I need some help to decide the 7 images to post, please give me some opinions.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
NEVILLE BRODY
Neville Brody is perhaps the best known graphic designer of his generation. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and first made his way into the public eye through his record cover designs and his involvement in the British independent music scene in the early 1980s.
As the Art Director of Fetish he began experimenting with the beginnings of a new visual language that consisted of a mixture of visual and architectural elements. Later he was able to put these ideas into practice and to set new precedents through the innovative styling of The Face magazine (1981-1986).
It was his work on magazines that firmly established his reputation as one of the world’s leading graphic designers. In particular, his artistic contribution to The Face completely revolutionised the way in which designers and readers approach the medium. Though Brody rejected all commercialisation of his graphic style, his unique designs soon became much-imitated models for magazines, advertising and consumer-oriented graphics of the eighties.
Brody also won much public acclaim through his highly innovative ideas on incorporating and combining typefaces into design. Later on he took this a step further and began designing his own typefaces, thus opening the way for the advent of digital type design. His pioneering spirit in the area of typography manifests itself today in such projects as FUSE, a regularly published collection of experimental typefaces and posters which challenges the boundaries between typography and graphic design.
While working for Arena (1987-1990) he embarked on a completely opposite course, using minimalist, non-decorative typography for a time before returning to his expressive visual style which he now began propagating with the aid of computers.
In 1987 he founded The Studio in London, and his unusual computer-generated designs received a great deal of recognition, especially abroad. His work has been commissioned by such major organisations as Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Greenpeace, Japanese companies Men’s Bigi and Parco, the Dutch Postal Service, the German cable channel Premiere and Austria’s ORF TV channel.
Today, Neville Brody’s work focuses largely on electronic communications design. At the same time, he continues to create his unique and striking digital typefaces. His contributions to the world of graphic design and digital typography are absolutely invaluable.
Brody has consistently pushed the boundaries of visual communication in all media through his experimental and challenging work, and continues to extend the visual languages we use through his exploratory creative expression.
MILTON GLASER
Born in 1929, Milton Glaser was educated at the High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union art school in New York and, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. He co-founded the revolutionary Pushpin Studios in 1954, founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968, established Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and teamed with Walter Bernard in 1983 to form the publication design firm WBMG.
Throughout his career, Glaser has been a prolific creator of posters and prints. His artwork has been featured in exhibits worldwide, including one-man shows at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums. Glaser also is a renowned graphic and architectural designer with a body of work ranging from the iconic logo to complete graphic and decorative programs for the restaurants in the World Trade Center in New York. Glaser is an influential figure in both the design and education communities and has contributed essays and granted interviews extensively on design.
Milton Glaser is the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. His presence and impact on the profession internationally is formidable. Immensely creative and articulate, he is a modern renaissance man — one of a rare breed of intellectual designer-illustrators, who brings a depth of understanding and conceptual thinking, combined with a
diverse richness of visual language, to his highly inventive and individualistic work.
Pushpin Studios
In 1954, Milton Glaser, along with Reyonld Ruffins, Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel, founded Pushpin Studios. For twenty years Glaser, together with Seymour Chwast, directed the organization, which exerted a powerful influence on the direction of world graphic design, culminating in a memorable exhibition at the Louvres Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.
In 1968, Glaser and Clay Felker founded New York magazine, where Glaser was president and design director until 1977. The publication became the model for city magazines, and stimulated a host of imitations.
Glaser is also personally responsible for the design and illustration of more than 300 posters for clients in the areas of publishing, music, theater, film, institutional and civic enterprise, as well as those for commercial products
and services.
Milton Glaser is at present design consultant to Stony
Brook University, Lands’ End Direct Merchants, Schlumberger Ltd., Bruegger’s Bagels and a number of other businesses.
From the start of his career, Milton Glaser has been an active member of both the design and education communities. He has been an instructor and a Board Member at the School of Visual Arts, New York since 1961, and is on the Board of Directors at The Cooper Union, New York.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
WOLFGANG WEAINGART
WOLFGANG WEINGART
Weingart: ‘what still surprises and inspires me today: to turn blank paper into a printed page.’ Nothing can be more reassuring than to read words like these from someone who has almost forty years of experience behind him. What more can you ask for in a career?
Weingart was born in the midst of the World War II in Germany. Most famous for his experimental, expressive work that broke the mould of classical Swiss typography, Weingart began his typographic career in the early sixties as an apprentice of hand composition at a typesetting firm. He then decided to further his studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, the cradle of classical Swiss typography. Following his rather unsuccessful attempt at completing his course, Armin Hoffmann, who was then the head of the Basel School, invited him to teach there, by the sheer admiration of his work. He has been teaching there ever since and had made extraordinary impact on the contemporary typographic landscape.
Swiss typography was founded upon the teachings of the Bauhaus in Germany soon after World War II and became a rational approach to typography. The use of grid systems was the key to the logical disposition of type and images on the page, along with sanserif typefaces for clear, functional communication. It was believed that typography should be unobtrusive and transparent, in order to clearly communicate its textual content. By the beginning of the sixties, the language of Swiss typography had already gained reputation the world over. Swiss typography became synonymous with corporate design for multinationals, and subsequently referred to as the ‘international typographic style’.
and then came.....Wolfgang Weingart- it can be said that he started it all, he ignited the spark of ‘typographic anarchy’ that exploded on the verge of the nineteen nineties, he began what was subsequently dubbed ‘Swiss Punk’, ‘New Wave’ ,perhaps even post-modernism.
‘not only one conception of typography exists in Switzerland.’ His experimental typography was also Swiss, because it was a ‘natural progression’ from the classical Swiss typography as we know it. His typographic experiments were strongly grounded, and were based on an intimate understanding of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions of typography. Whereas ‘traditional’ Swiss typography mainly focused on the syntactic function, Weingart was interested in how far the graphic qualities of typography can be pushed and still retain its meaning. This is when the semantic function of typography comes in: Weingart believes that certain graphic modifications of type can in fact intensify meaning. ‘What’s the use of being legible, when nothing inspires you to take notice of it?’
Weingart’s work is characterized by his painterly application of graphical and typographical elements. The emotionally-charged lines, the potent, image-like qualities of his type, the almost cinematic impact of his layouts, all speak of his great passion of creating with graphical forms. His typographic layouts are compelling yet lucid, free yet controlled. Some of his personal work is almost akin to landscape paintings, only that his paintbrush is replaced by type, rules and screens. He does not create a divide between fine art and typography. His inspirations were mainly drawn from the processes of typesetting and reproduction, where he finds great pleasure in discovering their characteristics and pushing them to their limits.
Weingart works with a very limited palette of typefaces. He suggests that four typefaces are enough to address all typographic problems. One of these typefaces would certainly be Akzidenz Grotesk, an early sanserif of the grotesque genre designed by the Berthold Foundry in Germany at the close of the 19th century. ‘I grew up with Akzidenz Grotesk and I love it. Akzidenz Grotesk has a certain ugliness to it, that’s why it has character.’ The simplicity of his choice of typefaces speaks of his fondness of simple tools.
‘For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique,’ writes Weingart. The possibilities that these technologies offer seem endless to him, and he finds it hugely satisfying to explore the materials: ‘The thing that is so special for me… is the variability of the materials under the influence of idea and technique.’
It is the tension between his desire to express and his consideration for communication that creates this interesting mix of work and his perpetually inquisitive working ethos.‘That’s my schizophrenic personality’.
Weingart’s typographic experimentations spanned across three different eras of typesetting technology: letterpress, phototypesetting and the computer. Yet, despite how readily he accepted and pushed the boundaries of the letterpress and phototypesetting processes, he is rather unenthusiastic about the computer technology. The computer, to him, is too illusive. He compares the computer to a digital watch: a traditional watch shows a ‘landscape’, it tells a story; a digital watch only shows a particular moment. Graphic design is in a big crisis. The education in our school is not the best any more. The value of living has changed. The computer and electronic tools in general are destroying our natural needs.’ The natural needs, perhaps, is our need to create, to express.
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