Lecture 02:
Victorian and Digital
Graphic Style:
What is style?
Style is a specific or characteristic manner of expression, design, construction, or execution.
Style suggests the dominant visual aesthetic of a particular time and place.
In the graphic design process, style is a transmission code, a means of signaling that a certain message is intended for a specific audience.
Simply defined, graphic style is the surface manifestation or the “look” of graphic design.
What makes a style emerge?
Social, Cultural, Economic, Political, Technological movement, change, advent, invention, development, etc.
Victorian: 1820s-1900 England, America, Europe
Victorian Style was the aesthetic response of society to industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution brought mass production system, complex cities, technological revelations, destroyed urban, the rise of ‘nouveau rich class.’
The surpluses created by the Industrialization Revolution led to increased competition in the marketplaces. It generated ‘Advertising,’ a new medium.
As the desire for unlimited comfort spread from the wealthy to the middle class, popular aesthetics were increasingly devoid of any critical standards.
They are mass producing so many items that the beauty and individualism decreased.
They borrowed elements from Gothic (in completely different context from the original culture).
- Ornamentation as a visual evidence of social status.
- Ostentation
- Corpulent (fat)
- Exaggerated embellishment
- Aberrant lusts (too much desire; greedy)
- Decorative excesses
Gothic style- Cathedrals
They bring the style from windows and patterns from cathedrals.
Characteristics of Victorian Style
Advertising:
- Image: Crude and rough images drawn and engraved.
- They have some illustration, although, because of technology, the quality of the illustration is not good.
- Type: distorted, larger, and blacker typefaces. Bastardization= Fat Face.
- Layout: Extreme variations of typeface, size and weight crammed within a single headline. (they use many different fonts, all kinds)
- Technology (production tools): Woodcut/Engraving chromolithography, Photoengraving.
British Victorian:
- Really packed, lots of text and different typefaces.
Before 1870s
Before the end of century, however, type designers working with foundries like the American Type Founders Co. began to teach printers how to make type more readable.
American Victorian:
- Mixture of text and image
- Stuck in boxes: vertical or horizontal
- What they want to emphasize is in the center
Sutton’s Compound Cream of Ammonia
French Victorian:
- Poster revolution that involved the marriage of text and image and supplied the basis for French Art Nouveau.
Digital 1980s~ USA, England, Europe
Destruction
Émigré
Fontism
Controlled Chaos
Rave
Kinetics
New Simplicity
William Morris created the “Arts and Crafts” Movement
Characteristics of 1990s; Digital
Post-Modernism was not unified movement based on utopian ideology.
In the early eighties, as a young generation’s genuine rebellion against the rigidity of cold, corporate Modernism.
Late-Modernist ideals of clarity and logic
Counterpart, supplanting, fading out and in or After a style
Deconstructing the clarity and logic:
1. Chaotic Typography
2. Jumbled page layout (Deconstructing conventional hierarchy)
Cranbrook, Katherine McCoy, 1985
Typocentric:
- Typographical Illustration
- Multilayered type
- Kinetic Image
- Jarring spatial Juxtaposition
- Illegible text
Émigré, Rudy Vanderlans & Zuana Licko, 1985
Typocentric:
- Eradicating any semblance of Modernist Grid
- Unfettered, raucously artful, typographic configurations, Duotone or monochromatic colors
- Not much color so you can focus on the text
Fuse, Neville Brody, 1996
Typocentric:
Post-Modern Expressionism
Symbolizing and expressing the issues through Conceptual Alphabets.
Layering type and images blurring typefaces.
Ray Gun, David Carson, 1992
Typocentric:
- Negative leading
- Overlapping
- Layering
- Absurd compositional conceits
- Harmonic dissonance
Typocentric:
Distressed and degraded
Rave is based on pop culture
Figures and image based on digital, animated images
Futuristic, blue, fine-line, creating illusion of space and volume
Saul Bass, ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ Title
- Watch on www.youtube.com
Kyle Cooper, Seven
- Watch Se7en Opening Titles on www.youtube.com
New Simplicity
Alexander Gelman, 1998
- Simplicity is to Minimalism what complexity is to chaos, a whole component, not the whole.
- It is rooted in the Mies van der Roos dictem
Project 01
Design posters in order to commemorate Victorian and New Simplicity Styles.
Size: 5.5x7.5
No comments:
Post a Comment