Graphic Design 1940's -1950's - International Typographic Style/Swiss International Style

Rational, tightly structured, functional, serious, clean, objective and harmonious, all adjectives pertaining to the International Typographic Style or Swiss International Style.

This style emerged in Switzerland in the 1950's and slowly became worldwide by the 1970's, as the name suggests the style had a strong dependancy on typographic elements. Along with these elements the style also was recognizable by the use of a mathematical grid to supply the design with an overall orderly and unified structure. The designers used almost exclusively sans-serif fonts, strongly favoring helvetica, usually formatting the type with a flush left and ragged on the right. The type would usually be blocked together and placed strategically in the design to be noticed, and the illustrations used were mostly photographs instead of, or combined with illustrations. The finished designs were simple and analytical giving the viewer a pleasant consistency of shape and colour.

The International Typography Style became popular with the look of many Swiss cultural institutions who depended deeply on the impact and effect of their posters as advertising material. 

(above) Armin Hofmann shows us an emphasis of contrasts between various design elements, but which emphasized economical use of colour and fonts.

                           

(above) Josef Muller-Brockmann's visual exploration of rhythm and tempo in his series for the 'Zurichs Tonhalle', both are important points in the evolution of the International Typography Style.

The Style was perfectly suited to the global postwar market of the time. Corporations needed international exposure and with world wide events happening as well as the popularity of media exposure, the International Typographic Style was gaining global recognition. It gave us pleasing aesthetics, favorable timing and had good mentors to help it spread in popularity. 

With America's booming economy and increasing need for graphic design in packaging and advertising grew a universal acceptance and appreciation, American designers created their own unique approach to The Style.

www.postershow.com/swiss_poster/poster_history.htm

http://swissposters.library.cmu.edu/Swiss/Tour.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographic_Style

www.internationalposter.com/style-primer/international-typographic.aspx

 www.internationalposter.com/ pimages/SWL01398.jpg

STACY POST 9: 1940'S AND 50'S GRAPHIC DESIGN

Discuss the graphic design of the time by researching a product, process or person. your post should be approximately 200wds with accompanying images and urls.

1940

leather jackets, workwear, the new look - christian dior, the chinese revolution,penguin book covers, tschichold, abram games, raymond loewry, edward mcknight kauffer, ww11 continues, war posters, ericofon, leica camera, first automatic computer developed in usa in 1944, atomic bomb used, the transitor developed by bell labs, 'saturday evening post', norman rockwell, 'picture post', 'kill the fascist reptile' poster, budapest gasworks posters, konecsni, 7 up posters, rene gruau, Wolfgang Weingart, swiss style, Garamond , us enters ww2, italy and france give women the right to vote, siam changes to thailand, bebop jazz, swing era continues, the andrew sisters, bob hope, first electronic computer, xerography invented, cherry red lipsticks 1925/pink 196/ yellow127olive 455/khaki 4515 navy539/blacktangerine 123/yellow 120/vibrant teal 3265/fuschia 2385/purple2582/true blue 2727 turquoise 306/ gray 422/ dark gray 436 yellow458/orange 472/ mauve 500/ navy 534/ green 5555/fonts monotype lydian, monotype lydian cursive, bernhard modern, park avenue, bernhard tango, beton, cairo, stymie, karnak, cartoon light,

1950

korean war begins, colour tv introduced to usa in 1950, elvis presley first hit in 1956, the birth of cool by miles davis, soviets launch sputnik satellite in 1957, the teenager consumer,coronation of elizabeth2 as queen, fidel castro becomes prime minister of cuba, james dean, univers, swiss/ international style, paul rand, esquire,olivetti- giovanni pintori,phonosuper braun, nikon f , tupperware, 'look', 'vogue', jean carlu, ofen ludin, astral email, savignac, toyko international trade fair 1956, takashi kono, marianne straub warner and son textile, univers 1957, optima 1958, zapf, palantino 1949, melior 1952, recta font1958, novarese, Type Director's Club of New York,ideal family in the suburb image, fonts times new roman, curvinus skyline, pl latin bold, bodoni,futura, futura light,

1920 Jazz and the New Negro Movement

By 1920 “Jazz” became not only a musical term, but a stylist one.

European designers, who were influenced by the pioneering work of cubist painters, struggled to capture the spirit of modernism through the expression of jazz rhythms and motif.

 The expression of jazz style in the design of  popular communication in the 1920’s  represents the first appearance of what can be considered a black inspired graphic design style. The jazz-era climate of relative freedom in the North created an environment for blacks to publish and design their own publication. During this “renaissance” Alian Locke, a distinguished African –American intellectual of his generation cited the emergence of the “new Negro” and declared that black culture was the appropriate source of inspiration and content for African – American artist.

One of the first designers to give graphic expression to this call was a European modernist, Winold Reiss who created African inspired logo types and titles for the book The New Negro.  Young black artist, most notably Aaron Douglas, was encouraged by Reiss and Locke to expand the emerging modernist trends and lead the emerging New Negro Art and design movement.

African aesthetic in design of the 1920’s are seen in black-owned journals. The designers of these publications were often black artist, influenced by European cubist painters, who were in turn, influenced by African art. Artist such as Aaron Douglas one of the best of these artist/designers of the time, learned to recognize and resonate with the African in cubism. Douglas and other black designers had a unique opportunity to express black style in a world that was starved for fresh anti Victorian imagery.

Douglas shows the emergence of unique graphic design expression that combines the syntax of cubism with the forms of African art. 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Douglas - 27k

www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/douglas_aaron.html

www.vintageperiods.com/ harlem.php

 people.virginia.edu/.../ images/anl_idyll.jpg

1920's - 1930's Constructivism

                

Constructivism was a style of art characterised mainly by a formal organisation of mass, volume and space. Also to deal with the social and economic problems of the time and convey the idea that some of the most popular artwork can often be the most practical.

The movement originated in Russia in 1919 and ended in 1934. It rejected the idea of 'art for art's sake' and encouraged art as a practice directed toward social purposes. While it was a popular movement for the sculptors and painters it was of paramount importance to the development of design. Designers were affected by the angular geometric shapes, organisational grid structures, sans-serif typestyles and innovative use of photomontage, overall it displayed a groundbreaking use of spatial arrangement.

The Constructionists looked at the properties of an object and it's spatial presence, the designers of the time flattened the objects into two dimensional works such as books and posters with photomontage and 'factography' becoming important concepts.

The Constructivists also worked on public festivals and street designs where groups painted propaganda posters, plaques and buildings, such as Lissitzky's poster 'beat the Whites with the red wedge' from 1919, as shown below.

In 1921, with the release of a new economic policy into Russia's economy, some of the Constructivists worked on advertising for the smaller local businesses. Rodchenko and Mayakovsky worked together and called themselves 'advertising constructors'. Together they designed eye catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes and bold lettering. The typography in most of these designs was supposed to create a reaction and operate on emotional subconscious levels. Most of these designs of this group were designed especially for a large department store in Moscow advertising everyday household items. Rodchenko, Lissitzky and the others working with them were an inspiration for the designers in western Europe.

         

Many Constructivists worked on the design of posters for everything from film to political propaganda. The Stenberg brothers presented the world with their brightly coloured, geometric style while others offered a more detailed, serious photomontage style. Each expressed the reality of practical art such as posters or books being the same visual art which we like to admire and collect. This aspect is also seen in today's designs which are also designed to create a reaction or cause some sort of an impact on the viewers emotion or their subconscious. The majority of art viewed by the average person today is designed for practical reasons such as advertising rather then just being art for art's sake.

http://20thcenturyart.suite101.com/article.cfm/constructivism_the_artist_as_worker 

www.10brilliant.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/brok.jpg

http://londoncontemporaryart.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/the-russian-revolution-hits-the-tate/

http://anneserdesign.com/Constructivism.html

http://greenlanddesign.org/coleg/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/stenberg_poster2.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art)

The economic and  social pressures  that immediately  followed the  First World War  brought with them  a new mood for a  rigorous and  clean-cut look.  Art Deco was an  innovative design style popular in  the 1920s  and 1930s.  Its sleek, streamlined  forms conveyed  elegance and sophistication.  It was the age of  the Flapper,  the Jazz and the  Machine Age.

Post 7:

Lucien Bernhard Poster designer Reveloutionary.

persuasive simplicity was a rare thing in most advertising: posters especially tended to be wordy and ornate. No one had yet heard of its young creator, who, was to influence the genre of advertising know as the Sachplakat, or object poster. Over the course of his career, which progressed from the turn of the century to the 1950s, Lucian Bernhard became a prolific designer not only of innovative posters but of trademarks, packaging, type, textiles, furniture, and interior design. From his studio in New York City (he left Berlin in 1922), he developed some of the most recognizable American business advertising and trademarks, for such clients as Cat's Paw, ExLax, and Amoco. He also designed more thank thirty-five popular display typefaces, including Bernhard Gothic. Bernhard deliberately invented most of his early biographical accounts. As his son Karl explains, Lucian believed that the actual facts of his youth had little relevance in judging his adult life and work, and enjoyed toying with the details of his life, revising his stories depending on his audience of mood. But past conversations with his children—Karl, Manfred, and Ruth (the renowned photographer)—and with various now-deceased friends, including Fritz Eichenberg, Aaron Burns, and Cipe Pineles, yield some biographical threads that can be sown together. This is genius that was what the judge said about Luciens first ever poster design Bernhard had won both the contest and a long-term benefactor. Bernhard capitalized on the Priester success. Although his subsequent designs were good—often gorgeous—Bernhard never really surpassed Priester's serendipity in any of his other poster. He did, however, produce countless images for a range of different German (and later foreign) products. By the ripe old age of twenty-three, he had become so sought after that he was compelled to open his own studio. Within ten years his elegant new studio employed around thirty artists and their assistant. In 1920, he was mad the first professor of poster art at the Berlin School of Arts and Crafts.Lucien Bernhard made profound contributions to the poster world of the 1920s with radical new takes on design. http://www.internationalposter.com/abo britannicaut-poster-art/style- orgprimer.aspx media-2.web.britannica.com www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk www.aiga.org flaggenkunde www.flaggenkunde www.bosch.com         www.internationalposter.com www.stepinsidedesign.com www.emailleschilder.com

Art Deco

Post No:7

post by Melissa

The economical and social pressures that immediately followed the First World War brought with them a new mood for a rigorous and clean cut look.

Art Deco was a design style popular in the 1920's and 1930's. Its sleek,streamlined forms conveyed elegance and sophistication.

The structure of Art Deco is on mathematical geometric shapes,It was widely considered elegant and stylish modernism being influenced by a variety of sources. Among them were the so called primitive arts of Africa, Ancient Egypt and Aztec Mexico. It also drew on machine age on streamline technology.

Some of the most popular Art Deco Graphic Artist are Adolphe Mouron Cassandre and Leonetto Cappiello.

Art Deco slowly lost patronage in the west

  after reaching mass production when it began to be derides as gaudy and presenting a false image of luxuary. 

Eventually the style was cut short by the austerities of World War 2. A resurgence of interest in the Art Deco came first in the `1960's and then again in the 1980's with the growing interest in graphic design where its association with film noir and 1930's glamour led to its use in advertisement for jewelry and fashion.

http://www.art-deco-style.com/

http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/scripts/explore.php?Lang=1&tableid=11&tablename=theme&elementid=48__true

http://www.adsw.org/resource/websites/Art/Graphic_Design/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Mouron_Cassandre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonetto_Cappiello