GRAPHIC DESIGN HISTORY 2009: 6/7/09

Friday, June 12, 2009

1970'S PUNK ROCK

"Punk rock is an anti-establishment rock music genre and movement that emerged in the mid-1970s. Preceded by a variety of protopunk music of the 1960s and early 1970s, punk rock developed between 1974 and 1977 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where groups such as the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. Punk rock bands, issuing the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock, created short, fast, hard music, with stripped-down instrumentation and often political or nihilistic lyrics. The associated punk subculture expresses youthful rebellion, distinctive clothing styles, a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies, and a DIY (do it yourself) attitude.

Punk was an aesthetic response to the political and social disasters of the nineteen seventies. It reflected a world of industrial and social antagonism, urban decay and hopelessness, not just through the employment of specific imagery, but through the very methods of cut-up, montage and appropriation it employed, which visually articulated the dislocations in the coming of post-industrial society

Punk was far more than simply a musical genre, though it produced some of the best pop music ever made (as well as a lot of the worst). It was a fully articulated subculture, with a distinctive visual style involving a bricolage of elements such as fetish clothing, teddy boy gear, ripped and torn items and, unfortunately, nazi uniforms (though these were eschewed fairly early on). It also developed, partly through necessity, a distinctive graphic design style, which found expression in record sleeves, publicity and in 'zines', the xeroxed and collaged publications which were one of the most distinctive developments coming out of punk. The most famous 'zine', 'Sniffin Glue', edited by Mark Perry, was exemplary in its use of roughly put together found material and hand written/drawn graphics; known as deconstructionist graphic design or ‘The New Typography’.

Jamie Reid's graphics for the Sex Pistols' record covers and publicity material also employed similar techniques to great effect. His famous collage of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose for the cover of the Pistols' controversial single 'God Save the Queen' is now recognised as a classic piece of design. While designer Jamie Reid developed a style for record sleeves and posters that evoked Situationist graphics, and the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs and others. Other punk graphics referred or were reminiscent of Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus or Futurism.

www.chart.ac.uk/chart2000/papers/noframes/gere.html

www.scribd.com/doc/3097490/punk-graphic

http://www.designhistorylab.com/

www.zazzle.co.uk/fist_punk_mug

https://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_file.asp?individual_id=224279&portfolio_id=1526196&is_featured=-1

1960's

1960's POP ART

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

Lichtenstein interest in Proto-pop imagery began his first Pop paintings in 1961 using cartoon images and techniques derived from the appearance of commercial printing. This phase would continue to 1965 and included the use of advertising imagery suggesting consumerism and homemaking. His first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday dots was Look Mickey (1961). This piece came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" In the same year he produced six other works with recognizable characters from gum wrappers and cartoons. In 1961 Leo Castelli started displaying Lichtenstein's work at his gallery in New York, and he had his first one man show at the gallery in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors of the time before the show even opened. Interestingly Castelli rejected the work of one of Lichtenstein's contemporaries, Andy Warhol.
It was at this time that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America but worldwide. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works, such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story in DC comics' Secret Hearts #83. Featuring thick outlines, bold colours and Benday dots to represent certain colours, as if created by photographic reproduction. Lichtenstein would say of his own work: Abstract Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the colour positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic.
Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the time challenged its originality. More often than not they were making no attempt to be positive. Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content". However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument".
His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comic-book panel from a 1962 issue of DC comics' All-American Men of War. The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane, with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!" and the boxed caption "I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky..."
Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies of comic-book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965.

www.artchive.com/artchive/L/lichtenstein.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Lichtenstein www.lichtensteinfoundation.org www.abstract-art.com/abstraction/l2_grnfthrs_fldr/g037b_Lichtenstein_Brush.html

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

70’S TYPE DESIGN The decade from 1970 to 1980 stands out for many reasons, from sideburns to Richard Nixon to disco. But the things Gene Gable remembers most fondly are the decorative, bold, and sometimes goofy type designs. I've never qualified as a "typophile," or any other –phile for that matter. For one thing, my knowledge of type history is woefully inadequate. And my attempts at drawing letterforms stopped precipitously in the eighth grade. It was then that I won a consolation prize for my hometown's fire-prevention poster contest. My entry depicted a joint-smoking, long-haired man tossing a lit match into the trash. Below I had carefully penned the caption: "Don't be a careless Hippie." I have no idea if I used a serif or san-serif style, but I'm guessing sans. I had no clue at that time what a serif was. All I remember is running out of space and desperately switching to a condensed writing style for the last few characters.

I will gladly confess to being a "typo-hack," however, prone more to gimmickry and showmanship than fine typography. I know and appreciate the difference, but fine typography is damn hard work. I find myself preferring type that cheaply draws attention to itself, boldly screaming "look at me!" Perhaps that's why I love 1970s graphic design so much. And why I'm nominating that decade for the title "Golden Age of Type Design." It was certainly the "Golden Age of Type Setting." Nobody set type like some of those guys in the '70s www.creativepro.com . www.overexposeddesign.com www.overexposeddesign.com www.printmag.com www.cpluv.com

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Post 12 -Chris Nowlan 1920-29

Alexander Rodchenko

Contructivism
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Bauhaus
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Art Deco
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60’s -70’s Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo (横尾忠則, Yokoo Tadanori) (born 1936) is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter.

Tadanori Yokoo, (pronounced "yoko-o") born inHyogo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular) but Yokoo himself cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and writer Yukio Mishima as two of his most formative influences.

In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been (unfairly) described as the "Japanese Andy Warhol" or likened to psychedelic poster artistPeter, but Yokoo's complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original. By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition for his work and was included in the 1968 "Word & Image" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Four years later MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work organized by Mildrid Constantine. Yokoo collaborated extensively with Shuji Terayama and his theater Tenjo Sajiki. He has also starred as a protagonist in Nagisa Oshima's film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.

In 1981 he unexpectedly "retired" from commercial work and took up painting. His career as a fine artist continues to this day with numerous exhibitions of his paintings every year, but alongside this he remains fully engaged and prolific as a graphic designer.

60’s and 70’s rock and roll poster Design

In the sixties and seventies some crazy shit went down

From 1965-1970 rock and roll veered off into a political and cultural revolution that changed music and art forever.

During the mid to late 60s, as rock music began the transition into psychedelia, art crept into the scene in the form of flyers and posters announcing the venues and bands playing in the San Francisco area. This art quickly took hold and soon enough posters were being produced for all kinds of shows up and down the west coast, and later in the east. At the heart of the scene was Bill Graham and The Fillmore Auditorium in SF.

As the 60s drew to close, we saw the music and art peak with events like Woodstock and the acid tests. The scene started to fade at the end of the decade, with the deaths of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix signalling both the beginning of the 70s and the end of rock and roll as people had known it. For many, the posters shown here are vivid reminders of an amazing time in history. That is part of the reason why values for these posters and handbills have risen tremendously in recent years, and are going to continue to rise in the future

LINKS

www.zazzle.com

www.media.commercialappeal.com

www.flickr.com

www.bmasse.com/60s.html

Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the same price as a packet of cigarettes. He also wanted them to be sold not only in bookshops but in railway stations, general stores and corner shops. Its most emblematic products are its paperbacks. The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of Bodley Head (of Vigo Street) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone. The vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s. By this time the paperback industry in the UK had begun to grow, and Penguin found itself in competition with then fledgeling Pan Books. Many other series were published such as the Buildings of England, the Pelican History of Art and Penguin Education.