taking fire

..thank jesus christ and most of the saints and apostles too. The essay from hell is finished! It was only 2000 words, but the topic was as dry as a faroes y-fronts. Should see everyone.. Bunch of fucking girl scouts. one all nighter and they have more luggage under their eyes than Heathrow International Departures. What can you do.. We’re all heading oot on the toon tonight for some hot anebriatory action to celebrate the fact that we’re not studying English and have to do this every week.

Thats after I go into work tonight for an hour long tutorial on how to make cocktails! Should be a good laugh. Chicks dig cocktails. Look at how lucky Tom Cruise got in the Film.. Hmmm?

Do you wanna read it? Hmmmm? hmmmm?

are you that bored?

didnt think so.

Jill Menzies – 2nd year BDes(hons) Graphic Design. Matriculation no: 023666902

Design History Essay – 30.12.02

“Style in art and design seems to be constantly recycled” – Discuss using examples of one particular style or designer, making historical cross references. Comment on the creative and ethical implications.

For this essay, I have chosen to focus on the Bauhaus, in particular the graphic design that it produced and the contribution that both its tutors and students made to todays graphic language. I find this subject very intriguing because of the fact that seventy years later, in today’s ultra fast moving, computer generated graphic design and desktop publishing world, the ideology and ethos of the bauhaus still directly influences a generation of designers who class themselves as post post-modern.

The Bauhaus, as we know it was founded by an architect called Walter Gropius in 1919. Gropius came from the Werkbund movement who saught to integrate art and economics, and to add an element of utilitarian engineering to design. The intention of the institute was to develop creative minds for architecture, design and industry and to influence students so that they would posess the knowledge to produce artistic, technically precise, practically balanced pieces. The institute was completely revolutionary in its approach. Other art schools kept their various specialisms seperate, here they were all under the one roof, and each student was expected to study a well rounded course syllabus before going on to specialise in their own chosen subject. There were no such thing as tutors or professors. Instead, tuition was given by craftsmen who were masters in their respective fields, and the students were called apprentices. The courses offered were highly vocational. To this end, it required a new kind of student beyond academic specialisation, for whom the bauhaus would offer adequate education. The syllabus started off with a six month preliminary course in all aspects of art and design, in which the basic principles of form, tone, colour, balance and shape were explored. In the three years subsequent to that, apprentices were given workshop training, together with form theory. The bauhaus ideology was very contentious, and not without its controversy amonst a very tradition oriented German society. But can still be sited as the origin of course syllabus that every art school follows today.

In the early years of the bauhaus, the emphasis wasn’t really on graphic design or typography as such. For other craftsmen at the bauhaus, such as Johannes Itten And Lothar Schreyer, calligraphy was seen as the premier means of graphic art. Consequently, practical fields of application remained seldom, and were restricted to small printed pieces. But this all changed in 1923, when a hungarian artist called Lazlo Moholy-Nagy came to the Bauhaus. He was to play one of the key roles in its future as a centre for graphic excellence. Moholy-Nagy considered graphic design to be primarily a communications medium, and felt very strongly that graphic art should be centred around “the clarity of the message in its most emphatic form” – a sentiment that has become one of the mantras of todays design and advertising industries. His influence upon Graphic Design at the bauhaus is very clear from the start, in the advertising campaign that Joost Schmidt designed for the summer exhibition of 1923. This is one of the most famous pieces of Graphic design that was ever produced there.

From then on, graphic design and typography at the bauhaus was closely connected to Corporate Identity and the development of an unmistakable house style for the institution, which was closely linked with the psychology of the visual message and semiotics. The style was intellectually complex, yet visually sparse. Characteristics of the style were clean, clear cut prints, bold sans serif typography, compositional angularity, use of primary colour, use of blocks of colour to guide the eye around the print, and a degree of compositional symmetry. When it came to design in general, the major bauhaus mantras were “form follows function” which relates to the fact that the form of an object should be closely interlinked with how it was experienced. For example, if the function of a chair is to support a person in an upright sitting position, then the form of the designed object should be a horizontal and vertical surface resting on a frame. And “economy of form” which relates to the ultra utilitarian approach which stripped the designs of anything unnecessary, and reduced it to the minimum amount of elements necessary to convey the idea. Much of the graphic design of the bauhaus relied solely on the use of typography.

The bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1919, and produced some of the worlds most truly modern revolutionary pieces of art and design until its closure in Berlin in 1933 under massive pressure from external government and political parties. In the seventy years since then, its style and ethos has gone on to directly influence an untold amount of artistic and design related movements, not least in the graphic design industry. It has been widely acclaimed to have written the rulebook for effective visual communication and has been closely related to the rise of many designers since, including Alan Fletcher – creative Director of pentagram, the international graphic design agency dubbed as “the designers’ holy grail”, Paul Rand – the acclaimed art director and designer of the hugely famous IBM computers logo, even down to designers associated with the “third wave” of post modern graphic design, such as Neville Brody and David Carson.

In the second part of this essay, I am going to go on to talk about the kind of stylistic effect that the bauhaus legacy had on these designers well after its closure. And wheather I feel that this is ethically sound and moral.

The bauhaus’ Ideals went on to influence movements within art, such as the abstract expressionists and the op art movement, who worked around colour theories, and hard edged, minimalism evolved from bauhaus classes. Bridget Riley’s work is indicative of this. But generally speaking, the bauhaus’s major influence within graphic design was in the areas of economy of form, and sans serif typography, which designers such as Paul Rand counted as major influences.

Paul Rand is one of americas most respected graphic designers. He was born in 1914 in New York City, one of two sons of european jewish settlers. His career spans six decades, 3 generations and numerous chapters of design hisory, and is widely acclaimed as the designer who changed the way that large companies used corporate Identity. From the start, Paul Rand displayed a flair for graphic design. His father owned a convenience store, and from an early age, Paul could be found copying the outlines of advertisments such as Palmolive soap and suchlike. As soon as he had any kind of self awareness, he said that he wanted to be an artist, and as soon as he was sent to school, displayed a flair for drawing, joining extra curricular art clubs and painting murals on school walls. He only happened upon graphic design as a matter of coincedence, by looking through a book on the bauhaus and de stijl movements in room 313 of the new york public library on 5th avenue, but loved what he saw and decided to embark on a career in the industry. 12 years later, he wrote the first of his 4 books ‘thoughts on design’ which was a bible of modernist graphic design and stated in it that one of his major influences was the bauhaus school of design. He shared the bauhaus ethos that art and design should be unified, and that commercialism was the best way of disseminating art to the masses. Like the advertising of the bauhaus, his work was strategicly placed to attract the eye, yet nothing about his design was formulaic.

This is highly obvious in the advertising campaign he profuced for William H Weintraub. The all over look is incredibly paired down, and purely typographic, which is quite obviously a homage to bauhaus ideals. Another piece of Rands’ graphic design in which the ideology of the bauhaus is clearly discernable, is one of his more famous campaigns, this time for a hat company called Disney. Again, the typography is very well considered and the use of blocks of colour give an all over very paired down look.

Although the bauhaus quite clearly influenced many graphic designers of the modernist and post modernist era, such as Alan Fletcher, Paul Rand, and Jan Tschichold, an altogether less likely product of Bauhaus idealism is Neville Brody, the rags to riches art director who changed the face of ‘the face’ and arena magazines. Brody is widely regarded in today’s industry as the father of post post-modern or 3rd wave graphic design. Without the rules of “less is more”, “form follows function” and “economy of form” set in place by the Bauhaus in 1919 Neville brody wouldnt have had the knowledge of how to break them. If you look closely at the grid systems and angularity of brody’s work, even today, 30 years after he initially pioneered the new wave movement it is discernable that even if one of his influences wasnt the bauhaus, then it was at least his starting point.

And this is the crux upon which this essay lies. It is my belief that yes, Graphic design is recycled up unto a certain extent. But each generation who recycles the ideals of the last comes up with something new and fresh, and it is this process of synthesis that allows Graphic Design to evolve into something new and different with each year that passes. And the interesting thing about design in general is the fact that it might not be the individual as such, who is to be given the credit for such an amazing feat. It could be put down to any number of variables, based on society, ideology, or technological advance.

To conclude, in the fourteen years that the Bauhaus School Of Art and Design was open, it produced some of the most visionary pieces of graphic design ever, and its legacy has been to change the way that composition and typography is viewed and to allow generation after generation to build upon and hone the values which it set in place, which I believe is highly ethical, and very admirable.