Assignment 12

The MTV logo was one of the most ground breaking of its time. Media visionary Bob Pitman wanted to create a round-the-clock music television station. MTV was formed, playing music videos all day long. Manhattan design was commissioned to create a logo for the new network, at the root of this as Pat Gorman and Frank Olinsky. The final product they cam up with was a three dimensional sans-serif M with the words music television written underneath it in the same sans-serif font. Gorman thought it needed more though, so she threw the graffiti looking TV over the M and they had their MTV logo. Little did they know how influential and iconic their logo would become. The designers realized though at one point that there was more varying potential in the logo, it was simple enough that it could form different personalities, become animated or be demolished, but still remain a recognizable logo. So Olinsky and Gorman produced more variations of the logo. The unique thing about the MTV logo at the time was that it broke the boundary of what defined a logo, that they must be fixed and remain consistent to create an identity for the company. The MTV logo was designed so well that they could break this wall down, and the company even began to make 10 second segments at the top of every hour where the logo would appear and animate through pictures and even different designs. By 1995 MTV was reaching more then 250 million homes, an incredible increase from the 18 million when it first started up. The logo paved the way for graphic design in the 80s as print graphics of the time began to take on the influences of television in color, texture, decorative graphic elements and sequence.

Assignment 11

Two of my favorite designers of the New York School era are Henry Wolf and Herb Lubalin. Both of them were masters of their own style, Wolf excelling in fashion photography and design and Lubalin with his masterful use of type so that the words became the subject. Henry Wolf was an Austrian born designer and photographer that came over to the U.S. after the end of the war. He influenced American magazine design during the 1950s and 60s with his bold layouts, elegant typography and his enchanting and eye-catching photography. He was the art director during his time at Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Show magazines, bringing his impeccable taste and eye for fashion and design to each of the magazines. He transformed the fashion world through design, fulfilling the need of beauty and nostalgia to a public that was recuperating from the war. One of his covers that stood out to me the most was the Harper’s Bazaar cover in 1959. The model has a peacock feather laying over her one eye, the make-up on the other eye imitates the colors and design of the feather. That is not the only thing, just as the peacock feather is off center of her face, she is off centered on the magazine cover. This creates an asymmetrical balance and allows the eye to flow from the writing on the left, to her eye on the right and then to the peacock feather covering her other eye. He even changed the font color of Bazaar so that it coordinated with the colors of the photographic image. As his skills progressed he eventually opened his own studio in 1971 where he taught magazine design and photography classes.

Herb Lubalin was a typographer and designer. He is most known for his creation of the font Avant Garde. He used this font in many of his designs, naming most of his works after the name of the typeface. Lubalin gained so much fame from his art as it began to show signs of the beginning stages of the pop art movement that was soon to come. His best known designs were created with just font alone, this style taking off in the 70s as advertising budgets were beginning to be cut due to the economy of the time. He made words into art, giving them movement and whythym, exploring with color, contrast and layering. Lubalin was even one of the people behind the culture-shocking magazines Avant-Garde, Eros and Fact, he spent his time with these publications making them a visual beauty. His success in just about everything he did had to do with his consistent breaking of boundaries on both a visual and social level. The biggest gift by far that Lubalin gave to the graphic design community was the font Avant Garde, his bigger success, it is used in brand names and album covers today.

Assignment 10

When the war broke out in Germany it caused a flood of immigrants to come to the United States, many of them artists and designers. There were two major effects that this had on the United States. At large it introduced the modernist view and developments in the Bauhaus to America, but it also changed American advertising forever. The immigration of European designers actually began before the Nazi uprise, with the first wave bringing designers such as Georg Salter, Erté Tirtoff, Agha, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. Salter began his career as a book cover designer, introducing cross over of techniques such as calligraphy, photomontage, airbrush scenes, panoramic colors and pen and ink drawings. The others designers got into editorial design and creating fashion magazine covers for magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. Dr. Agha took on American Vogue when he first came here and soon joined the Vanity Fair and House & Garden magazine. The most prominent editorial designer in my eyes was Brodovitch, who was art director of the Harper’s Bazaar  from 1934-1958. Brodovitch had a knack for design, seeing the rhythm and movement in art as he did in music, he applied this to his editorial layouts. His strong interest in photography was important as well, as he taught other designers how to use photography and its use soon became a major pillar in advertising and especially fashion. Brodovitch’s presence in America was pertinent at this time during the war so art, design, and fashion would stay alive in America while much of Europe fell to shambles. While some of these designers came to America before the war, 1933 sent a flood over including many Bauhaus students and teachers. America was a safe place at the start of the war and gave space for these designers to continue to practice and nurture their skills. The post war era had a similar effect on advertising just as the first wave of immigrants had on it before the war. Politics and advertising had planted their seeds in the design world before the war, and now that the war was over everyone was looking for a new look, a new start, beauty after the time of chaos. Walter Paecock, head of the CCA packaging company found the answer. He wanted to rebrand his company after the war and he found the answer in commissioning an institutional ad campaign presenting the ideas of western culture. Artists gathered and submitted over 135 posters with their abstract illustrations of the ideas and Paepcke stuck his CCA logo in the corner of it. The entire project was a huge success as it transcended the bounds of advertising before. At this time Brodovitch was still the preeminent designer for magazines and he, also inspired by this project began to scout for photographers and designers for his company. Finding people such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. These men redefined fashion to the new world, portraying it with an artistic eye in magazines. For the first time, advertising and life had completely encompassed itself with art. Neither hurt the other, art simply made life better and more beautiful. The Bauhaus tried to do the same, as did William Morris and constructivits; but it was in America that the cross over finally happened. The world of advertising had been changed forever.

Assignment 9

The Bauhaus was an art school that opened in Germany after the war to attempt and rebuild German culture and economics. They believed this began with art, and so the school was opened in 1919. Their ultimate goal in the end was to combine art and machine since it was finally realized that the machine was here to stay. This idea was not fully embraced though until after the 1923 exhibition when it became evident that the De Stijl movement had left its impression on the staff and students; medievalism, expressionism and handicraft began to fade into the background. Modernism movements became largely influential as the machine grew more popular. The school practiced and taught all forms of art to attempt and nurture the creative ability in students to discover their own design method instead of producing similar pieces. Some of the staff members I would like to explore further that taught these classes were Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian constructivist that came to the Bauhaus and had a large impact on its transition from medievalism and handicraft to its teachings of rationalism and designing for the machine. Moholy-Nagy became head of the preliminary course when he started teaching. Painting, photography, film, sculpture and graphic design were his methods of creation and he even explored new materials like acrylic resin and plastic, new methods such as photomontage and kinetic motion with light. His innovative ideas and knack for pushing the boundaries of art was perfect for inspiring new artists to follow their unique design eye when they first began at the Bauhaus. The school put no limits on the definition of art. Moholy-Nagy’s passion though was typography and photography which he inspired the Bauhaus interest in. He believed that the collision of world and image on a poster was the strongest and purest form of communication because it minimized the artists interpretation having affect on the viewer. He began to use the camera as a tool for design, using natural light and shadows that created spatial lines and areas naturally in the photograph and could be manipulated simply through changing the normal viewpoint to worm’s-eye or bird’s-eye. He took so much pride in his photos that he grew into photomontage so as to further play with the uses of film. Through photomontage he realized he could take truths from photographs and manipulate and collage them to create new meanings or ideas that were more creative and functional then the regular image.

The second staff member, Kandinsky, was a Der Blaue Reiter painter that introduced advanced ideas about form, color and space to the Bauhaus. He had a unique interest in the power of form and especially color. He was painting during the expressionism era, however less concerned with the portrayal of human condition at the time, he sought a spiritual reality beyond nature and explored color and form. When Kandinsky came to the Bauhaus to teach he had mastered the ability to reveal the spiritual nature of people (as expressionism did), but in a new way through the orchestration of color, line and form. He believed that emotion could be depicted with color and form alone instead of the literal presentation of symbols and subject matter; it is this teaching method and technique that he introduced to the new age of the Bauhaus upon his arrival in 1922, opening the door for intensive expressive color use in future art movements.

The third teacher of the Bauhaus I wish to reflect upon is Herbert Bayer, the typography and graphic design professor. Bayer, originally a student at the Bauhaus, Gropius realized his potential as a graphic designer and helped to nurture Bayer’s talent. He returned to teach in the Dessau era of the Bauhaus. An extraordinary graphic designer with a knack for typography. He pushed typographic boundaries, uses sans-serif almost exclusively and even going on to produce his own universal type that simplified the alphabet. What I found most interesting about Bayer is that he designed his font omitting uppercase letters, because he believed that the two different forms of the same letters created a slight road block in the aesthetics of design, so he broke the alphabet down into one set of letters that  was universally recognized. The simplicity of his type and the sans-serif echo speaks predominantly to the approaching modernism of the time, and even today as I recognized that Beets by Dre uses Bayer’s ‘b’ in his font as their logo.

Needless to say the Bauhaus played a significant role in the leap into modernist art. The school assisted in blurring the lines between applied and fine arts, striving to bring art into a close relationship with life just as other art movements had done in the past. The only difference with the Bauhaus though is that it succeeded in blurring the lines, incorporating art and life together, and breaking the boundaries that were placed on art altogether. All because of a talented, unique staff that not only saw, but accepted that the art world was changing.

Bayer:

Moholy-Nagy:

Kandinsky:

Assignment 8

Constructivism came about when art was given a social role for the first time during the revolution in Russia. Many artists, including Lissitzky turned towards applying art in a massive propaganda effort to support the revolutionaries. In 1920 the split between constructivism and suprematism took place as suprematist artists believed art should remain a spiritual activity and reject the social or political role saying that the aim of art was, “to be realizing perceptions of the world by inventing forms in space and time” (301). Constructivists took the opposite stance; that industrial design, visual communication and applied arts should serve the new communist society. They believed artists should stop producing paintings and start producing posters because it was believed by constructivists that the duty of the artist as a citizen is to clear the pallet of the old to prepare for the new life after the revolution. Gan broke this down into three principles that identified constructivism; tectonics (unification of of communist ideology and and visual form), texture (nature of materials and application in industrial production), and construction (the creative process and laws of visual organization). Of the constructivist artists, El Lissitzky had the most profound influence on the movement as a painter, architect, graphic designer and photographer and his broad talents allowed him to profoundly influence graphic design itself.

The De Stijl movement was happening at the same time in the Netherlands. The artist Leo van Doseoesburg was the founder of this movement. Much like the suprematism movement De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and symmetry for art, using mathematical structures to layout their designs. De Stijl stripped design back to its simplest form, using horizontal and vertical lines with primary and neutral colors and flat planes. Van Doesburg’s cover for the Principles of Modern Art magazine is a good representation of the De Stijl era of design. Similarly to the constructivists, De Stijl artists sought to incorporate art into life and the every day use and object, believing that the, “every day life would be elevated to the level of art” (314). As the movement continued Van Doesburg introduced a new design principle to the movement, bring back diagonal lines because he believed them to be a more dynamic compositional principle then horizontal or vertical. Color became a structural element and not just a decoration. 

Although I found many similarities in the aesthetics of the constructivist art and the De Stijl art I would like to compare the works of Lissitzky and Van Doesburg, two significant artists in each of their movements. Both men have many similar design principles as they were both inspired by cubism. Both artists show evidence of mathematical grid use but Lissitzky adventures more into the use of diagonal planes, creating lines that your eyes follow exploring the page. His use of colors are also strictly black, reds, and neutrals. This is representative of the political posters that constructivists were pushing artists to participate in, showing support for the revolution and communism. A similarity between Lissitzky and Van Doesburg as artists is their use of type in their designs. San Serif was the typical font for the movements but these men experimented with the font, making it more square in appearance. They were also some of the first to incorporate their type as a part of the design, bending and curving words on different planes to move with aesthetic of the lines and image. Lissitzky experimented far more with the movement of font though, evident when comparing their pieces as he often curved words, and his use of type itself to make objects in Mondrian’s book of poetry that he illustrated. Van Doesberg’s work was far more grabbing to me, with his bold use of primary colors, especially when laid next to black gives his work an eye-popping contrast. He also does a wonderful job of creating a path for your eyes to follow with his placement of squares and lines that flow with his text. Both artists embraced the aesthetics of their movement, Lassitzky having more political relevance, but I still found it interesting that these two artists have so many similarities and it not be recognized until later after the war when art began spreading through Europe again.

Doesburg:

Lissitzky:

Assignment 7

Edward Kauffer, A.M. Cassandre and Jean Carlu were three designers that stood out to me in the PostCubist era. These designers stood out to me because of their simplistic designs, minimal use of color, and the their incorporation of text and image together; while still capturing the idea of movement. The cubist movement inspiration was evident where solid shapes and colors were laid out to create a full image, Cassandre and Kauffer’s designs were most evident of this. All three artists however, succeeded in their use of subject and text working together to create one complimentary image. 

Kauffer made hundreds of travel posters for the Underground in London, promoting weekend travel. His type was simple and legible, the letters seemingly cut out from the same square. The images echoed the use of shape as he took scenic landscapes and broke them down, echoing the cubism movement, into a simple color scheme of interlocking shapes with out losing the landscape itself. 

A.M. Cassandre kick started his career as a graphic designer creating commissioned posters. Even more so than Kauffer, his designs were known for their simplicity in image. His designs emphasized the two-dimensional, making his subjects silhouette like and using broad and simple planes of color; details that are identifiable to Synthetic Cubism. Cassandre's posters were also known for their excellent use of text with-in the designs, because he did not simply pick a complimentary font to the image but he often incorporated his text into the image. This is most obvious in his poster he made for the Paris newspaper L’intransigeant (pictured below).

Jean Carlu was the third designer I chose, perhaps a bias choice because of the fact he studied art after losing his arm, trained himself to illustrate with his left hand and in the end produced posters I thought were exquisite in the simplest aesthetics of design. His designs consisted of very little compared to Kauffer or Cassandre, but they were just as eye catching, if not more powerful. His use of colors on black background was grabbing and the simplicity dumbed down so much it stood out to me. His goal in creating his designs was to be as simple as possible. Using one line for a whole image or one subject instead of multiple. In his use of lines he expressed emotion as well, “tension and alertness conveyed through sharp angles and lines; feelings of ease and relaxation were transmitted by curves”. The saying I’ve heard for years, “less is more” in design became obvious to me when looking at the work of Carlu.

 Cassandre:

Carlu :

Kauffer: