-Postmodernism - not a style, a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings
-Skeptical of truth and Suspicious of public norms
-Roots of Postmodernism- the 60's with the Vietnam war and College Graduates, the birth of pop and modern television
-People begin grouping by musical style
-The alternate publication began to appear during this time
-Pushpin studios emerges and takes a new approach to graphic design
-New Wave Typography - the european design updated for postmodernism
-Wolfgang Weingart - began designing intuitively and getting the old guard to follow him and encourage him - ahead of the curve
-Computer comes out and changes things greatly - allow a graphic designer to do it all
-Willi Kuntz - brought up on swiss approach - more conservative of the New Wave - the segway into corporate culture
-Siegfried Odermatt and Rosmarie Tissi - came to NY after Basel - Weingart students
-April Grieman - early digital designer
-Paula Scher - very well aware of modern graphic design - tore it all apart
-The idea of being purely original begins to not be as important
-Charles Anderson - collected old advertising art and reused it
- "Quote and then attach artificiality"
-Nevel Brody
-Deconstruction - not taking something apart, the idea of questioning the principal or claims of culture
-Jacques Derrida - postmodern theorist - the graphic designers theorist
-Grammatology - writing was a distinctive mode of representation
-Ed Fella - distinctly unsystematized - Grunge
-David Carson - typographic savant - disruptive and disturbed - disregard for functionality
-Emigre - digital type foundry - type explosion
-Post-Structuralism - challenging hierarchies - mixing codes
-Cultural Jams - "citational grafts"
-Why not Associates
-Fragmentation - the electronic media
-Chip Kidd - book designer
-Jonathan Barnbrook - demonization to market fonts - campy

Postmodernism is an interesting thing to digest. Like you said several times during the lecture, it is the present, and its hard to really grasp what is hardly even the past yet. It also makes for an interesting topic because you cant ask what comes next. We don't know what it is until its basically over. Thats kind of hard to wrap your mind around. Its a funny thing. I think the lecture today was immensely interesting. I feel like i know more about this time period, just because its more contemporary but thats not even really true. Its good to acquire a deeper understanding of things around you though, it was cool going over this. New Wave typography was especially interesting and its always amusing how intensely David Carsons work has been ripped off since he got into it. The video on Barbra Kruger was a good watch also.

unit 3 lecture 2

Swiss Design
Basel School of Design - Laboratory of the International Style
Univers - fire typeface where all letterforms share the same x-height and many other properties
Armin Hoffmann - Graphic Design Manual
Josef Muller Brockman - the book Grid System
The Swiss Grid
"The Golden Age of Logo"
Paul Rand - Corporate Design and the NY School - IBM logo
Saul Bass - First Broadcast Designer
Bradbury Thompson
"Good design is good for business" - beginning in the 1950's
Chermayeff and Geismar - First design office - did it all
Vignelli Associates - most vocal anti post modern pundit - NY and Washington Subway
Guy Debord - "The Society of the Spectacle"
Henry Wolf - art director of Esquire
George Lois - advertising Genius
The New Advertising - Visual statements used simple images, talked intelligently to there audience, focus on the benefits of a product
Herb Lubalin - single-handedly defined the aesthetic potential of "photo-typorgraphy"
Photo-typography - shakes everything up
Post-Modernism

This lecture was about the Swiss Design sensibility and what America did with it. We talked about the Swiss Grid and how starting in the 1950s everyone decided they needed to have a heavily designed logo. It was pretty interesting seeing all the logos different designers created and how Chermayeff and Geismar shaped the American corporate culture. I had no idea that basically between them and Vignelli they designed nearly every logo for most of the major companies in the US. The movie introducing us to Post-Modernism was interesting also. I think this next lecture will be interesting.

Count as second DISCOURSE

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - 5:03 pm
Stuart Golley

Art in Type Design
By Frederic W. Goudy