For our last studio task for Richard before our practical sessions begin, we must create a list of 5 designers that relate to each context of practice lecture we have had throughout first year on the programme. We have 9 topics; modernism, postmodernism, street art/graffiti, film, high culture vs. low culture, typography and the history of type, media specificity, advertising and communication.
Modernism
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the colour field painters. Newman was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them.Newman's late works, such as the Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases - Anna's Light (1968), named in memory of his mother who had died in 1965.
Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? can be viewed as a piece of modernist design as it symbolic in nature, the work itself has moved away from the realistic and relies on the symbolism to create meaning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/newman/
http://www.barnettnewman.org/
Jon Braley
Jon Braley’s paintings are about how we relate to nature in an urban, technological age. The more we live in cities and cocoon ourselves from the natural world, the more we become separated from it. In the process, “nature” seems to have become like a commodity or consumable idea that we have come to see as separate from ourselves. Like ancient myth or legend, the natural world has managed to become something romanticised but distant: an essential part of our identity that we nevertheless have increasing trouble reconnecting with.
BA Fine Art (1999)
MA Fine Art (2000)
Walter Allner
Walter Allner noted designer, typographer and painter was trained at the Bauhaus under Josef Albers, Vasily Kandisky and Joost Schmidt. He also worked for a short time with Otto Neurath, inventor of the Isoype, at the Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna. He also worked briefly with Piet Zwart, the influential Dutch typographer. He worked for Graphis Paris from 1945 to 1948 and emigrated to the United States in 1949 where he worked for several corporate clients, including Johnson and Johnson (1954-1955) and RCA Records, (1965-1967) as well as the American Cancer Society, I.T.T. and I.B.M. He is most noted for his tenure as Art Director at Fortune magazine from 1962 to 1974. He personally created 79 covers for Fortune magazine and was known for his innovative use of computers in his design. He is recognized as the designer of the first computer-generated cover of a national magazine for the annual Fortune 500 issue. "Long before the personal computer revolutionized the methods used to produce graphic design, Mr. Allner predicted the integration of aesthetics and advanced technology, and so worked directly with computer engineers whenever he could." (Heller). Allner left Fortune magazine in 1974 and taught and lectured and as Steven Heller writes, his motto was "Raise the aesthetic standard - the public is more perceptive than you think." RIT's Walter Allner Collection contains a sampling of his work, primarily magazine covers for Fortuneand Packaging Digest and was donated by Mr. Allner himself.
Peter Saville
Peter Saville (born 9 October 1955) is an English art director and graphic designer. During the 1980s, he designed many record sleeves for Factory Designer. Peter Saville was born in Manchester. Saville attended St Ambrose College. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic (later Manchester Metropolitan University) from 1975 to 1978. Peter Saville designed many record sleeves for Factory Records artists, most notably for Joy Division and New Order. Influenced by fellow student Malcolm Garrett, who had begun designing for the Manchester punk group, the Buzzcocks, and by Herbert Spencer's Pioneers of modern typography. Saville was inspired by Jan Tschichold, chief propagandist for the New Typography.
This is the best selling 12" ever made, maybe a move into post modernism however the experimental simple minimalistic design going against traditional styles of working keeps it very modern, going against form follows function this band lost 30p for ever copy of this record sold due to the expensive production of the design.
Blue (1983)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Saville_(graphic_designer)
http://designmuseum.org/design/peter-saville
http://www.petersaville.com/
Bauhaus
Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist Architecture and modern design. The most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
Modernism Imagery; Barnett Newman, Jon Braley, Walter Allner, Peter Saville, Bauhaus
