Lecture April 14

Here are some key point in tonights lecture:

Postmodernism is not a style, a group movtivated by some common understandings.

Technology takes over the normal everyday lives

Idea of knowledge,power

period of underground cartoons

Styles of graphic design appeal to the counterculture youth, and the dizzying euphoria of the era.

Wolfgang weigngart rejected the right angle intuitive design richness of visual effect and broad technical knowledge.

New Wave typography new approach to typography in the late 70s and early 80s

new wave: wide letter spacing, bold stair stepped rules, rule lines punctuating space, diagonal type, mixing typefaces or weight changes within words

textural patterns

like the music postmodernism in 80s does not comprise a single unified style but a conspicuous group of trends.

the phonic alphabet

Derrida's Grammatology

grunge movement

deconstruction, neo mania of type design

history can be recoded

David Carson

mixes codes in the music underground

challenging hierarchies

fragmentation in the 90s

high low juxapositions

In todays class we went over alot about how pop culture plays a big role in graphic design. I enjoyed looking at all the posters how they have changed from each decade. My favorite of them all would be the ones in the 70s because i like the colors they used and how free formed everything looked and they were all very youthful. I also as well liked the design on the album covers for the music underground. You can see many changes from each each decade and all have to do what is going on during that time which was pretty interesting to me.

Discourse 2

Key Points on Futura by Alexander Nesbitt in Texts on Type:

• Paul Renner designed Futura
• Renner was born in 1978
• he went to art schools of Berlin, Karlsruhe,and Munich
• started as a painter
• first job as a book designer for Georg Muller publishing company
• The capitals have classic proportions
• lowercase are based on traditional minuscule patterns
• strokes are all the same width
• two years later Futura reached the market
• great effect on American Advertising typography
• based on new painting,new architecture
• disliked period typography

Here is Futura used as a letterpress. Paul Renner began sketches for Futura in 1924 and did trials in the Bauer Foundry in 1925 because they were interested in the letter. All the strokes of the letters are all the same width. The typeface had no bad optical illusions and was designed very well. It has large character counts and has a great range of well related weights and variants. The original Futura was suited to the slug casting machine. I love the way letter pressing makes typefaces look.

Futura is a typeface used for many advertisements. Here it is in one advertisement. San serif faces are well up at the top of advertising and printing type usage. Futura was used in the 1950 advertisements the most. It is a very classic font and looks very nicely in advertisements. I enjoy the typeface a lot and loves how it looks in print.

Here is the cover for an announcement for Paul Renner's Futura new typeface. It was taken place in Frankfurt Germany in the 1930s. The cover was using a new type of style called photo montage which was using photography with graphic elements that sort of looked like a collaging technique.

April 7 Lecture

Here are some things we went over in today's class:

Stylist attitude in Zurich and Basel

Swiss design reunited by efficiency and clarity of method and expression

Armin Hoffmann basic letter form design. Point, Line, and Plane.

Type could be visual as well as verbal, make it talk to the audience

Opposing forces

Visual counterparts to the structural harmony of music

Swiss movement had a major impart on American graphic design

Paul Rand corporate American design

Swiss information put in a structural way

Branding. people could control the message and reputation.

Revolution in editorial design occurred from classes being taught by Alexis Brodovitch.

Large formats with abundant space for design and photos was editorial design in the 1960s.

Visual communicators, entertainment as part of the function.

Message, conceptual power of images

first time to overlap elements

Politically active

We learned a lot about the Swiss movement as well as commercial and editorial work. We looked at Esquire and Bazaar magazine covers which I thought were nice. Out of all the work we looked at tonight I liked the NY City Subway System design the most. We learned how company's started to create a message in graphic design work. Some were political and some were just how the companys wanted their reputation to be. We also watched a video on post modernism.