Edward Young and Penguin

Edward Young is a british graphic design best known for his work on the design of the front covers of penguin books. His designs for the cover were in 1935. The designs used sans serif typefaces which were very modern around the time of publishing. The look of each book were similar, using the same layout and typefaces. He also made sets of colours for the different types of books:
Orange and white for novels, green for crime and detective novels and light blue for the pelican series of books.

Although that was his only main design set, he influenced designers who took hold of the penguin cover design. These included Jan Tschichold in 1949. The three section covers of penguin are an iconic look of a penguin book and are now recognised as penguin, without seeing the logo.

While the books today, have left the original penguin design, they still use some elements found in the very first books, these include the sans serif type, gridded layout - often split into three rows and the simple colour scheme.


















http://designmuseum.org/design/penguin-books

Jonathan Ive and Apple Design

Jonathan Ive is the lead designer at apple and has been leading since 1996.  He has been the 'driving force' behind the look and feel of all apple products since he has been working there. He has a doctor of the arts which he earned at Newcastle Polytechnic and has earned many awards in design such as one from London design museum.

Since 1996 apple have released many upgraded and totally new products and technologies into the market. Jonathan has been involved in all of these. From when he started the mac computer range has become more sleek and has changed with the times, which is also true to other products. 

The iPad is the most recent design from apple, which has entered the market in a time where the need of portable computing is high. Apple's design of products often uses basic functions of makes vast improvements to the users experience. Due to technologies on the iPad and iPhone, most of apples users interactions are with the on screen user interface, which has means the look of the products is only touching the edge of the products design, which is key to be successful in modern design.

http://www.apple.com/uk/pr/bios/jonathan-ive.html

David Carson

David Carson is an American Graphic Designer, art director and surfer. His designs include posters, album covers and magazines - including 'Ray Gun, which was a music magazine.

While working on 'Ray Gun' he was well known to use typefaces like dingbats, which is a symbol only typeface, which meant having no legibility. His reasoning behind this was due to a boring interview with 'Bryan Ferry'.

He is known to be very experimental with typography, often breaking the boundaries of legibility often using letters of words to make an interesting image. He rarely uses a grid system in his work.

Although he uses loose layouts in type he still plays with type size to add hiarchy in his work. The poster above has a 'cut out' paper look to the text, like it was from a magazine. He has also played with the ledding. Even the angle of the photograph is not following the rules of photography, the camera is looking downwards, allowing the viewer to focus down to the type.  The overall look of the poster has punk elements to it, going against society.

Helvetica

Helvetica is a modern sans-serif typeface. Its first entrance to the world was in 1957 where the Haas Typefoundary's Eduard Hoffmann and Max Miedinger designed a typeface named Neue Haas Grotesk. 

Three years later in 1960 Linotype took shares in the typeface which allowed them to produce the letterforms at larger scale. However Linotype did not like the name that the designers had given it. Helvetia, was then suggested which was Latin for Switzerland but the design Hoffmann did not like the idea of it being named after a country. Thus changed it to a latin translation of the word 'Swiss' - Helvetica was born.

Helvetica has a very simple look, same stroke width and can be used for many things. Over the years, the Helvetica family has grown into a lot of different variations. However it has been criticised over recent years for being 'standard' due to it being overused.  

http://typophile.com/node/13514

Josef Muller Brockmann

Josef Muller Brockmann was a swiss graphic designer who was a follower of the 'swiss' international style of design. The Swiss style has been linked to influencing, constructivism, De Stijl, Suprematism and the Bauhaus. Brockmann is one if the best known designers in the movement.

He was a teacher at the Zurich School of Arts and Craft by the age of Forty-Three. Brockmann was best known for his work at the Zurich town hall, which includes poster designs for theatre shows.

As shown, his work uses typography to express the theme of the theatre production. He often only used one typeface and very few other aspects, this allowed the poster to be simple but appealing to a mass audience. In some of his work, no capitals were used.

These were common style elements in 'Swiss Graphics'

He also designed a few books, including 'The graphic Artist', 'His Problems' and 'Grid Systems'. All the books provided an indepth knowledge of his work and his research. They were made for up and coming designers, both where he taught and also elsewhere - including The US and Canada where he spoke about his work.

http://www.designishistory.com/1940/joseph-mueller-brockmann/

William Caslon

William Caslon is best known as a typeface designer, however was originally a gunsmith. He grew up in Worcestershire and died in Bethnal Green, London.  He first started his typography career as an apprentice engraver. After this he became a self-employed engraver which landed him jobs designing arabic letter forms for christian groups.

Throughout his career he designed a total of forty-seven typefaces which were displayed in a one page specimen sheet shown below.

Shown in the picture, he designed many different styles of typefaces for both roman and arabic alphabets, using both script and serif. His work was very precise, every letter designed perfectly to link to a previous or next letter in a word or sentence.

He inspired many of his future family members, who many were also called William Caslon, while the Caslon typefaces used today are different, they had still only evolved or developed from the engravers work. Caslon is now used as a standard typeface in a lot of published books, often novels, due to its legibility.

http://www.linotype.com/348/williamcaslon.html

Olly Moss

Olly Moss is an english designer, artist and illustrator who was born in Winchester, Hampshire. A large proportion of his work are his interesting approaches to movie posters. He has been commissioned by Marvel Entertainment to do a poster for 'Thor'.

His approaches to design and illustration are simple, using a simple colour palette to still add an interesting image, normally an illustration. His work also consists of posters for video games such as resistance 3. Often his illustration link directly to the type used in the image, sometimes even fully incorporating it such as the 'Thor' poster above.

Other posters he does, have more detail due to the need of the client. The poster he designed for 'The return of the Jedi' for Lucas Arts has a more in depth image while still having Moss's modern, unique illustrations.

Some of his illustrations are produced by screen printing, this still adds the block colours he likes to use for his work, while adding a more textured look, which for some posters works better and would be unrepeatable on-screen. The poster below is a screen print which adds a nice effect to add a more relaxing, rustic look.

http://www.redirectify.com/people/olly-moss.html
http://www.ollymoss.com/

Wolfgang Weingart

Wolfgang Weingart was a graphic designer and typography who was internationally known. Born in 1941 in south Germany his work catagorised into Swiss Typography which then developed on his creation of 'New Wave' and 'Swiss Punk' design.

His work consisted his experimental typography which to him was a form of visual enjoyment. meaning his work was quite playful while sticking to rules of swiss typography and graphic design.
He enjoyed experimenting and making patterns in much of his work, shown in one of his typography books - 'My Way to Typography' shown below.

His typographic layouts became even more abstract later on in his career. During the 1980's he created many posters which has a lot of overlapping type. This would have been done using film montage.

 In 1968 he came a lecturer of his own postgraduate course which was inspired from his own work and also work of the Swiss 'International' Style' he taught his students to experiment with the limits of legibility and repetition.

He also later on new skills in photolithography which meant he could play photographically with type changing the size, focus and also being able to distort his type manually. While also being over to overlap and mask film to add depth to his image making.






palomar.edu/users/gkelley/Weingart.html

http://typography-daily.com/blog/2011/03/02/6-must-have-books-about-typography/

Laszlo Moholy-Nagly

Laszlo Moholy-Nagly first studied as a law student but during his three year military service he took up drawing which he followed up with evening classes on figure drawing and late joined a hungarian free art school, which subsequently voluntarily quit law school/
He was then appointed a master specializing in typography and film making at Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar but left five years later to open his own studio. During his time at Staatliches he created a 
catalogue for the exhibition at the school.

Within the book he used innovative image and text layouts to represent the designers work. He got a lot of influence from contructivism which originated in Russia. The design of the binding was by Herbert Bayer, which is still different to most of todays binding techniques. His use of block capital letters were also quite new to design, with its two colour block printing technique, it added a modern look to a book front cover.

Later on in his his career, he joined designers in becoming a graphic design, this allowed his to move to Amsterdam and then later on, London. This gave him opportunities to work on commissioned documentary films.

For the rest of his career he worked as a freelance artist and designer until his death in 1946.

One of his contructivist inspired paintings from 1922


http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/werke/cover-of-the-bauhaus-exhibition-catalogue-1923
http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/werke/construction-z1
http://www.moholy-nagy.com/Biography_1.html

Gender Identity - Malala Yousufzai

Malala Yousufzai is a girl from Pakistan who was brutally attacked by the Taliban due to going against the grain and wanting an education in her country. This made international headlines which made the vast difference of gender equality in eastern counties. She began actively writing blogs, and news articles about the education system which the Taliban put in place to stop girls having a right to education after primary school.

She was an inspiration to many girls which allowed her to earn a name for herself which made her known by the BBC. A few years later however the Taliban failed an assassination attempt on her way home from school on the bus.

The view of women in countries like this have not developed over many years, equality is taken for granted in western countries. This may be due to lack of education, or religious views being manipulated so that fatalities like this can happen.

Modernism - Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge

Modernism was an art movement which started in the early 1900's which used a new style, new tools and new artists appeared. Constructivism was a part of Modernism which held a dominant part in Russian Propaganda.

El Lissitzy's 'Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge' is a modernist work of art which is a lithograph during the Russian Civil War in 1919. The Red wedge is a representation of the Russian Revolution edge which were against the 'white' anti-revolutionaries - Capitalists.

The wedge is shown to be breaking into the white circle with shards coming off. This denotes 'invasion' or breaking something. In this case a, group/army of people. Even though the lithograph is in Russian, due to it's bold visual display, it can be depicted by anyone. This was handy during the revolution due to many working class people not being able to read, they could still read the propaganda, allowing more people to understand the political meaning behind the poster.

The red triangle is a sign of strength, it dominates the image thus denoting the stronger side.

The words on the image actually simply saying 'beat the whites' or 'beat whites' so is even simple to other classes who can read the poster. Although the words do not stand out on the poster due to the dominating strong shapes.



(2012). Utopia/Dystopia. Available: http://utopiadystopiawwi.wordpress.com/constructivism/el-lissitzky/beat-the-whites-with-the-red-wedge/. Last accessed 25/04/2013.

Semiotics - The Treachery of Images

This painting of a pipe is painted by René Magritte which was painted to show deception from what is actually being seen. Under the painting it says, 'This is not a pipe'. Which is meant to explain that it is a picture of a pipe and not actually a pipe. To an audience which do not know french people could
read it.

The aesthetics of the painting are very smooth using highlights and shadows to illuminate the most important part of the image. The background colour compliments the pipe due to it being on the same hue scale. The type itself is just basic scripted text, made to look like someone has written it. This makes it more personal.