Final Project

For this post I went through the book one more time and looked at all the pictures and the one piece that really jumped out at me was the graphic imagery that April Greiman designed for Design quarterly, #133, 1987 entitled "Does it Make Sense?"

What I really like about this piece was how she took the limitations of early digital manipulation, such as low resolution imagery, and embraced them and incorporated it intro her work.

From the AIGA website, "Before the appearance of “Does It Make Sense?” designers widely considered bit-mapped type and imagery not only unorthodox but unacceptable, straying too far from the clean, crisp precision of the Intermational Style. The computer itself was viewed as cold and unfriendly, wildly expensive, and a harbinger of the demise of fine design. After the publication of Design Quarterly #133, many designers felt compelled to reconsider the role of the computer in design practice. Greiman's willingness to ask the question, and to place it at the center of the design community, triggered countless debates about computers, context, and creativity."

Here are a few other pieces that she has done that shows off this style

April Greiman was one of the first designers to see what kind of possibilities digital technology would have for the design world.   What I also found out that I thought was really cool was she was one of the first designers to embrace the Macintosh platform as a artistic tool and used the MacDraw program to design the "Does it Make Sense?" It's pretty interesting to read about the challenges she had during the making of the poster.

Again from the AIGA website, "The process of integrating digitized video images and bitmapped type was not unlike pulling teeth in the early days of Macintosh and MacDraw. The files were so large, and the equipment so slow that she would send the file to print when she left the studio in the evening and it would just be finished when she returned in the morning. One morning, after she had arrived and was assembling the tiled image, it was clear that something big was missing. For some reason, her body had not printed, though everything else was there. While the technical details of the mystery of the missing body remained unsolved, its later reappearance on the pages presented another problem—Greiman didn't like the way her right breast looked. The reproduction process had flattened her and the light was strange. So, in what may well be the first MacDraw breast replacement; she cloned and flopped her left breast and placed it on the right side of her body."


Here's a more recent piece that she has done

If you want to learn more about this amazing designer, check out theses links.


An awesome collection of her posters http://madeinspaceshop.com/


Her design consultancy business' website http://madeinspace.la/


And her personal website http://aprilgreiman.com/

Field Journal - Module 10

The graphic designer who's work really resonated with me this week was Paula Scher. 

Paula Scher is an American graphic designer and artist who has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors and awards.  She has developed numerous identity and branding systems for a wide range of clients such as Citibank, Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, Time magazine, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

Artistically, she is known for for her paintings of maps with hand-painted labeling and lettering.

"It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds."

-Paula Scher

Field Journal - Module 9

Field Journal - Module 8

Field Journal - Module 7

The Artist who's work really caught my eye in this week's reading was Lester Beall.

Lester Beall was a graphic design pioneer that helped usher in the explosion of modern graphic design in America in the late 1920s and 1930s.  His use of bold blocks of color, strong angles and dynamic shapes was a major break from the traditional illustrations that were prevalent in graphic design during this time.

In 1937, Lester Beall created a series of posters for the Rural Electrification Administration.  A selection of these posters were shown at The Museum of Modern Art which prompted the Swiss magazine, Graphis to write, "When The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a special exhibition to Lester Beall in 1937, he was the first commercial designer to be honored in this way. It (thereby) paid tribute by its choice to the successful struggle for higher standards in American advertising."

"Applied good taste is a mark of good citizenship. Ugliness is a form of anarchy... ugly cities, ugly advertising, ugly lives produce bad citizens."

-Lester Beall          .    

Field Journal - Module 6

Field Journal - Module 5

Field Journal - Module 4

Field Journal - Module 3

What I really enjoyed about this week's reading was the history of relief printing in Europe because I was able to learn a bit of the process of this style first hand in my printmaking class.  What I would like to talk about this week is the process of making my prints and the materials I used.

The first thing I did was created an image using pencil on paper.

Original Art

From there, I transferred the image by filling in the back of my design with a soft leaded pencil and tracing over my design onto a block of linoleum.

Linoleum

From there I used a Speedball Lino Cutter to scrape away the linoleum around my design.

Lino Cutter

Here is the final block inked for printing.

From there I placed the printing block on the bed of a printing press which presses down the paper onto the inked block.

Not the one I used but similar in design

And here is the final product.

After learning this process, i really can see what the draw must have been to early print makers.  Just the simple ability to reproduce an image that is an exact duplicate of the original in a fraction of the time it takes to make an image by hand must have been such a refreshing change of pace.

Field Journal - Module 2

What really grabbed my attention in this week's reading was the evolution of pictographs

petroglyphs

and ideographs.

into writing.

My understanding of the reading is that prehistorical humans used their early form of visual communication primarily as a tool to help survive in a hunter-gatherer society. As society evolved from the Paleolithic Period to the agricultural societies of the Neolithic Period, visual communication evolved in two ways. One, pictures became more detailed to become an early artform with the purpose of being a visual record of events and two, that of a simpler pictorial form that represented the spoken word.

By the time the Bronze Age rolled around, visual communication had evolved from a survival tool of the Paleolithic humans to a means for an agricultural society to keep records. What I really took away from this reading was that the more complex society became visual communication evolved as a means to keep the forward momentum of society going by having a stronger record of humanities' past.

Field Journal - Module 1

The first impression I got from looking at the pictures throughout the book is how much abstract imagery has been important in the history of graphic design.  From the cave paintings early humans to pictographs, hieroglyphs and letterforms that represent words to photography and illustrations.  Each instance is an abstract image that invokes an emotional and intellectual response in the viewer.

The second impression I had was that typography is very important in a lion's share of the images.  A powerful image can be lifted to new heights with as little as a single word and a bold typeface where as the same image can be made irrelevant with the same word but with a typeface.  A great example of this is Shepard Fairey's Obama Poster.

Now imagine the word HOPE in comic sans...

All in all, I found myself wanting to read more about the images that are in the book and I am really looking forward to learning about the different techniques and the histories behind these images.