Paul Rand Part 3

Paul Rand: Part 3

As he had done with many adverts, Paul Rand had designed many book covers. He merged photographs, pieces of patterned or colored paper and the use of token font. He preferred the use of sans-serif and contributed to a sense of closeness by adding his own personal touch in handwriting. He was seen as modernist and he had once exclaimed that “the real difference between modernism and traditional design lies in the way an image is placed on a sheet of paper.”

Paul Rand as a member of business in advertisement held how important a brand identity was and single-handedly managed to convince numerous companies that it was more important than a billboard. It is thanks to him that commercial artists in the 1950s had become legitimate workers in business as graphic designers. Eventually the fastest growing and cost-effective business of the time had in effect become that of corporate identity design.

One of the most effective designs he had made was that for IBM. Upon entering this modern technology era, Rand thought that the company’s logo needed a restart. The 1924 logo was mainly composed of a globe with a very modest font. Being a conservative organization, Rand could not just jump in to introduce the IBM light blue parallel striped version of the logo. Instead he took baby steps first changing the logo of 1947 in 1956 so that the font was only slightly changed into a more stylish version of the ‘slab-serif’ and block filled in black until he changed it with his initial idea in 1972.

Rand kept designing for IBM until 1980, where they eventually even integrated his famed Eye-Bee-M poster.

Paul Rand’s designs were criticized as being much unsophisticated, however he did not hesitate to say that in order to be original or exciting one did not need to be too obscure or over-the-top with the designs. On the other hand, his extremely minimalist designs turned these logos timeless and relaxed, and could appear trendy in another 10 years. He has in point of fact designed identities for ABC, Cummins Engine, UPS, and Westinghouse which are still used today.

Apart from these he worked with Steve Jobs on creating a new logo and company name which had become known as NeXT and also on the colored Apple Logo. Rand was proud of his work. Upon starting out for work Paul Rand had told Jobs, “I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.”

Paul Rand died at the age of 82 in 1996 where had spent the rest of his life creating trademarks and developing them. He was in a few words, a revolutionary. He was the man who had linked European modernist art with graphic design originating from the USA, and he was one of the few to use both methods in design. Other than that of hand-drawing and paper-sticking, he had made use of the newer technical equipment. He broke away from the old traditions but built enough confidence to produce what he really wanted.

References:

·        http://www.complex.com/style/2012/03/20-graphic-designers-you-should-know/21

·        http://iconofgraphics.com/paul-rand/

·        http://www.myturtleneck.com/blog/2009/4/16/graphic-modernist-paul-rand.html

·        http://ahistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-york-school.html

Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, John Wiley & Sons, 2012, New Jersey

Paul Rand Part 2

Paul Rand: Part 2

Apart from his job at Esquire magazine, he decided he could take on some more work, and so he took a freelance job for a cultural magazine called ‘Directions’. The covers he designed had more or less become a workshop for his development of Bauhaus inspired ideas and those of many other revolutionary artists. In fact, during an interview with Steven Heller in 1990 he had said, “When I was doing the covers of Direction I was trying to compete with the Bauhaus, Van Doesburg, Leger and Picasso. Compete is not the right word, I was trying to do it in the spirit.”

Similarly to Picasso he would adopt a sense of angularity as the artist had done during his cubist period. Rand would incorporate photographs and his own drawings onto the cover creating collages as well as make use of primary flat colours especially red, as well as the colours black and white.  He also liked making use of complementary colours to create a unique pattern for his covers.

Around the late 1930’s, the great depression had finally come to an end and so this was the opportune time for many companies to start advertising their products again. Paul Rand had spent 3 years working at Esquire and now that he had had enough and was offered another job he accepted immediately.

In his work he started using the font Futura as opposed to many other designers. Thanks to this, his advertisements looked simpler than those of others, but striking. As he had done with ‘Apparel Arts’ his designs relied on the intelligence of the viewer, but at the same time capable of communicating with the audience so that they know what the advertisement is offering. His designs were very easy on the eyes and he would not allow any necessary details if they were not meant to attract people. By dividing the component of his designs in two by making use of large fonts and of smaller ones, he would first attract the buyers, and then draw them in so that they could read further.

Despite having quite a inimitable style in deign which was easily detectable as his, he would still sign his work which was uncommon practice in the United Sates as many designers operated under the name of an agency. 

Paul Rand made use of his own drawings, which he incorporated into the ads he was working on. They were characterized by visual puns, where that in itself was a very exclusive feature of his works. He produced logos for the products he was advertising, which were generally treated as a standard for everything else that followed after. He revolutionized the use of the logo. Rather than put it at the bottom as a trademark as was traditionally the case, he enlarged it and included it as part of the main picture, turning it into the center of attention on the poster. 

References:

·        http://www.complex.com/style/2012/03/20-graphic-designers-you-should-know/21

·        http://iconofgraphics.com/paul-rand/

·        http://www.myturtleneck.com/blog/2009/4/16/graphic-modernist-paul-rand.html

·        http://ahistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-york-school.html

·        Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, John Wiley & Sons, 2012, New Jersey

Paul Rand Part 1

Paul Rand: Part 1

Where most European countries had become rubble and were completely destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States, despite their involvement, were left unscathed. They experienced no financial losses. On the other hand, American industries flourished, eventually becoming world leaders in the global economy. The majority of European states had had their factories destroyed and their companies bankrupt and they could not do much but lean on America and depend on them to get back on their own two feet. A new age of industrial growth had begun, prodigious and unrivaled to the one before it. Fresh businesses started budding across the United States, soon becoming multinational thanks to the cutting edge trends they set in their production of commodities, providing services, and advancing in technology. As a result these countries sought to be easily identifiable by donning an easily recognized sign or symbol, and as a result many graphic designers took up the job to provide such a thing. Many designers’ work had become popular and they had made a name for themselves, one of them being the much celebrated Paul Rand.

                                                                                                         

Paul Rand had started from the very bottom. He had started as a recruit with a part-time job in illustration. What he had produced was of no extraordinary prominence. Rather, he had thought of it as junk, but nevertheless thanks to this job he became more open and cultured into the world of graphic design and the techniques used, than he had ever been in school. In the 1930’s he started a project as a self-employed worker, where he had been commissioned trivial projects. He had also decided to change his name. He had been swayed by his friends’ opinions that his Jewish name might be the cause of him being over-looked for other designers. Many were still cold and unfriendly towards the Jews due to the recent end of the war, and thought better than wanting to get involved or do business with the kin they had blamed for America’s losses. Recalling the fact that an uncle of his had done the same exact thing, calling himself “Rand”, he had decided to do the same, becoming Paul Rand from Peretz Rosenbaum. 

In the year 1936, he had been recognized by a men’s fashion magazine called ‘Apparel Arts’. Through his self-employment he became active, producing the journal’s layouts. He had become known for the eccentric ways in which he designed the covers- they were not meant for the unwise; however they were not too difficult to understand. His editors saw a lot of potential in him and would leave him completely free in deciding what to design on each new edition’s cover. Eventually, he would be offered a full-time job and also an opportunity to work with ‘Esquire’ magazine as art director.

References:

·        http://www.complex.com/style/2012/03/20-graphic-designers-you-should-know/21

·        http://iconofgraphics.com/paul-rand/

·        http://www.myturtleneck.com/blog/2009/4/16/graphic-modernist-paul-rand.html

·        http://ahistoryofgraphicdesign.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-york-school.html

·        Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, John Wiley & Sons, 2012, New Jersey

De Stijl

De Stijl

The De Stijl movement was launched by the Netherlands in the late summer of 1917. Its founder and guiding spirit Théo van Doesburg was joined by painters Bart Anthony van der Leck and Piet Mondrian and Vilmos Huszár the architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, and others. Mondrian believed true reality in visual art “is reached through active movement in equilibrium, established through the equilibrium of unequal but corresponding oppositions. The explanation of equilibrium through plastic art is of a great importance for humanity. It is the task of art to reach a clear vision of reality.” Working in an abstract geometric style, De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and harmony in art, which could then be a prototype for a new social order. The theorist M. H. J. Schoenmakers influenced Mondrian’s thinking, by defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two most important opposites shaping our world, and called red, yellow, and blue the three principal colors.

Similarly to what Pablo Picasso and all the other cubists had done in the beginning after they started moving away from the academic way of representing figures and set their eyes on the simple primitive African masks, Mondrian had decided to simplify detailed and elaborate form into simpler ones. He had had to move to New York City where he would remain for the rest of his life due to the rise of fascism in Europe. There he became inspired with the way the city looked from a bird’s eye view and through a series of studies he managed to simplify the once elaborate sketch of the city’s map into an oil painting composed of lines.

Furthermore, he had personally stated that he preferred using primary colours to all others because they were the root of all other hues, further sparing the viewer the observation of different shades.

This artist advocated paintings without an initial view point and many of his compositions have no clear point on which the eye can rest and the edges and the middle are equally important. The horizontal and vertical lines repeatedly advocate a stillness and suspension, ascending from two mutually divergent forces holding each other steadily. Mondrian was confident that his work revealed the essential arrangement and organization which supports the world as we experience it. Mondrian’s impact extended well beyond the fine arts, his work and philosophies predisposed artists who backed the Dutch magazine De Stijl, and the Constructivists, all who were looking for new forms for the modernizing world. These groups included particularly those accompanying with the Bauhaus. When Mondrian moved to the United States in the 1940 he inclined the abstract Expressionists who held comparable views about a psycho-spiritual order behind human presence. 

Piet Mondrian, oil on canvas,

Composition with Red, Yellow, and

Blue, 1927.

Théo van Doesburg and Laszlo

Moholy-Nagy, book cover, 1925.

The essence of D .

Théo van Doesburg, cover

for De Stijl, 1922. Type is asymmetrically

balanced in the four corners

of an implied rectangle. De Stijl is

combined with the letters N and B,

which indicated Nieuwe Beelden

Bibliography:

•        Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London
•        Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis
•         Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

Modernisim

Modernism

The 19^th and 20^th century were characterized by a boom of revolutionary ideas for artists around the world. The invention of the photographic camera forced artists out of there comfort zone and drove them to explore new avenues when painting and to challenge what photographs could not bring to and audience: colour, texture, movement, feeling and a relation to contemporary issues in everyday life. Also they felt that rather than relate a story, they had a right to deliver their own opinion and message, especially those aimed towards the events that took place radically across the two centuries such as the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. This was the year of modernism.

In order to shake people out of their passive attitude and make them start thinking of what is truly going on around them. They found many ways of delivering an unexpected, expressive, strange, liberating or shocking composition.

All artists within the Modern Era had the natural feeling that the world in the way it way in the past was too different from the way it was advancing in their present time. What fueled all the art movements within this period was the artist ways of experimenting to explore new boundaries in art, while rejecting the academics and the assessment of the art critics. With the end of Neo-Classism and its exaggerated focus on its strong connections with academicism, Romanticism took over, which focused on the emotions, rebellion , and the thirst for truth by creating fantasy- like scenes.

They rejected what society found as favorable and what was considered as good taste at that time. Another movement was Realism, which also challenged the society’s view and also broadened their subjects as scene of everyday life, such as a scene of manual laborers.

Up to the year 1920 Europe had been going through a number of tumultuous events. What with the industry, the all-over faster rhythm of life, and the start of state revolutions leading to the ending of many monarchies, new ideologies started developing. Citizens started becoming more nationalistic and servant-like towards their country. Other European leaders brainwashed even the youngest of boys to lead onward with their idea of a militaristic government. This upheaval led to the Great War.

Since Germany was a greatly militarized country, donning the latest and most advanced weaponry of the time and had started achieving support quite early into the war, started posing a great threat towards the Allies who on the other hand were low on the number of soldiers. Therefore, they could do nothing, but turn to their citizens and urge them to conscript “for the pride and glory of their country”. This is where propaganda and poster design played a great role.

Inspired by the many movements within Modernism, many artists and print-makers designed posters in order to impulse the citizens into offering their services for the war effort. Bright colours were used in order to itch curios eyes towards it from a distance as well as making it captivating and attention-grabbing up-front. Political figures and important leaders were depicted, addressing a general audience and using either inspiring or commanding words to commend people into joining the army.

Bibliography:

•  Stephen Little, …isms Understanding Art, 2011, Herbert Press, London
•  Jesse Bryant Wilder, Art History for Dummies, 2007, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis
• Philip B. Meggs, Megg’s History of Graphic Design, 2012, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey

Dadaisim

Brief History of Dada

In the early 1900’s a group of rebellious artists disregarded art philosophies and academic teachings and even art itself, to persons a new way of perceiving reality in the Dada movement.
Emerging during the time of the First World War the Dadaists used tactics of shocking people to lure their blinded society out of their nationalistic and materialistic attitude which had led them to the ruins of World War One. These artists sought to deliver the truth- that what morals and political and aesthetic beliefs the people had built and developed on through the years were destroyed by the war, by encouraging catastrophic, profane and detached themes in their compositions. Since as a movement, they were quite radical to bringing about change and progress to their present situations, these artists had openly subjected the Expressionists to having resisted to the times with their sentimentality. Being a literary movement as well as a visual one, Dadaism was spread in various parts of Europe, such as Zurich, Berlin and Paris, as well as New York.

Dada Typography and Aesthetics of Meaning

Like the Futurism movement before them, Dada created this ‘typography revolution’ that was founded on the typography itself, were the type face was used as a way to communicate the creation of the meaning. In some other words, Dada removed all the graphic work from the conducted textual message. Dada didn't want the people to read and look “through” the words so to precept the meaning of the content, the movement wanted to enforce the people to look at the typography and on its exposed layouts and fonts.

Tristan Tzara, Une Nuit d’Echecs, 391 Paris !920                                                               

Hugo Ball,Karawane, 1917.

This version published the Dada Almanach, in Berlin in 1920. According, Raoul Hausmann, a Berlin Dadaist, Richard Hülsenbeck created the typography. The use of different type faces was a distinctive feature of the Berlin Dadaists.

In comparison to the Futurism typography, which outwardly aimed at an the interpretation of the ambition for speed, Dada’s typography, war technology, inherently multifarious, was suggesting a new way for deciphering the meaning of one that was eruptive and nonlinear and the most important self-sufficient of any fulfilled textual. Dada attached typographical weight to the words not according to its semantic sense in a statement. 

Covers, illustrations and Layouts of Dada’s Publications

Although the fact that Dadaists consider Dada movement not as an art but an anti-art movement, the designers of illustrations, layouts and book jackets in the Dada publications had a very strong artistic taste. Dada ignored the conventional aesthetics and instead offered a new viewpoint on it, and it also aimed the questions and the meanings of the meanings and it presented as a complete idiosyncratic idea.

Bibliography

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBRUmpRtAV2_2g-vg9glHGw7Lu0tS3GAtN4hNy8dxPGboAtCzj4fA9VSiyrzUDuj-TQJfvzxjUbYq20YkWRTTyJ7YN7mc37ScuuQBLhEqIgbtjlv4rqLA1RIDn1oB9OwLm1alNB_tcmI_y/s640/391_no14_p3_6487.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7PxTLgdgc-lYK2A-CBSNgrT4mHLlXOZP5gxfnpPv3BFcfQckO35ZlxNgP4gV2PbmjjT36qQmnBYfCzIX_2aktHh3V-rlPuMeqqEBpgWmCZ-q0SjC2gd81Hr2xMJq4SkyZg_YrTs1zn01m/s1600/Dada4-5.jpg

https://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/teachers/type_lecture/lecture_images/DadaSoiree.gif