An In-Depth Reflection

- Introduction

 This collection of 10 journals is an amalgamation of everything I have learned from this class during the quarter. This blog is a chronicle of my blood, sweat and tears over this past couple months and in it I analyze art movements, break apart design theories and apply liberal amounts of my own opinion into the mix. I hope you enjoy reading these posts as much as I enjoyed writing them.

- What did you learn? How do you see things differently as a result?

What I had initially hoped to achieve by attending this course was a greater understanding of the graphic arts and how it had evolved throughout the span of human existence. In a shallow sense, this was accomplished. This was more evident to me in the first couple chapters of the book as it described the origin and growth of written language. I found it interesting how the textbook painted a picture of graphic, representational art evolving alongside language, from the cave painting of our ancient ancestors to the illuminated manuscripts of the medieval era. I had never really considered the origins of language as the beginning of graphic design and I definitely found it an interesting theory.

- What did you not learn? Why was the class not valuable to you? How could it have been more valuable?

I now only have a very shallow knowledge of typography as it relates to graphic design, while I realize that this is not a typography course, it would have been nice to have a less scholarly (boring), and more hands on approach to all the terminology and variables that go into fonts. The book itself was not the most interesting of textbooks, and along with being rather dry at points, it also straddles the line of being far too opinionated at others. I found the author to be very biased for and against certain artists, which is not really what I expect from a history text. A new more engaging book, plus assignments in which we actually analyze the works by the artists would have been much more valuable to my learning experience.

- What new connections did you make regarding graphic design and the evolution of human culture?

I came to a realization about how society has used limiting information as a means of control and the route to power. As the spread of certain types of information evolved the playing field leveled a bit, but there are always those who limit the spread of information and so carve out for themselves an advantage. We see clear evidence of this in ancient Sumeria with the advent of city-societies. Even as reading and literacy became more of a vehicle for the masses by which they could educate themselves, society evolved a counter with which they could maintain a degree of control over people, advertisements. This was especially marked in the industrial era as factories needed to peddle their wares to their consumers. Looking at ads, and the governmental version of them, propaganda, there is a strong use of emotional manipulation for the majority of these works.

- What new interests might you have based on what you've been exposed to?
Though I studied Egypt a lot as a younger man, if feel as if there was an aspect of it that I was missing, and  the Books of the Dead I feel may be interesting to research and perhaps read. The act of inventive story telling as opposed to the chronicling of events has always been fascinating to me and perhaps I can learn something from those who have done it before me.

- How will you apply what you've learned to experiencing life, your understanding of other disciplines, your future career?
I'm going to apply the different methodologies and concepts at the heart of the art movements we've learned about and apply them to my own work. I hope to broaden my range as a creative force and perhaps by imitating the past and combining it with my own interests and focus I can synthesize great works and vastly improve my skills.

- What is the future of graphic design?
I feel that in the future this will become more prevalent as information now is catered directly to us using our habits and locations to target us directly as advertisements. The future of the graphic designer will be using these technologies and creating a seamless, aesthetically pleasing experience for the user. Think of it as web design for the mobile information junkie.

Module 10

In this module we learned about postmodern design and the origin of the digital revolution and the effects that they had on Graphic Design. There have been several advances by the same section of people that have greatly enhanced the lives and power of the individual artist and graphic designer in this digital age.

One of the companies that had the greatest impact was Adobe Systems. They invented PostScript, which was a page description language; a computer language that allowed for the printing of a bitmap image. After this language had been invented, Steve Jobs of Apple, asked them to adapt the language to be included in the Macintosh and to power their laserjet printer, the Apple laser-writer.

Macintosh

Laser-writer

In 1986 Adobe released yet another innovation that supported graphic design, the program, Adobe Illustrator. It allowed users to create postscript graphics changing line art and drawing forever.

A year later Adobe licensed Photoshop, a photo manipulation program developed by Thomas Knoll and with it's release on the Macintosh, digital photo manipulation was brought to the masses.

Module 9

For this reading we studied the latter half of the post modernist era of graphic design. What really spoke to me in these chapters was the explosion of poster design, from the highly political to the psychedelic mind warping of American poster mania. The creativity and the effect of past movements on the posters stood out to me. I was particularly drawn to the works of the artists Robert Wesley "Wes" Wilson. This poster for example.

The typography in the poster is so much more expressive and interesting than the clean, sterile look of the Swiss International style. This poster and the movement were about flowing line and playing with the shapes that one could make with typography.

There is a real influence from the art nouveau movement in his work. These two posters seem almost Mucha-like.

It's obvious to me that Alphonse Mucha's work had a rather large impact on Wes' style. The art nouveau line that takes place in much of the typography of the Psychadelic movement is taken a step further with the subject matter of the female form that appears in many of Wilson's posters.

It's also rather exciting to see poster art meant to encourage political activism. There is a quite inflammatory image that Wes produced in response to the Vietnam War.

The reminder to be AWARE I feel is an important one, for the times when we are not vigilant and allow ourselves to fall into complacency is when the meanest of us will take advantage.

Module 8

What I found intriguing about this weeks reading was the evolution of a artistic movement based on a mainstreaming of Typography. Most of the movements we have learned about have referred to graphics or images and the styles and techniques that were grouped together. It's refreshing to have a movement based around communicating with words in a clear way.

Swiss Modernism was a movement that emphasized communication over the attention grabbing of advertisements. It is fitting then that as the world began to move closer to the modern era and the world began to grow smaller with the development of mass communications that the International Typographic Style would arise.

Note the lack of serifs and the boldness of the type, communication is the key function.

A forerunner of the movement, Amil Ruder a typography instructor of the Basel School of Design taught that legibility and readability are dominant concerns and that type loses its purpose if it loses its communicative meaning.

The fonts in this movement epitomized this ideal. In 1954 Adrian Frutiger completed Univers a font with 21 variations.

This era was also the orgin of the popular font Helvetica, which is a traditional Latin name for Switzerland.

German designer Hermann Zapf would evolve traditions of calligraphy and Renaissance Typography into three typefaces that would also exemplify the movement 

Melior

Optima

And Palationo

Module 7

I found the immigration of many of the Bauhaus designers to be fascinating. I of course had heard of scientists and the like coming to America to escape from Nazi Germany, but had given little thought to the artists and designers of the country and the effect they had on American design. The fact that key figures in the movement such as Groipus and Marcel Breuer were teaching at Harvard and Moholy-Nagy created the Institute of Design in Chicago was mind opening for me. I have to say I like their tenet of form following function. The sleekness and simplicity of their designs is an interesting juxtaposition to the heavy ornamentation and decoration of the Art Nouveau movement, for instance.

And their application of design to architecture is also something that is inspiring. Below I have several images of the Dessau Bauhaus.

The building itself has a very fluid yet machine-like dynamic to it. The perfect center for a movement that was characterized by the unity of Art and Technology.

I also love the idea of such a place being a wellspring of ideas and innovation, a school based on innovation instead of stagnation and dogmatic thinking.

Module 6

The turn of the century was a turbulent time for the human race. There was great upheaval in the societal, social, political, and economic aspects of human life. It was a time of artistic experimentation as people sought a new way to express the emotional uproar that the events that unfolded around them had driven them into. Several artistic movements influenced by the time such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Expressionism.

Cubism was an intriguing movement that experimented with human perception of images and forms through the use of geometric planes, shapes, values, and colors.

Pablo Picaso was the originator of the movement and enthusiastically played with the classical norms for human figure, by rotating, abstracting, chopping up and redistributing viewpoints.

Futurism was a movement characterized by a violent love of war, the machine age, speed and modern life. To quote their manifesto, their intent was to "Destroy the cult of the past... Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation... Elevate all attempts at originality... Regarded art critics as useless and dangerous... Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects that have been used in the past... Support and glory in our day-to-day world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science."

What I found so interesting about this movement is the experimental use of type that was implemented by so many of the poet/painters that embodied the movement. Filippo Marinetti, founder of the Futurists used typography to express emotion and feeling that is typically lost when translated from spoken to written language as well as a particular iconography in how the capitals seem to create the landscape of mountains and valleys the poem describes.

Filippo Marinetti "Montagne+Vallate+Strade x Joffre" 1915

I find a similar aspect in the more modern art of kinetic typography of which I've provided a small example of in the video below. There is the same type of emotional expression in the presentation of the words but presented with speed and animation. I think the futurists at the beginning of the last century would have accepted this as a part of their own movement had it been possible at the time.

As an experiment, try watching video again, but without sound and see if it still evokes the same feeling.

Dadaism as a movement embodied much of the violence and drive of the Futurist movement and took it to more of an extreme. The Dadaist claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. The rebelled against the horrors of war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes. They took the Futurist rejection of tradition, but instead of an embracing an idealized version of the future, there was only the present and the need to change it.

"Whoever reads the bourgeois press turns deaf and blind. Away with these stupidity causing bandages!"-John Heartfield

Surrealism was the searching  for the "more real than real world behind the real". As convoluted as that sounds, that quote sums up the movement quite succinctly. Art from this movement embodied the inner thoughts, intuition and feeling of the artists. It was at the same time deeply personal and yet could evoke a universal response from large numbers of people. 

"Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man" by Salvador Dali

Expressionism was the tendency to not depict objective reality but rather subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events. Visually there was a heavy use of symbols, with pronounced lines and color and value contrasts were intensified. The controlled geometric patterning and constrictive rules of realism were abandoned for thick paint, loose brushwork, and bold contour drawing. Expressionist fostered a deep and intense idealism that bucked the authority of the military, education, and governmental rule. There was a deep empathy of the poor and social outcasts, these were often the subjects of expressionists.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913

There was also a deep focus on pictorial art during this time period, as radio and other means of electronic communication were far from being widespread, the art of poster-making was being refined and used to advertise and support propaganda and war efforts.

This art movement shares a grapic style with graphic artist Sheperd Fairey, who I was recently made aware of by a colleague of mine

Shepard Fairey

Module 5

Art Nouvea was an international decorative style that thrived for two decades at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. It encompassed a large variety of the design arts from architecture, furniture and product design, to fashion and graphics, influencing the posters, packages and advertising as a whole. The key visual quality of Art Nouveau is an organic plantlike line. There is a sense of a flowing energy or line throughout it as it forms, decorates, and modifies a given space.  Vine tendrils, birds, and the human female were frequent motifs from which this fluidity was developed.

Ukiyo-e was a Japanese art movement that took place around the time that Japan was first joining the world stage. It was an artistic style that was noted for it's prolific printing from woodblocks and screens. The flow and line of this style had a major impact on many European artists who would develop Art Nouveau.
Kitagawa Utamaro was a great example of a Japanese artist who embodied many of the traits and subject fixations that characterized the Art Nouvea movement. He had a great observation of nature and the female form. His work often included birds and plants, as well as many depictions of the female form.

Module 4

The Industrial Revolution was a time of radical sweeping change in human history. The power of steam and new mechanical innovations gave rise to a new culture and society. The predominate source of power shifted from humans and animals, to mechanical and steam. This had a marked impact on Graphic Design of the time period. Type faces became bolder and more pronounced as mass communications became the norm and a bigger impact was needed. The speed of printing increased with several innovations to the printing press.

Antique Tuscan

The linotype machine was a dramatic innovation to the printing process, it was quite literally the mechanization of typography. One of the problems slowing the production of prints was the need to set each letter of each word in every single printed document had to be set by hand. The linotype automated this process and created an explosion of printed material.

The invention of photography also had a dramatic effect on communication in this era. Joseph Niepce was the first to produce a photographic image.

The change from a handicraft to the mechanical production of items reminds me of my own personal experience with screen printing. I have over the past year have learned how to screen print by hand and have had some reasonable success with it. My rate of production though, is limited by my mechanical aids or printing press. Manual printing takes a lot more human energy and precision then a fully automated press such as the one below.

Module 3

These chapters focused on the printing of the written word and the explosion and exploration of the mechanization of printing and the development of fonts and typography. The greatest advance made in the area of human communication until our current culture of electronic mass communication was the development of the printing press, which increased the rate of production of books and printed material exponentially.

Prior to the development of the printing press by Johannes Gensfleisch zum Guttenburg, books were all written by hand. In fact a production line style of book making controlled by the clergy and the wealthy had been in place for years. A single book before the printing press possessed the same value as a farm or vinyard! 

The name Incubala has been adapted for the period of time and the books printed after the creation of Johannes' press. This was a time in which not only the printed word spread rapidly, but the process of printing itself. As it states in Meggs History of Graphic Design, "By 1480 twenty-three northern European towns, thirty-one Italian towns, seven French towns, six Spanish and Portuguese towns and one English town had presses. By 1500 Printing was practiced in over 140 towns. It is estimated that over thirty-five thousand editions for a total of nine million books were produced."

Just 50 years earlier, the monasteries and libraries of Europe had only contained around fifty thousand volumes. That MASSIVE increase in literature made the literacy rates around Europe leap to a previously unheard of high. The mass production of books and their effect on literacy was two-fold. The increased supply of books greatly brought down their monetary value to a fraction of what it had been previously and the mere fact that there were more books in circulation gave more people access to physical copies.

The rise of literacy also gave rise to the many social and political upheavals that took place in Europe in the last couple of centuries. The fact that so many could now read and the ease with which mass copies of written material could now be created led to an intellectual revolution as new ideas and values could be spread to the masses. This led to the destabilization of the European religious authority's power base as so much of it depended on controlling the flow of information, much like the scribes of Sumeria and Egypt. This weakening of the Clergy's informational authority led to the spread of Humanism and Individualism, a hallmark of our current society.

The study of this great upheaval and social change 500 years ago, gives me pause as I can see parallels between it and the current change that we are going through as a culture and as a species. The flow and spread of information, once limited to books and print, now lives in the chips and drives of our computers. Instead of movable type, we now have word processing programs, e-mail, and blogs. Instead of illuminated manuscripts we now have photoshop and jpegs. In place of paper we have light projected directly into our eyes from our screens. Information is now free to those with an internet connection and a power source, in fact, one can view computer literacy as the new literacy. The rise of the internet and personal computing has done as much for the spread and exchange of information and ideas as the printing press did and more.

It's interesting to note though, that the printing press led to learning being a more individual and personal act leading to individualism and the spread of different ideas. In the current trend, information is more open and with the rise of social networking sites it is instantly share-able and spreadable much like a virus, from person to person. I wonder though, if this will lead to more of a homogeneity of ideas and information as we all begin to draw from the same sources, such as the front pages of sites like Yahoo, or Youtube. Hopefully not as variety is what makes life so interesting. 

With the rise of cloud computing, I also wonder if the preservation of information will be a personal thing any longer as more and more documents, videos, and other information are saved on the servers of other more powerful computers that are owned by corporations.  But like the Europeans of the past half millennium I can only speculate on what changes this new technology will bring and I look forward to finding out.

Module 2

Graphic Design is the art of communicating with visual images. It has at its very core the desire to connect to and inform another human being. When looked at in this sense it’s easy to see how it could have developed from our more primitive ancestors.  It’s having a conversation in another language, the visual one. Before, history began being recorded in a physical sense there was an oral history. Legends and stories would be passed down from village elder to the younger generation. 

And for a time, this was good. It passed down knowledge from one generation to the next allowing the tribes base of knowledge to grow and expand, but there are some problems with trying to preserve information this way. Being passed from one person to another leaves room for change and human error in the retelling of it. There is also the issue of the mortality of the teller; to make it to the present the information would have needed to be passed down an unbroken chain of successors for thousands of years. With our current knowledge of the human lifespan this is highly unlikely. One can only imagine the countless things lost to the sands of time in this method.

The quantum leap came when these original people began to use a more visual language. There are examples of this first step in the cave paintings and petroglyphs discovered in caves around the world.

 This small step may not seem like it has the same richness to it that an oral story would, but this graphic representation is a moment frozen in time. A painting on the wall that has lasted to the present is a marvel in that it is unchanged and provides us with a glimpse into the world of our ancient ancestors. Instead of hearing a change and diluted tale of the hunt, we can SEE it. This would have been very powerful to the paleolithic people. Pictographic communication is not without it limits though. The details of the events can be lost and the images that depict those events are dependent upon the skill of the artists and the interpretation of the viewer. As time moved on, there was a movement towards the simplification of these images and historians theorize that this led to the emergence of written language.

The ancient Mesopotamians are often credited with the creation of many advances in human culture and technology such as agriculture, animal domestication and the development of metal tools. The Sumarians, who settled in the land of Mesopotamia are believed by archaeologists to be one of the first civilizations to create a writing system. This advance had a dramatic effect on human culture. As the village culture moved into one of a city, many accounting problems for the distribution of resources to maintain a large amount of people living together arose. Many historians theorize that the writing system arose due to this desperate need by temple scribes to account for all of this information.

Example of Sumarian Cuneiform

The development of this system of communicating information made those that could understand and write it VERY powerful in their societies. In fact, being a scribe was a prerequisite to priesthood, estate management, accounting, medicine  and government. The power of the writing system among the select was repeated in the Egyptian society, with their famed hieroglyphics. 

Scribes in Egyptian society had immense power, in fact their writing had a large religious aspect to it. The Egyptians had an extremely superstitious culture centered around the afterlife. There was a belief that one could predict what would happen after one died through the use of a scribe writing down the story. These came to be know in popular culture as Books of the Dead, and were in fact some of the first examples of illuminated manuscripts.

This discrepancy in knowledge and power began to equalize only later with introduction of several advances in both language and technology. Alphabets, or writing systems that use phonographs in which the basic speech sounds of a language are represented, began to form, making literacy more accessible to the common person. "The Northwestern Semitic peoples -Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phonecians- are widely believed to have been the source [of the alphabet] (Meggs 19).

The most famous users of the alphabet, the Greeks, used it to develop science, philosophy and democracy.

The other advance that greatly evened the scales was the development of printing and paper. Both of these leaps forward in human development were invented by the Chinese. The printing process is actually quite simple, the space around an image on a flat surface is cut away, and the remaining raised areas are inked and a piece of paper is place over the surface and rubbed to transfer the image to paper.

The Chinese used this technology to create a paper currency which was widely distributed and many of the populus were exposed to printing and the word. This aspect of Chinese history led to an Eastern Intellectual Renaissance of science, art, medicine and poetry. This is comparable to what Guttenburg's press did for the West hundreds of years later.

These chapters have really opened my eyes to the grow of human culture and how closely the visual language has been tied to it. One might even say that all of our current advances have come from the compiling of this information over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly building upon those that have come before us.

Module 1

Initial thoughts and observations
Going through the book and simply looking at all the images is a novel way to approach a textbook for the sake of learning. As a primarily visual learner I recognize it as a great way to really engage my curiosity and desire to learn more.

What really caught my eye while going through this book was the evolution of the way that visuals were used to communicate. From the beginning with the simple cave paintings of our prehistoric ancestors to our modern advertisements, you can quite literally see the language evolve over the course of hundreds of years by turning these pages. What I found fascinating is that the images shown in this book have similar subjects and layouts. They mainly focus on the combination between the written word and illustrations depicting human figures; a way of sharing ideas that I now realize has been with humankind since it's inception, but the sophistication of the images greatly increases as timeline of the images closes in on the modern age.

Another thing that really stuck out at me was that as time progressed and printing technology evolved, the use of images began to overtake the use of text in regards to how ideas were communicated. Whether this comes from a kind of visual collective unconscious or simply that the technology had restricted artists in this regard before, I can only postulate, but I am eager to delve more into these concepts as the quarter progresses.