Context of Practise: Seminar- "How Modernism Relates to Graphic Design"

Tuesday 23rd October 2012
"How Modernism Relates to Graphic Design" Seminar Notes
Richard Miles

Modern
- To push things forward
- Celebration/ Fetish of the new- automatically better

Modernity
- Social experience
- Industrialisation/ Urbanisation/ Leisure/ Transport

Modernism
- Response to the experience of Modernity and embracing it

Rejection of Ornament (Adolf Loos (1808))
- Goes out of date quicker
- Fashion trends are dated
- Distill its essence to allow it to keep

Form Follows Function (Louis Sullivan (1896))
- Looks are secondary to how it communicates
- "Good typography is invisible"

Beginning of Modernism
- Shift towards Modernist aesthetic (Cheret (1884) and Toulouse- Lautrec (1891))
- 'Parole in Liberta' by the Futurists- experimental shift in typography
                                                        - ornamental lexis- international audience
                                                        - anti-ornamental
- Maronetti- Experimental typography- used as an image (constructivist aesthetic)
- Fortunato Despero (1927) Bolted Book- true to materials that workers constructed
                                                                - Questions the materiality of the book
- Appollinaire (1918) "Il Pleut"- Concrete Poetry-Presentation more important than meaning

First rules laid down for Modernist typography- Jan Tschichold (1927)
- No fonts except Grotesk fit for the modern age (un-ornamented sans-serif)
- Fraktur- Germanic greatness yet backwards and historic
              - criticised by Tschichold
- 'International Typographic Style' or 'Swiss Style'- Switzerland Post WW2 neutral
                                                                               - Quintessential modernist style
                                                                               - Use of a rigid grid
                                                                               - Aksidenz Grotesk
                                                                               - Flush Left/ Ragged Right
- Abandoned drawn illustration for technologies and photography
- 'Neue Grafik' Journal- 3 Langauges
                                    - No Decoration
                                    - Information to-the-point
-Joesph Muller-Brockman- helvetica, Stripped Down, Logical, Grid-based, Minimal colour

5 Areas of Modernist Design:

1. Aesthetic Self-Reflexiveness
2. Montage
3. Paradox, Ambiguity and Uncertainty
4. Loss of the Intergrated Individual Subject
5. Optimism

Optimism and Utopian

- Herbert Bayer 'Univers' typeface- making text with machines shown by sans serif

                                                     - only lowercase- easier to learn and cheaper

-Bauhaus

- Harry Beck 'Underground' map

Aesthetic Self-Reflexiveness

- El Lissitsky (1924) Advert for Pelican Ink 'TINTE' Photogram

Montage

- Paul Citroen 'Metropolis'

No essence is shared by all- just resemblances

Moves away from realism of the worked and relies on signs and symbols

Helvetica Film Extras:

Massimo Vignelli

- Produced the signage fort the underground subway system in the USA

- Mistake of plotting in the geography

- Clear legibility

- Post-Modernism- 'No Logic' and 'Fad'

- Strong Modernist

David Carson

- Post Modernist

- Form before the Function

- Making the text into an image

- Images have no text relevance to the article

- Helvetica- dull and anyone can use it

Experimental Jetset

- Trying to fit in Post-Modernism interests with Modernist Ideas