Rise of the Ism's

"It could be said that the fusion of Cubis painting and Futurist poetry spawned 20th century Graphic Design." -- Meggs.

Much like Behrens, self-taught designer Lucian Bernhard set the ground work for distinct professional identity for graphic design -- tying closely with the focus of modernist pictorial graphics which became developments enduring as major concerns of the 20th century:

• Graphic simplification
• Integration of word and image
• Symbolic concerns of Synthetic Cubism
  

DADA and the Futurist developed during the advent of the World War; the former a reaction in the style of "anti-style" -- (a sort of response to the world saying that if all this death and destruction are going on in our world, then how could there be art? How could there be style or beauty in anything while the meaningless loss of life continues?) and the latter being actually in favor of war -- it voiced enthusiasm for danger and the machine age, called for the destruction of libraries and museums to fight against moralism, feminism, and utilitarian cowardice. But the importance of these two movements are enormous -- they are the catalyst for all the modern movements in the early decades of the 20th century, including Avant-Garde, Cubism, Surrealism, and Automatism.

The leaders of this significant era who are important to remember:

• Ferdinand de Saussure (Structural Linguistics)
• Stephane Mallarme
• Filippo Marinetti
• Ludwig Hohlwien
• Picasso
• Giacomo Balla
• Tristan Tzara
• Voltaire
• Duchamp
• John Heartfield
• George Grosz
• Kurt Schwitters
• Max Ernst
• Rene Magritte
• Man Ray
  

Era of Art Nouveau

The overarching theme of lecture, for me, was the importance of Art Nouveau in the evolution of Graphic Design. The Beggarstaffs were particulary significant, especially with their Gestalt ideas of closure using “meaningful incompleteness” -- an incomplete image which challenged the viewer to participate by deciphering the subject.

Sharp silhouettes, and high contrast were the new vocabulary of form for the graphic artist. There was also the idea of the introduction of duality and plurality and the idea that in art you make shapes, but must also make a message. It was the very beginning of the reduction of iconicity -- cutting down subjects to the bare essentials, something which is in heavy use today.

Other important topics relating to the ideals introduced by Art Nouveau are:

• Ornament as Structure
• Historicism (use of past forms and styles to express the present intead of inventing new ones)
• Japanese design and Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and their influence (stylized form, the idea of artificial perspective and the distortion of forms --- basically the beginning of the poster)
• Aubrey Beardsley's introduction of dramatic interplay between positive and negative shape and the blurring of society's conventions of what should and shouldn't be allowed
• Jugendstil and Sezesionstil
• Gesamkunstwerk - to encompass every possible type of aesthetic expression.
• The idea that modernism is conveyed through students of different academies.
  
• Peter Behrens and the “New Objectivity”

Ephemera

Some things which stood out in particular during the lecture that were of interest to me included the beginning of the use of scale, the Victorian period's ideals (where trends are fickle and most everything is influenced by Queen Victoria herself), and how mass-production snuffed out true design and nearly killed the design of books. It's interesting to think that scale as we understand and use it today first began with posters in the streets of England, where advertising played such a large role in everyday affairs. The progression to such enormous, attention-grabbing signs such as billboards is one which, these days, is not seen too often anymore --- what with this digital age, all the communication designers try to get across are dealing with "new media", using the internet and its interactivity to reach people across the entire globe.

The Victorian Period expressed a new consciousness of the industrial era’s large middle class – their spirit, culture, and the moral standards. Queen Victoria controlled the whole fashion statement for women, much like the trends of today are affected by fashion, even though they're extremely temporary; ephemera.

Mass-produced books were of appalling quality – excessive ornamentation, sensational novelty. Type design and book design became casualties of novel graphic expressions for commercial consumption, which I'm glad to see is no longer the case in the modern world -- or at least not in this generation. Agencies and Publishing Houses take great care in the advertisement of books and with their design, lest they be overlooked and create a loss in revenue.