Zemni Design

Design Explorations by Linda Mayoux

Kurt Schwitters

Author: lindamayoux

  • Kurt Schwitters

    Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (1887 –  1948) was a German artist painter, sculptor, graphic designer, typographer and writer. He worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

    Studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hanover 1908-9 and at Dresden Academy 1909-14.

    Influenced by Expressionism and Cubism 1917-18.

    In 1918 created his own form of Dada in Hanover called ‘Merz’, using rubbish materials such as labels, bus tickets and bits of broken wood in his collages and constructions. Friendship with Arp, Hausmann and van Doesburg. Published the first edition of Anna Blume (a collection of poems and prose pieces) in 1919 and the magazine Merz 1923-32. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, 1920. Began in 1923 to build fantastic Merz constructions in his house in Hanover (the first ‘Merzbau’).

    Spent the summers in Norway from 1931 and emigrated in 1937 to Lysaker near Oslo. Fled to England in 1940, spent seventeen months in internment camps, then lived 1941-5 in London. Moved in 1945 to Ambleside in the Lake District. In the last months of his life, he began a further Merz construction in an old barn at Langdale. Died at Kendal.

    See Wikipedia article

    Colour and Collage

    Ursonate Sound Poem

  • Joseph Muller Brockman

    Josef Müller-Brockmann (May 9, 1914 – August 30, 1996) was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. He is recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography (notably Akzidenz-Grotesk), shapes and colours which inspire many graphic designers in the 21st century.

    Each letter has its own personality …the forms of letters can create simultaneously both tension and nobility…The new typography differs from the old in that it is the first to try to develop the outward appearance from the function of the text…uses the background as an element of design which is on a par with other elements.
    (Muller-Brockman)

    Work and books

    Many of Müller-Brockmann’s works can be found in the online gallery “Blanka”

    Müller-Brockman was author of several books on design and visual communication.

    • The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers), Teufen, 1961
    • A History of Visual Communication (Geschichte der visuellen Kommunikation), Niederteufen, 1971
    • History of the Poster (Geschichte des Plakates), co-author Shizuko Yoshikawa, Zurich, 1971
    • Grid Systems in Graphic Design (Rastersysteme für die visuelle Gestaltung), Niederteufen, 1981
    • Graphic Design in IBM: Typography, Photography, Illustration, Paris, 1988
    • Fotoplakate: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, co-author Karl Wobmann, Aarau, 1989
    • Mein Leben: Spielerischer Ernst und ernsthaftes Spiel (autobiography), Baden, 1994

    Biography

    Muller-Brockmann studied architecture, design and history of art at both the University and Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. In 1936 he opened his Zurich studio specialising in graphic design, exhibition design and photography. From 1951 he produced concert posters for theTonhalle in Zurich. In 1958 he became a founding editor of New Graphic Design along with R.P. Lohse, C. Vivarelli, and H. Neuburg. In 1966 he was appointed European design consultant to IBM.

    See:
    Layout
    Modernist Typography

  • Neville Brody

    Neville Brody

    Neville Brody (born 23 April 1957 in London) is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. Influenced by Punk, Dada and Pop Art. He is the  Head of the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art.

    In 1988 Thames & Hudson published the first of two volumes about his work, which became the world’s best selling graphic design book. Combined sales now exceed 120,000. An accompanying exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum attracted over 40,000 visitors before touring Europe and Japan.

    Graphic Design

    • The Face magazine:  as Art Director produced revolutionary work that established his reputation  (1981–1986)
    • Arena magazine (1987–1990)
    • partly responsible for instigating the FUSE project – the conference and quarterly forum for experimental typography and communications presenting an influential fusion between a magazine, graphics design and typeface design. Each pack includes a publication with articles relating to typography and surrounding subjects, four brand new fonts that are unique and revolutionary in some shape or form and four posters designed by the type designer usually using little more than their included font.  The publication is approaching its 20th issue over a publishing period of over ten years. Three FUSE conferences have so far been held, in London, San Francisco and Berlin. The conferences bring together speakers from design, architecture, sound, film and interactive design and web.
    • designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.
    • created the company Research Studios in 1994 produces and publishes experimental multi-media works by young artists. The company also completed a visual identity project for the famous Paris contemporary art exhibition Nuit Blanche in 2006.
    • 2007 launched a new look for the champagne brand Dom Pérignon in February 2007, having been appointed in 2004 to help the brand with its strategy and repositioning.

    Typography

    He was a founding member of Fontworks in London and designed a number of notable typefaces for them:

    • 2006 the updated font for the Times newspaper, Times Modern –  the first new font at the newspaper since it introduced Times New Roman in 1932. The typeface shares many visual similarities with Mercury designed by Jonathan Hoefler.
    • New Deal as used in publicity material and titles for the film Public Enemies and
    • Industria.

    1990 he also founded the FontFont typeface library together with Erik Spiekermann.

     

  • Robert Massin

    Robert Massin is a French graphic designer, art director and typographer who is notable for his innovative experimentation with expressive forms of typographic composition. Massin stopped using his first name in the 1950s.

    Google images



    Work

    Notable books designed by Massin:

    • Exercices de style, by Raymond Queneau, Gallimard, 1963. A book of 99 retellings of the same story, each presented different graphically.
    • La Cantatrice chauve, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1964. (translated asThe Bald Prima Donna or The Bald Soprano). The book presented the dialogue of a single play through hundreds of pages of innovative graphic compositions. Different characters took on different typefaces. He used mixtures of typefaces and new compositional methods to present dialogue, he also formally manipulated dialogue by stretching and bending. He used black pages to capture silence on stage.
    • Délire à deux, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1966.
    • Conversation-sinfonietta, by Jean Tardieu, Gallimard, 1966.
    • Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, by Jean Cocteau, Hoëbeke, begun in 1966 and published in 1994.

    Notable books written by Massin:

    La Lettre et l’Image, Gallimard, 1970.

    Biography

    (Wikipedia)

    Massin was born in 1925 in Bourdinière-Saint-Loup, a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France. He began working as a designer following World War II. Massin’s immediate influence in the 1950s was innovative French book designer Pierre Faucheux. Faucheux emphasized the idea that each new book should be a new object determined by type choice, proportion and déroulement, the development of a visual concept over several pages. Faucheux also emphasized the idea that the choice of typeface should have some relationship to the meaning of the text. These ideas are apparent in much of Massin’s most famous work. For over twenty years Massin acted as art director of Éditions Gallimard, one of the leading French publishers of books.

    Writing in Eye magazine in a review of a book on Massin, Jan Middendorp credited La Cantatrice and La Lettre et l’Image as follows: “These two masterpieces of typographic eccentricity became hot items among designers and art directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and were especially influential in America, where they helped trigger the post-functionalist approach of graphic design that eventually culminated in the eclecticism of the late 1980s and 1990s.”

    A 2007 major monograph of his work, Massin, written by Laetitia Wolff and published by Phaidon, was the first Massin monograph to appear in English.

  • Eric Gill

    Eric Gill

  • Massimo Vignelli

    Massimo Vignelli (1931 – 2014) was an Italian designer who worked firmly within the Modernist tradition. He focused on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all his work. He worked in a number of areas ranging from package design through houseware design and furniture design to public signage and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella.

    If you can design one thing, you can design everything

    Google Images

    Vignelli Associates website

    Corporate and public design

    His clients at Vignelli Associates included high-profile companies such as IBM, Knoll, Bloomingdale’s and American Airlines (which forced him to incorporate the eagle, Massimo was always quick to point out).

    • New York City Subway signage and the 1970s–80s map of the system. Contrary to news reports. This became a landmark in Modernist information design and Vignelli regarded the map as one of his best creations. In 2011 he updated this for an online-only version and described it as a “diagram”, not a map, to reflect its abstract design without surface-level features such as streets and parks.
    • Washington Metro signage and wayfinding system – the Map was designed by Lance Wyman and Bill Cannan. 
      Film and documentary
    • Helvetica,  with filmmaker Gary Hustwit  
  • Jan Tschichold

    Jan Tschichold

    Jan Tschichold (1902- 1974) was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.

    Modernism: Die neue Typographie 

    Tschichold became a convert to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He wrote an influential 1925 magazine supplement; then had a 1927 personal exhibition. The book ‘Die Neue Typographie’ was a manifesto of his theories of modern design and codified many other Modernist design rules:

    • importance of machine composition
    • use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter
    • effective use of  sans serif (Grotesque) typefaces using different sizes and weights of type in order to quickly and easily convey information.
    • non-centred design and asymmetrical placing of contrasting elements with flush left headlines of irregular lengths
    • layouts based on horizontal and vertical underlying grids with spatial interval and empty spaces employed as design components.

    He advocated the Van de Graaf canon based on proportions in medieval manuscripts and based on Golden Section used in book design to divide a page in pleasing proportions.
     
    This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany.

    Return to Classicism

    Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards (e.g. his Saskia typeface of 1932, and his acceptance of classical Roman typefaces for body-type) as he moved back towards Classicism in print design. He later condemned Die neue Typographie as too extreme. He also went so far as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic. He now advocated:

    • symmetrical typographic treatments as more appropriate for great works of literature.
    • classical typefaces like Garamond, Janson, Baskerville and Bell because of legibility
    • importance of grids underlying layout design.
       

    Penguin Books

    Between 1947–1949 Tschichold lived in England where he oversaw the redesign of 500 paperbacks published by Penguin Books, leaving them with a standardized set of typographic rules, the Penguin Composition Rules. Although he gave Penguin’s books (particularly the Pelican range) a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages. In working for a firm that made cheap mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work—in cheap popular culture forms (e.g. film posters)—that he had always pursued during his career.

    Typefaces

    His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style. Unimpressed by the use of realist or neo-grotesque typefaces, which he saw as a revival of poorly-designed models, his survey of typefaces in advertising deliberately made no mention of such designs, save for a reference to ‘survivals from the nineteenth-century which have recently enjoyed a short-lived popularity.’
     
    Sabon typeface 1967 is the best known.
     
    Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. For example, he devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs ch and sch. His intentions were to change the spelling by systematically replacing eu with oi, w with v, and z with ts. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.
    Other typefaces: Transit (1931), Saskia (1931/1932) and Zeus (1931).

    Biography

    (edited from Wikipedia)

    Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and unlike most other typographers of his time, was trained in calligraphy. This may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.

    After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they both were denounced as “cultural Bolshevists”. Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold’s books were seized by the Gestapo “for the protection of the German people”. After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.

    Apart from two longer stays in England in 1937 (at the invitation of the Penrose Annual), and 1947–1949 (at the invitation of Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of Penguin Books), Tschichold lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. Jan Tschichold died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974.

  • James Goggin

    James Goggin is a Chicago-based British and/or Australian art director and graphic designer from London via Sydney, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Auckland, and Arnhem. Together with partner Shan James, he runs a design practice named Practise working with clients across Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North America. James has taught at design schools in Europe, Australasia, and the United States, including Werkplaats Typografie, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), and at Rhode Island School of Design, where he is currently a visiting thesis critic. He frequently gives lectures and runs workshops around the world, and occasionally writes about art and design practice. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Design Archive, and he has been a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale since 2010.

    Mass Contacts Dialogues

    Practice website    archive

    It’s Nice That

  • Art&Language

    Art&Language

    Art & Language is a pioneering English conceptual art group founded in 1968, that questioned the critical assumptions of mainstream modern art practice and criticism. The group was founded in Coventry, England by Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Terry Atkinson and Harold Hurrell. The critic and art historian Charles Harrison and the artist Mel Ramsden both became associated with the group, in 1970.

    Their conceptual art privileges the relationship between a work of art and its environment, and a work of art and the observer. Examples are mirrors that have no content and only reflect the environment and/or invite the observer to interact.

    Some works address the issue of art that has no physical object, and resorts to text to describe it.

    Secret Painting 1967-68 is a black square painted within a black square and thus has nothing in it. But with accompanying block of text next to it in a dyptych frame the same size as the painting stating ‘the content of this painting is invisible. The character and dimension of the content are to be kept permanently secret, known only to the artist. ‘ a sort of joke, using text to indicate that the painting is still a work of art.

    https://media.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection_images/3/30.2003.a-b%23%23S.jpg

    In terms of my own work I am not really sure of the relevance – I find the whole discussion somewhat obscure, self-indulgent and pedantic.

    The main points that have some interest for me are that:

    • it is possible to produce a image that is completely opaque as a means of attracting the viewer’s attention to a piece of text.
    • it is possible to produce an image whose main function is to reflect back to the viewer and leave the interpretation completely to them.

  • John Baldessari

    “What motivates me is the elusive quality if trying to get things right....art is the only thing that gets me close to understanding what the universe is all about.”

    John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.

    http://www.baldessari.org

    He often plays with different ways of combining text and image. In his Prima Face series he produced large square diptychs of image and text. In the first ones he just put simple captions that described the colours of the image. The next he put captions that made assumptions about the meaning of peoples’ expressions. The third he put opposing interpretations of expressions for the viewer to choose. The next he put a list of synonyms and so on…

    Some of his best known work is where he puts flat coloured cutout shapes on photographs eg people climbing up buildings. The bits he cuts out are those elements that people are most interested in, thus focusing on things we do not normally notice. One body of work are photographs of civic officials at events where he covers their faces with round coloured shopping stickers to focus on their postures instead of faces.

    He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.

    Most of his work plays with combinations and collisions between the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language. Found images are often collaged and worked into/over with stickers or flat coloured paper shapes. Much of the work is concerned with the nature of art in a playful manner. Other work is humorously enigmatic, turning things upside-down to make the viewer aware of how they think and show that there are different ways of understanding things.

    He takes things from everywhere, and can’t throw anything away. It can all be used in art. He uses images from movies a lot. He prints a lot of images out, lays them on a big table and groups them. Some of his work is in grids eg on violence. Some is collage.

    Collage takes things from here and there and puts them together. “Collage is when two things don’t go together too easily. If it’s right there’s a kind of tautness there that if you pull them apart any further it’ll snap. If you get them any closer it’ll be just flabby. But if you can get it just right it’s terrific.”

    He is interested in signifiers eg clouds are ephemeral, they change shape and we see things in them.

    The important thing is to hold the audience’s attention eg image of table and shark. Things must be dissimilar enough to be intriguing.

    Some of his recent work uses vibrant colour and takes a more low relief 3D approach to collage.

    A short but detailed overview on Baldessari’s art done by Baldessari himself with Tom Waites.
    Baldessari explains his approach to appropriation – no one can own images any more than they can own words. Images are there to be used.
    In depth discussion of different aspects of his work.