Week 6 Images

These images are two sketches I drew myself, redesigning the packaging of the "Band-Aid" brand. Both are a little sloppy, but they are only sketches and my first attempts. The top sketch is an example of the art nouveau style with the flowing, organinc lines. I tried to incorporate some flowers and use a typeface that matched the organic shape of the vines. Art Nouveau was known for its organic designs and the female form was actually the most popular kind of design on posters. Flowers and birds were also used. The bottom sketch is an example of the Victorian style packaging. I tried to make the type detailed and to vary it within the design, like they did in posters of the time. I also tried to add details and use every space of the package. I don't feel that I had enough elaborate details, but I do like my overall design layout. I used examples of tobacco packages I found in the text book as inspiration. I noticed that the actual product wasn't on any of the packages or the advertisements, so I didn't put the band-aid on either package design, only the typography and some details.

American Kitsch and WW2 Posters

American Kitsch is a movement that is about the tacky, sentimental and amusing art that isn't neccesarily quality art. It can be anything from literature to the way a person behaves. It can also be described as melodramatic and overdone and was once over produced, but with time it gains value and becomes a collectible. Kitsch items are often thought of as junk by people who aren't collectors or appreciators of the style. Kitsch uses bright colors and cheap metallics and has a feeling of charm and nostalgia about it.
Posters from World War 2 most often were advertising and encouraging production of materials and food for allies, like eggs. Since there were a lot of strong feelings with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the actions of Hitler, the posters also displayed a lot of strong feelings. They were still designing with simple shapes and bold colors and, because of the war, symbols were also prevelant. Ben Shahn achieved an intense communication through his graphic pictures and interesting use of type, especially with his Nazi brutality poster that showed a victim with a hood to hide their face. Kauffer and Carlu, among others from the Bauhaus, were also popular poster designers using photos, hand illustration and typography. After the war, everything shifted from the needs of the troops to consumer needs. The same Container Corp of America (CCA) company that commissioned the ads for paperboard during the war started a series of posters from across America that set the bar for institutional advertisment uniting art with life, taught by the Bauhaus. After that series came out, poster design was relatively the same with the symbolic, geometric shapes and minimalism, but collages were also popular as well as photography. Herbert Matter actually made the molded plastic chair of the 50s famous and known for the time period with his photos in ads.
I think I like the idea of kitsch. It's funny that people will appreciate, even love, tacky, gaudy pieces of art or collectibles, even if they aren't high quality. People like it because of what it makes them think of or reminds them of from their childhood. I also really like the graphic quality of the poster Ben Shahn made. It's scary and has so much emotion in it. It gets the point across so well.

Art Deco

The movement known as art deco was a geometric style influenced by cubism and De Stijl, among a list of others, and was popular between the 1920s and 30s. It was mainly the type of look a lot of graphics, mostly posters, architecture and the design of other products between world wars. The two most important designers to this particular style were Edward McKnight Kauffer and A.M. Cassandre from America and Ukraine, respectively.zeKauffer was born in America and started his art education there, but left to continue in Europe where he felt the movement was more modern. He designed mostly posters there and a series of travel posters for the Underground that had a much simpler design and utilized flat interlocking, representational shapes. Cassadre studied and worked in Paris where he designed posters that were geometrically symbolic, natural and used bold colors. He also worked with typefaces. He designed the Peignot, Bifur, and Acier Noir typefaces. Others like Jean Carlu, Paul Colin and Joseph Binder also made great contributions to the art deco movement with their poster designs, geometric with bright colors and basic forms.
When we read this chapter, chapter 14, I felt that Jean Carlu was the most interesting person to read about. I still feel this way and I respect his ideas concerning design. He wanted to make his designs the most simple he could, using the fewest number of lines he could or expressing his message the best with only one idea.
If Kauffer's famous "Daily Herald" poster was flawed in the type choice and placement, why did it become so famous?

Chapter 15

Chapter 15 discussed how cubism and futurism influenced Russian graphics and became suprematism and constructivism. Civil war and other political issues allowed a brief period of creativity. Kasimir Malevich founded suprematism, which was a style of painting with basic forms and pure color. He didn't believe in utilitarian function and pictorial representation, but that art must remain a spiritual activity. El Lissitzky was the eptiome of a constructivist, which was the opposite of a suprematist. They felt that paintings were useless and concentrated on industrial design. Among his achievments, Lissitzky developed a design style called Prouns, designed covers for the magazine Wendingen, created the journal Veshch and totally designed a book of poetry. Lissitzky also used the photomontage to make dramatic and powerful posters or magazine covers. After his death he was remebered as a great pioneer of design and type. Another influential constructivist was Vladimir Vasilevich Lebedev. He simplified forms to their basic geometric shapes while he illustrated books for young children and became the father of the modern picture book. He was inspired by how children actually draw and called it "infantilism". De Stijl was a movement that strived for equilibrium and harmony universal in art. Piet Mondrian's works were where the philosophys and visual forms were formed. He used only primary colors and painted abstract images of horizontal and vertical lines. Bart Anthony Van der Leck and Theo Van Doesburg both used a similar paint style during the 1910s. Doesburg worked with the De Stijl theories to sculpter, architecture, typography and on the cover design of a book. He didn't used curves in his typography. He prefered sans serif with horizontal and vertical structure composed in rectangular blocks. Doesburg experimented with his architecture using asymmetries in the spaces. The Schroeder House helped De Stijl architectural theory to become realized with its radical design. The De Stijl movement died out as an organized art movement along with Deosburg, since he was De Stijl, according to the book, with his energy and creativity. I thought that Lebedev's work was the most interesting, along with the application of the De Stijl theory to architecture. The simplicity of Lebedev's geometric forms and children's illustrations feel refined and expressive at the same time. I feel like they would communicate well to a child and he did his job to the best of his ability by putting himself back to his childhood to decide how to paint.
What made the Schroeder House so radical when Frank Lloyd Wright and the Glasgow group designed buildings similarily?

Wednesday, March 11

We had another presentation in class today. Victoria talked to us about pictorial modernism and the style of the posters at the end of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. World War 1 and Lucian Bernhard were the main influences of the time. Bernhard was the first to start simplifying the advertisement poster with just the product and the product name. He used flat colors and bold designs to get the product across. We spent some time in class talking about the different poster styles of the Central Powers and the Allied Powers during the war. The Central Powers used the bold colors and simple design with a central figure and old style typefaces, while the Allied Powers had very realistic, detailed and emotional posters. A popular theme we discussed was how each side was trying to get people to donate to support their soldiers and what a poster today would have to look like. This was interesting to discuss because there were two main kinds of ideas where we could use a graphic picture to show what's going on without support or the good that the troops are doing so that people want to donate to a good cause. Though we came up with two different ideas between four groups, we all agreed that we would need a realistic image, like a photo, with emotion in order to make it relateable, which is similar to what the Allied Powers were doing then. How long was it until America picked up on the sort of designs that the Germans were using, or did we ever really?

Chapter 14

Chapter 14 was about poster designs influenced by modern art and both world wars. The Beggarstaffs were the ones who took the first steps toward a simplified poster design with strong colored shapes and silhouettes. Their work wasn't very successful financially, but very artistically attractive. Lucian Bernhard also worked with simple poster designs and became famous with is Priester poster that was just the brand name and two matches on a flat colored background. The works he produced after, went with this same formula. Bernhard also had a typeface designed after the broad sans-serif letters he was using in his posters. World War 1 was the biggest influence in the design of posters at the time. Recruitment and public support were popular messages. The posters designed by the Central Powers were Vienna Secession inspired designs while remaining simple. Their messages were conveyed through shapes and patterns or simple pictographic symbols, which was Julius Klinger's style. They also included the destruction of enemy symbols or flags. The Allies' used literal and illustrative images to get messages across. Public patriotism and the protection of traditional values, the home, and family were important and popular themes. Posters encouraging troop support and help, like blood donations and the Red Cross, were also popular in Allied countries. After the war, technologies and the industrial form was what was important. Poster designs were influenced by the cubist movement and art deco was a new term used to identify the geometric works that evolved. Edward McKnight Kauffer and A.M. Cassandre were the designers who worked to define this new style. Jean Carlu of France was also influential with his simplified cubism designs. I think he is one of the designers that should be remebered from this reading since he had started out as an architect, but lost his right arm in an accident and had to relearn everything with his left hand. That he could design his posters with such a precise communication of the emotions and messages he was trying to get across is phenomonal. Why were the posters on each side of the world war designed so differently?

Monday, March 9

We had another presentation today about the Modern art movement. A lot of what was going on was about expressing something in a completely new way, like Cubism with Picasso and Braque. We talked about expressionism and surrealism and expressionism includes lots of colors and exaggerated figures while surrealism was more about fantasy or dreamlike images. Personally I really liked futurism, where they made images from words and letters, and Dadaism. I think that the little group exercise at the end of the presentation was helpful. We got to see different pictures and works of art and decided what style they were. It made you think about what characteristics each style had and whether or not it applied in the images we were given.
Why didn't the Dadaists want what they were doing to be seen as an art movement?

Chapter 13

Many things, mostly political, changed during the twentieth century and the influences of those changes introduced new styles of art and graphics in advertisments. Cubism was started by a series by Pablo Picasso with geometric lines combined with African tribal art, as well as Paul Cezanne. Both demonstrated a new way to express feelings with abstract figures and geometric planes, mostly representational elements. Cubism was influential to the way painting and graphic design was done from then on. Filippo Marinetti was a poet that began Futurism as a movement where the arts were up against the new science and industrial age. Mostly poetry and typography was talked about in the chapter. The style was chaotic and nonharmonious. Writing took shapes and became visual designs. Some of these techniques were taken in by the Dadaists, who were rebelling against World War 1. Most of the works of this movement were meant to be shocking and held a strong negative and destructive meaning. The photomontage is credited to Dada artists that took photos and manipulated them to create new images. Surrealism and expressionism were two other big movements in Europe at the time. Surrealism was the opposite of the Dada movement with poetic faith in the spirits of mankind and humanity. Visual works were often too personal and abstract to acurately communicate an idea, but were well accepted almost because of this. Two groups of expressionists were big in Germany, "The Bridge" and "The Blue Rider". "The Bridge" expressed their emotions by working the subject matter, while "The Blue Rider" expressed their emotions through perceptions given by an object. Photography also went through some changes during the modern movement. Man Ray was a big player in how it changed. He applied Dada and surrealism to his photos by manipulating things in the darkroom or using different studio set-ups. He also started using solarization to strengthen contours in photos.
I thought that reading about Dada was the most interesting, as well as the way people started to manipulate photography to get something new. I find it fascinating to see how artists of the time reacted to the war and that people were upset by it and conveyed the anger and destruction of it in their images. I also liked seeing how photos were changing with the styles that the poets and painters were using too. I'm still confused about what surrealism actually is, so what is surrealism as a visual and poetic style?

Week 5 Image

This is an image that I found on designer Paula Sola's website under her projects (www.paulasola.com/portfolio/projects/posters). This is actually a poster I used in my presentation on Wednesday, but I really liked it and thought it would work for my weekly image. It is a poster for an art nouveau exhibition that highlighted "The Four". It fits the Glasgow style with the typeface that was used in previous Glasgow posters by "The Four" and the style of the image. It's not as abstract as the original style, but the rose is a signature of their designs and the goemetric leaf shapes and lines feel like their style. Since it is a poster for the art nouveau style, the curves in the stems and the actual roses themselves fit the design. I like the clean cut look and the color scheme. The red really pops out against the black and white. I also like the way the designer organized the information on the right side of the poster with the border.

Wednesday, March 3

I gave my presentation in class about the genesis of 20th century design. I talked about Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Four", The Vienna Secession and their magazine, "Ver Sacrum". Afterwards, we discussed Peter Behrens and his style. He had a very structured design style that could even be used as plans for a building. We also talked about questions that we had about art nouveau and the answers we had come up with. I was glad to get my project out of the way and I feel that discussing our questions in class was interesting. I got to hear what other people wanted to know and it was interesting to know what information was found. I especially liked the question about the American Art Nouveau movement since we didn't read about it in the book. Why is it that we are reading very much about what's going on in America during these different styles?

Chapter 12

Chapter 12 is about the style that developed from art nouveau into a modern style. The style of the times was geometric abstract forms, sometimes combined with floral, curvilinear forms. "Total Design" was also a big philosophy that was generated by Frank Lloyd Wright and his works. He was an American architect that designed homes and other buildings based on the idea of "organic architecture" and space. He focused on opening up the living spaces of homes to suit people living in them. He also designed everything in each home he built, down to the cutlery. Wright was also a graphic artist, which few people know about. He used white space in his designs and thought of his pieces as unified wholes, like his architecture. "The Four", from the Glasgow School of Art, was inspired by his works and philosophies. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, J. Herbert McNair, Frances and Margaret Mcdonald were the group of collaborators from Scotland that designed with abstract human forms and symbols with bold lines and flat colors. They weren't quite so popular in their homeland becaue of their human figure abstractions, but did well for themselves in Germany and Austria. Besides just graphics, Mackintosh was also involved in architecture and designed and built the new Glasgow school building. He became the most famous out of the four. A movement in Austria, called the Vienna Secession, took great steps toward a different style as well. The members of this revolt wanted to start designing something less traditional and moved toward the abstract and symbolic. Gustav Klimt was the leader of this revolt and also founded "Ver Sacrum", which was the magazine of the Secession. It had an unusual square format and page layout with wide margins and very little detail and decoration. Though the page layout was cleaner and more refined the cover page was bold and elaborate with hand-lettered titles and color on color line drawings. Peter Behrens was a designer that used san-serif typography and a grid system in his design layouts. He was known as an "industrial designer" with his innovations on the teapot and electric lamp, among other things. He was also an innovator in typography with his Behrensschrift, causing some controversy.
I think that it was interesting to learn about the contributions Frank Lloyd Wright made towards the graphic design industry. I think it's important that we know this side of him as well since it isn't as well known as his architecture and his graphics were inspiring and beautiful even though they weren't always accepted.
Why were people so against the abstraction of the human figure in the posters by "The Four"?