Entry 8

• Swiss Design.
• Basel School of Design - Laboratory of the international style.
• Emil Ruder, Armin Hoffmann, Josef Muller Brockman are teachers at Basel
• Valued minimalism
• Armin Hoffmann published a Graphic Design Manual to demonstrate his principles
  
• He said Type goes on Point, Line, and Plane
• Brockman at the time leading theorist of Swiss movement
• Wrote the book on Grid Systems
• Der Film poster, and Public Awareness posters
• Also created music posters
  
• Swiss design remained prominent for over two decades in America
• Paul Rand understood the value of invented forms for both symbolic and communicative ends.
  
• Corporate design begins
• Lester Beal helps define emerging corporate design movements
  
• Branding was a major way to shape reputation of a product
• Saul Bass - motion picture design, famous corporate identities
• Design firms began being bought by corporations to become in house.
• Chermayeff and Geismar Associates - "Early Design Office"
• C&G did many types of design.
• Post war corporate American Identity
• Vignelli Associates
  
• Unigrid system
• Herbert Matter - Knoll
• Advent of Televison
• Henry Wolf Brodovitch became art director of Esquire in 1953
• Cover becomes a single image conveying a visual idea
• Henry Wolf - Conceptual strategies
• George Lois - advertising genius
• Conceptual power of images
• Doyle Dane Bernbach
  
• Opened in 1949 new approach to advertising
• Text and Image
• George Lois concept was dominate and text and image became completely interdependent
• The New Advertising -
  
• Visual statements used simple images
• Talked intelligently to there audience
• Focus on the benefits of a product
• Pushed concepts to the limit
• Innovative concepts grew from his ability to understand and respond to the people of his era
• Challenged shocked and provoked the audience
  
• Photo-typography typefaces on film
• Overlapping begins
• American design - graphic form to a concept
• Word and image separation collapses. Type playing two roles.
• Word becomes image, image becomes word.
• Figurative Typography
• Lubalin - Avant Garde
  
• Ebony Magazine

The most intersting part of tonights lecture to me was the section about George Lois. His Esquire covers were originally shocking before anything else. The ideas may seem somewhat trite these days, but they are so original it seems. I feel like they can never been done again. The most inspiring one featured is probably the one about the Vietnam War that says "Oh my God-we hit a little girl." It is so simple, yet really shocking. I feel like it very simply said so much about the Vietnam War. I can only imagine the impact it had when it was realeased.