Discourse #1

Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture – Helfand

Paul Rand: The Modern Designer

• Graphic Design is everywhere: everything we do, buy, and see. From the bible to our birth certificates

• Popular art, practical art, applied art, and ancient art

• Formerly known as commercial art.

  Performed by printers and typesetters. It was more of a vocation then profession.

• Unlike in the US at the time it was being practiced and taught in Europe

• “To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to ad value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”

• Rhythm, contrast, balance, proportion, repetition, harmony, and scale

• A trademark is a company's signature

• Simple, modern, geometric abstractions of letterforms, recognizable shapes and symbols

• designed to work at any scale or at an angle

• Having a strong verbal skill to express your ideas along with having a formal vocabulary is key

• It is necessary to understand history

• Five is better than four, three is better than two.

After reading this article and again acknowledging that graphic design is truly everywhere around us, I immediately thought of New York City. A specific part of the city would be Time Square. There is a lot of advertising with means logos, posters, billboard, and people walking around that has design all over them from graphic tees or brands, fashion, and products. That one block is filled with, and I wouldn't be surprised well over tens of thousands items that would fall under graphic design. It gave me a much more appreciation for the field. Followed by that image I decided to take one that expressed what communication was. The job of a designer is to not just design and send it off but to also educate those who do not know it. Being strong in communication is our profession. It only makes sense to be able to also verbally communicate to clients and just general public. Lastly, the history of IBM's logo is a fine example of progress and simplifying design. Just about all the design principals can be checked off with that logo making it one of the longest lasting ones to date.

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Looking Closer Critical Writings on Graphic Design I, II, III, IV - various authors

Advertising: The Mother of Graphic Design Steven Heller

• Aesthetic and philosophical pursuit that communicates ideas.

• Advertising tool of capitalism

• GD cultural force that incorporates parallel world views.

• William Addison Dwiggins coined the term “graphic designer” in 1922

• GD began with seventeenth-century Italian printing

• 1950s modern graphic design veered from mass advertising towards corporate and institutional communications and evolved into a rarefied practice

• Graphic designers have distanced themselves from advertising in the same way that children put as much space as possible between themselves and their parents.

• Graphic design has developed its own characteristic

• They are equal still by having a form to communicate, selling, and entertaining

• if GD history does not expand to include advertising, “it will ultimately succumb to the dead-end thinking that will be the inevitable consequence of being arrested in a state of continual adolescence.

Living in an age where advertising and graphic design is pretty much as separated as it will be it is odd yet normal knowing they were almost the same thing. I would never of thought graphic design was really advertising back then. In the modern era of the 20^th and 21^st century there seems to have become a feud between graphic designer and advertising. Both do still work together in campaigns but since the separation advertising has been know to be cynical which for the most part can be true. It makes sense why then graphic designers distant themselves to not have the bad reputation which is why the shirt seems to be rather self explanatory. Both professions do share the common profit instinct of being successful and building upon that creation. After reading the closing line of this article it got me thinking of how true it is. If graphic design does not let in other medias of design it could start to hurt the field as it did with advertising. It may not be known to the common person. I included Milton Glaser to represent the last statement. A highly recognized designer, I wonder what his take would be on a topic. I would assume it would agree to not be adolescence.