Final Project

In the past it was very expensive to create a new font. Special machinery had to be developed. Metal letters had to be created. These had to be created for multiple print shops.

Modern typography is more affordable, efficient, and can be easily distributed. With the development of font-design software for desktop computers, designers could design and market original typefaces as electronic files. Adobe Systems is a digital type foundry that produced many types and was very influential. Designers at Adobe created original typeface designs as well as interpretations of classic typefaces.

A new industry of typeface designers emerged. Typeface foundries opened around the world. Independent designers and entrepreneurs used the new technology to create and distribute their original typefaces. There was a conflict between designers who believed the traditional values should be maintained and young designers who wanted to be more experimental and expand the range of categories of typefaces.

Journal 10 - Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer was an English graphic designer and author. He was a writer, editor, and designer of the graphic design journal Typographica. He brought an awareness to printer, compositors, and designers a history of modernist design. In his articles he explained how typography in the twentieth century was ''entwined with those of 20th-century painting, poetry and architecture,'' he wrote.

Herbert Spencer was born in London on June 22, 1924 and died March 11, 2002. His family was uninterested in art. During World War II he was a cartographer for the Royal Air Force. He later worked designing trademarks for a London firm called Typographical Designers. He was a typography instructor at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1949 to 1955. In 1966 he became a senior research fellow in the print research department of the Royal College of Art; he was a professor of graphic arts there from 1978 until 1985.

Herbert Spencer wrote a number of books. He is most known for writing Pioneers of Modern Typography in 1969. It drew on and re-used material he previously published in his journal Typographica.

Sources

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/nyregion/herbert-spencer-77-pioneer-in-typography.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer_%28graphic_designer%29

Peter Max

Peter Max was born October 19, 1937 in Germany and is of Jewish descent. He resides in New York City. In his childhood, Max lived in China, Tibet, Israel, and France before coming to America. He is an illustrator, painter, and graphic designer. He combined the art nouveau aspects of psychedelic art with more accessible images and softer colors.

In the late 1960s, Max revolutionized the poster industry in America. Capturing the spirit of the era, the cosmic poster art of Peter Max was cited by journalists and many art critics as the visual counterpart to the music of The Beatles.

Max often uses American icons and symbols in his artwork. He has created artwork for several of the U.S. presidents.

Sources:

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Max

http://www.petermax.com/

Journal 8 - Joseph Albers

Josef Albers was born in Germany in 1888. He was an artist and educator in both Germany and the United States. He taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau until it was closed under Nazi pressure. Then he emigrated to the United States. In 1950 Albers became a professor at Yale where he headed the department of design.

Albers was accomplished in different fields including be known as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet. However, he is most known for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He painted hundreds of paintings in his series Homage to the Square between 1950 and 1976. In this series he painted chromatic interactions with nested squares. He often recorded the colors of paint used on the back of the piece.

Albers is also known for his work as a color theorist. In 1963, he published the book Interaction of Color. This book presents his theory that colors are governed by an internal and deceptive logic.

Resources:

Megg’s History of Graphic Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

http://www.albersfoundation.org/

Journal 7 - Chapter 17: The Modern Movement in America

From this week’s reading I became interested in the design work supported by Walter P. Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America (CCA). After World War II, the CCA commissioned a series of paintings by artists from each of the then forty-eight states. These paintings advanced the Bauhaus ideal: the union of art with life.

When I saw the painting for Nevada in the book, I wanted to research these paintings further and see if there was an image for California. The image for California, from the United States Series, was created by Charles Howard in 1946. It is housed in the Smithsonian collection.

Charles Howard (1899-1978) was born in Montclair New Jersey and died in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. He was born into a family of architects, painters, and sculptors. He introduced the style of European surrealism and biomorphic expression to the American art world. Howard was a journalism graduate at Berkeley. Howard moved to Paris to pursue his writing, but was encouraged to take up painting. He returned to New York and began painting. He married a British painter, Madge Knight. They lived in New York, London, the Bay Area, Suffolk, England, and retired to Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

Resources:

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=10821

http://www.caldwellgallery.com/bios/howard_biography.html

Journal 6 Chapter 13

I’m not a huge fan of modern art, but one movement that I do enjoy is Surrealism. I find the paintings and drawings of Salvador Dali very interesting, humorous, and eccentric. Dali’s art appears as dreamlike sequences and the subconscious. Probably his most famous painting is the Persistence of Memory.

This is well known for the soft watches that are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time. The watches are a theme that Dali uses again in later work.

When I was a student in college I did a summer study abroad in Spain. I had the opportunity to travel by train from Barcelona to Figueres in the Catalonia region of Spain. Figueres is the birthplace of Dali, and on the train ride to that town you get to observe the landscape of that region, which Dali paints in his paintings.

In Figueres there is a fabulous museum and theater dedicated to Dali. Those are eggs on top of the building. The museum is eccentric in true Dali style. It houses the biggest collection of his work.

Sources: Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Wikipedia, http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index/

Journal 5 - Chapters 11 and 12

The Moulin Rouge is a dance hall in Paris, which is featured in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1891 poster “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue.” It is a lithograph. This poster started Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster career and made him famous overnight.

La Goulue is the can-can dancer who shows her petticoats. The figure in the front of the poster is the "boneless" acrobat (because he is very flexible) Valentin le Désossé. The audience appears in silhouettes in order to focus attention on the performers. The style of silhouettes is borrowed from the Japanese, which was popular at the time.

The Moulin Rouge opened on the boulevard de Clichy in 1889, in the Montmartre district of Paris. Moulin Rouge is French for red windmill, which is featured in front of the club. The Moulin Rouge is still open today and provides entertainment for tourists from all over the world.

There are two movies named Moulin Rouge from 1952 and 2001. The 2001 Moulin Rouge movie starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor is one of my favorite films. I love the musical numbers and the spirit of love and creativity.

Sources: Meek’s History of Graphic Design, http://metmuseum.org, and Wikipedia.