.

_It was a reaction against the prevailing practice in architecture and applied arts of using conservative design motifs from Gothic, Baroque, Neo-Classical and other standard historical styles.

_As a movement, Art Nouveau sought to find a new, modern style that escaped from the formal, rigid past by emphasizing natural, organic forms such as plants and flowers.

_Generally speaking, earlier works of Art Nouveau tend to be more lush and dramatic, whereas later examples are more likely to be more subtle and stylized. However, the style’s manifestations differed dramatically from one European country to another.

Victor Horta, architect of the Art Nouveau…

_Was an English artist, writer, socialist activist and pioneer of eco-socialism, one of the principal founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement, best known as a designer of wallpaper and patterned fabrics, a writer of poetry and fiction, and a pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain near London and the Eco-socialist movement of the later twentieth century.

_He went to school at Marlborough College, but left in 1851 after a student rebellion there.

_He then went to Oxford University (Exeter College) after studying for his matriculation to the university.

_He became influenced by John Ruskin there, and met his life-long friends and collaborators, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb there as well. He also met his wife, Jane Burden, a working-class woman whose pale skin, languid figure, and wavy, abundant dark hair were considered by Morris and his friends the epitome of beauty.

_These friends formed an artistic movement, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They eschewed the tawdry industrial manufacture of decorative arts and architecture and favoured a return to hand-craftsmanship, raising artisans to the status of artists. He espoused the philosophy that art should be affordable, hand-made, and that there should be no hierarchy of artistic mediums.

The Kelmscott Press:

_In January 1891, Morris founded the Kelmscott Press at Hammersmith, London, in order to produce examples of improved printing and book design.

_He designed clear typefaces, such as his Roman ‘golden’ type, which was inspired by that of the early Venetian printer Nicolaus Jenson, and medievalizing decorative borders for books that drew their inspiration from the incunabula of the 15th century and their woodcut illustrations.

_Selection of paper and ink, and concerns for the overall integration of type and decorations on the page made the Kelmscott Press the most famous of the private presses of the Arts and Crafts movement.

_It operated until 1898, producing 53 volumes, and inspired other private presses, notably the Doves Press.

_Among book lovers, the Kelmscott Press edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Burne-Jones, is considered one of the most beautiful books ever produced.

_A fine edition facsimile of the Kelmscott Chaucer was published in 2002 by The Folio Society.

Bradbury Thompson, Westvaco books, 1940’s and 1950’s…

_When it came to the blending of photography, typography and color, nobody did it better than Brad Thompson.

_In his own quiet way, he expanded the boundaries of the printed page and influenced the design of a generation of art directors.

_Thompson is one of the few art directors who have received all three major design awards: National Society of Art Directors Art Director of the Year in 1950; AIGA Gold Medal in 1975; and the Art Directors Hall of Fame award in 1977.

_By simply looking at one year of his career, the scope of his involvement in the field of graphic design can be understood.

_In 1945, Thompson designed the final issues of three wartime magazines including Victory and USA. Back in New York, before the year was out, he had become art director of Mademoiselle, where he worked for nearly fifteen years. He also accepted the role of design director for Art News and Art News Annual, a position he held for 27 years.

_As if that were not enough, he designed a brochure for the Ford Motor Company and began his experiments in typographic reform by creating his monoalphabet, which broke with the tradition of separate letterforms for capital and lower-case letters. He first introduced this typographic innovation in an issue of Westvaco Inspirations for Printers, one of four issues that he produced that year. And 1945 was not unusual.

_Any analysis of Thompson’s style and any attempt to assess the value and extent of his influence leads irrevocably to one word: form. Whether by examining his precise cropping and careful placing of images on the printed page or studying his attention to typographic detail, his sense of order and stucture cannot be missed. Recalling his early draftsman experience Thompson said, “It was a critical part of my training as a designer. It taught me discipline and, working with huge sheets of tracing cloth, I learned to cope with space in an orderly way.”

_The New York School was an informal group of American poets, painters and musicians active in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in New York City.

_The poets, painters, composers, and musicians often drew inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movements, in particular action painting, abstract expressionism, Jazz, improvisational theater, avant-garde music, and the interaction of friends in the New York City art world’s vanguard circle.

_For the purposes of Graphic Design, however, the New York School denotes the group of graphic designers active during the 1950s in and around New York.

_The older generation of these designers had fled from Europe earlier in the century, while the younger consisted of students which they educated at institutions such as the Cooper Union, Blackmountain College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and who in turn become educators themselves, setting up a chain of innovative, modernist design firmly embedded within an instructional tradition.

_Leading graphic designer of 1930’s and 1940’s.

_An influential Ukrainian-French painter, commercial poster artist, and typeface designer.

_Cassandre became successful enough that with the help of partners he was able to set up his own advertising agency called Alliance Graphique.

_Serving a wide variety of clientele, during the 1930s, his creations for the Dubonnet wine company were among the first posters designed in a manner that allowed them to be seen by occupants in fast-moving vehicles. (Billboards)

_His posters are memorable for their innovative graphic solutions and their frequent denotations to such painters as Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso.

_In addition, he taught graphic design at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and then at the Ecole d’Art Graphique.

_With typography an important part of poster design, the company created several new typeface styles.

_Cassandre developed Bifur in 1929, the sans serif Acier Noir in 1935, and in 1937 an all-purpose font called Peignot.

_In 1936, his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which led to commissions from Harper’s Bazaar to do cover designs. This was the first time that a designer’s works were considered as art and showed in an art museum.

The posters of Cassandre…

Alexey Brodovitch, editorial design at Harper’s Bazaar, 1940’s and 1950’s…

_Was a Russian emigrant photographer and designer who worked in Paris, then America, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

_He went on to become the art editor for Harper’s Bazaar.

_He is considered to be one of the most influential 20th century designers in the field of graphic design.

_His contribution to contemporary magazine design while art director of Harper’s Bazaar would be sufficient enough to honor Alexey Brodovitch as a pioneer in graphic design, but his influence was much greater.

_He was one of the first to introduce European modernism of the 1920s to the United States both by his own work and by commissioning art and photography from leading European artists and photographers, including A.M. Cassandre, Salvador Dali, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray.

_Through his lifelong dedication to teaching, he created a generation of designers who shared his belief in visual vitality and immediacy. Fascinated with photography, he fostered an expressionistic approach that became the dominant photographic style of the 1950s.

_Born in Russia in 1898, Brodovitch fled the Bolsheviks in 1920 with his family and future wife and settled in Paris.

_Brodovitch’s design career flourished in 1924 after his poster design for Le Bal Banal, a benefit dance for poor artists, was selected over many other artists including Pablo Picasso. Soon he was in great demand, designing fabric, jewelry, restaurant décor, posters and department store advertisements.

_Invited to the United States in 1930 to start an advertising art department at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Brodovitch began his teaching career while completing numerous freelance assignments.

_In 1934, Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper’s Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a 24-year tenure that would revolutionize both fashion and magazine design.

_By the 1950s, Brodovitch had perfected his style of combining text and photography with copious amounts of white space.

_Despite his easily recognizable work, Brodovitch did not formulate a theory of design.

_ “There is no recipe for good layout”, he said. “What must be maintained is a feeling of change and contrast. A layout man should be simple with good photographs. He should perform acrobatics when the pictures are bad.”

_Henry Wolf, Brodovitch’s successor at Harper’s Bazaar, commented on his unique approach to magazine layout. “Oh, of course he was a good designer and superb typographer and had an innate sense of elegance about space.” Wolf said. “But his layouts were done only as approximations. He stood in the middle of the room and, with a scissor, cut out photostats which he taped to a piece of paper. Others later straightened them. It was communicating an idea, a mood, a criticism that he was precise and masterful.”

_Besides his achievements at Bazaar, Brodovitch’s legacy as a publication designer included the influential but short-lived Portfolio.

_Only three issues were published in 1950 and 1951. An innovative quarterly aimed at the design profession, Portfolio contained vividly illustrated features on Alexander Calder, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, Saul Steinberg and others. It also contained the work of pioneering photographers, many of whom were Brodovitch’s students.

_As art editor, Brodovitch helped determine the magazine’s contents, and created its distinct design with the help of elaborate devices such as die-cuts, transparent pages and multi-page foldouts. Those three issues are considered by many to be the pinnacle of Brodovitch’s design.

_He continued to teach throughout his career.

_His Design Laboratory, which he began in 1941 at the New School for Social Research in New York, focused on illustration, graphic design and photography. As a teacher, Brodovitch was considered harsh in his criticism but inspiring, and his student list reads like a who’s who of visual communication, including photographers Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Art Kane and Hiro, and art directors Bob Gage, Helmut Krone and Steve Frankfurt.

_A trend of thought which affirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation.

_The term covers a variety of political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.

_Broadly, modernism describes a series of progressive cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the decades before 1914.

_Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.

_By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day.

_Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation.

_Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.

_One of the most visible changes of this period is the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them created the need for new forms of manners, and social life.

_The kind of disruptive moment which only a few knew in the 1880’s, became a common occurrence. The speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life.

Modernist magazine advertisements of the mid 20th century…

_A term which is used to denote the application of post-modern theory, to a “text”.

_A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text. Because pages are not read only, they are also perceived too. A reader should feel the page and understand what the text is about with that feeling.

_Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstruction implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference.

_This is analogous to the scientific idea that only the variations are real, that there is no established norm to a genetic population, or the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context.

_A deconstruction is created when the “deeper” substance of text opposes the text’s more “superficial” form.

_According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words, but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought.

_To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is “signified”, which they imagined to exist “just beyond” the text.

_The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work, and the assumptions about it.

_In graphic design deconstructivism gave its name to one of the major typographic movements, starting in the early 1980’s and continuing into the late 1990’s: Deconstructive Typography.

_Taking on a more experimental approach to typography, the Dadaists and Futurists in the 1920s and 1930s, and later Concrete Poetry during 1950s and 1960s experimented with floating type compositions and fragmented typographic treatments, releasing type from its linear structure.

_Further developments of the deconstructivist typography in the 1990’s shifted the typographic practice towards a spatial, non-linear process: Communication for the deconstructivist is no longer linear, but involves in-stead the provision of many entry and exit points for the increasingly over-stimulated reader. [Cahalan 1994, p.1]

_The page is no longer to be just “read” but also “perceived”, beyond the pure textual content, into all of its associative conjunctions: We are meant to “feel” rather than “read” a page.

_The end of the century, with the rising issues surrounding global economies, ecology and rising poverty in developing countries was a time when graphic designers took a long, hard look at the nature of their work; at its ephemereal qualities, its associations with consumerism/capitalism. The outcome took into account unexpected resources; the ordinary, the often-used, the soon to be discarded - as indeed is most of the output of graphic design itself. Designers sought inspiration in unlikely items such as old ticket stubs, torn billboards and discarded packages and the expression and legitimisation of the vernacular :

_Punk was also one of the inspirations, along with ‘postmodern’ fiction for the science fiction genre known as ‘cyberpunk’. The technological potential unleashed by desktop publishing and graphics software allied with the methodological potential offered by variously by punk and French deconstructionist philosophy produced a style of graphic design and typography known sometimes as deconstructionist graphic design, and sometimes as ‘The New Typography’.

_Though obviously coming out of different contexts and circumstances, these developments shared a fascination with contemporary technology and in both its utopian and dystopian possibilities, as well as its glamour. They also evince similar tropes and strategies, of appropriation, juxtaposition, detournement, montage, collage, repetition, facilitated by or reflecting upon the extraordinary capabilities of that technology.

_The deconstructionist graphic design’s use of layers and experimentation with typography all reflected a world of diffused and distributed communication mediated through networks of powerful information technologies.

Deconstructivist Typography: Cornell Windlin…

Deconstructivist typography by “Substance” design agency, London, UK, mid 1990’s…

David Carson, advertising design 1990’s…

Editorial design: “Beach Culture”…

Editorial design: “Ray Gun”…

Editorial design: book cover…

_Is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography.

_His first actual contact with graphic design was made in 1980 at the University of Arizona on a two week graphics course.

_Later on in 1983, Carson was working towards a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology when he went to Switzerland, where he attended a three-week workshop in graphic design as part of his degree. This is where he met his first great influence, who also happened to be the teacher of this course, Hans-Rudolph Lutz.

_During the period of 1982-1987, Carson worked as a teacher in Torrey Pines High School in San Diego, California.

_In 1983, Carson started to experiment with graphic design and found himself immersed in the artistic and bohemian culture of Southern California.

_By the late eighties he had developed his signature style, using “dirty” type and non-mainstream photography.

_He would later be dubbed the “father of grunge.”

_Among other things, he was also a professional surfer and in 1989 Carson was qualified as the 9th best surfer in the world.

_His career as a surfer helped him to direct a surfing magazine, called Beach Culture.

_This magazine lasted for three years but, through the pages of Beach Culture, Carson made 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.

_From 1991-1992, Carson worked for Surfer magazine. A stint at How magazine (a trade magazine aimed at designers) followed, and soon Carson launched Ray Gun, a magazine of international standards which had music and lifestyle as its subject.

_In 1995, Carson founded his own studio, David Carson Design in New York City.

_In November 1995, Carson published his first book “The End of Print”.

_His second book, 2nd Sight, followed in 1997. It is said that this book simply changed the public face of graphic design (Newsweek).

_In 1998, Carson worked with Professor John Kao of the Harvard Business School on a documentary entitled “The Art and Discipline of Creativity.”

_The third book that Carson published was Fotografiks (1999) which earned Carson the Award of Best Use of Photography in Graphic Design.

_Carson’s fourth book, Trek, was released in 2000. Carson has also helped in the development of The History of Graphic Design by Philip Meggs.

_Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920.

_The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design, which concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

_According to its proponents, Dada was not art it was “anti-art”. Dada sought to fight art with art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend.

_It is ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on order and the carnage they believed it wreaked. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

_Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, “in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide.”

_Years later, Dada artists described the movement as “a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization…In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege.”

_Reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war; the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and the irrational.

Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) :

John Heartfield / Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968) :

One of the most beautiful periodicals ever designed:

Merz was published and designed by Kurt Schwitters…

Futurist typography…

_The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy.

_It is extremely important for graphic design.

_The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions.

Futurists love speed, youth, technology, power, violence… They hate anything about past and traditions of all kinds.

_The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of man over nature.

_Marinetti’s impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo who wanted to extend Marinetti’s ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, and introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions).

_The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together these artists represented Futurism’s first phase.

_Futurism influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada.

_Futurism as a coherent and organized artistic movement is now regarded as extinct, having died out in the 1944 with the death of his leader Marinetti, and Futurism was, like science fiction, in part overtaken by ‘the future’. Nonetheless the ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture.

_Ridley Scott consciously evoked the designs of Sant’Elia in Blade Runner. Echoes of Marinetti’s thought, especially his “dreamt-of metallization of the human body”, are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in manga/anime and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the “Tetsuo” (lit. “Ironman”) films.

Futurist book design…