Sunday, 4 May 2014

Max Miedinger


Max Miedinger - Biography

This entire biography was sourced from historygraphicdesign.com and can be viewed here

Max Miedinger was born on Christmas day, 1910, in Zurich Switzerland.
When he was 16 years old, he became an apprentice typesetter in the book printing office of Jacques Bollmann in Zurich.
After four years of apprenticeship in the book office, Miedinger entered the School of Arts and Crafts, Abendkurse in Zurich.
In 1936, at the age of 26, he became a typographer in the advertising studio of the Globe department store chain. He worked at the Globe for ten years and refined his skill as a typographer.
After ten years at the Globe, he became a representative for the Type Foundry Haas in Basel Switzerland. This is where he would make his mark on graphic arts history, when in 1957 he revised a typeface called Akzidenze Grotesk—an old san serif font designed by the Berthold foundry in the late 1800s. His newly designed san serif was named Neue Haas Grotesk. Little did he know that, in the later 20th century, his neue sans serif typeface would become the default typeface for most software packages under its new name, Helvetica.

http://www.hca.uws.edu.au/student/101180/student/tuesday_2-4_roman/thomas_hayes/project1b/biography.htm

Max Miedinger's "Helvetica" was a revolutionary typeface and is still considered influential. The typeface is all over the world because it is so easy to read. It's design is flawless. You don't notice it at all, which is exactly the point. Miedinger's "Helvetica" is useful for my 2D course because it is an amazing example of design that is meant to be invisible to the eye.   

Milton Glaser



Milton Glaser
To many, Milton Glaser is the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. His presence and impact on the profession internationally is formidable. Immensely creative and articulate, he is a modern renaissance man — one of a rare breed of intellectual designer-illustrators, who brings a depth of understanding and conceptual thinking, combined with a diverse richness of visual language, to his highly inventive and individualistic work. *

Born in 1929, Milton Glaser was educated at the High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union art school in New York and, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. He co-founded the revolutionary Pushpin Studios in 1954, founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968, established Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and teamed with Walter Bernard in 1983 to form the publication design firm WBMG. Throughout his career, Glaser has been a prolific creator of posters and prints. His artwork has been featured in exhibits worldwide, including one-man shows at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums. Glaser also is a renowned graphic and architectural designer with a body of work ranging from the iconic logo to complete graphic and decorative programs for the restaurants in the World Trade Center in New York. Glaser is an influential figure in both the design and education communities and has contributed essays and granted interviews extensively on design. Among many awards throughout the years, he received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, for his profound and meaningful long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.


* Excerpted from CSD, August/September, 1999 — "Milton Glaser: Always One Jump Ahead" by Patrick Argent
 http://www.miltonglaser.com/milton/#1 



I really like Milton Glaser's work as he can beautifully combine solid black images with imaginative colorful designs and he created some of the most recognizable logos of the 20th century. His work is playful and professional at the same time. It will benefit my 2D course because it's an example of combining block color with exciting colorful designs and how they neutralize each other into a beautifully balanced design.   








David Carson


Bio, David Carson

 David Carson is principal and chief designer of David Carson Design, Inc. with offices in del mar,california and zurich switzerland.

Carson graduated with “honors and distinction” from San Diego state university, where he received a BFA degree in sociology. A former professional surfer, he was ranked #9 in the world during his college days. Numerous groups including the New York Type Directors Club, American Center for Design and I.D. magazine have recognized his studio’s work with a wide range of clients in both the business and arts worlds. Carson and his work have been featured in over 180 magazine and newspaper articles around the world, including a feature in Newsweek magazine, and a front page article in the new york times . London-based Creative Review magazine dubbed Carson “Art Director of the Era.” The American Center for Design (Chicago) called his work on Ray Gun magazine “the most important work coming out of America.” His work on Beach Culture magazine won “Best Overall Design” and “Cover of the Year” from the Society of Publication Designers in New York.

Carson’s first book, with Lewis Blackwell, The End of Print, (forward by David Byrne) is the top selling graphic design book of all time, selling over 200,000 copies, and printed in 5 different languages.The work featured in The End of Print is the subject of various one-man exhibitions throughout Europe and Latin America,Asia and Australia. Carson’s other titles include 2nd Sight, Fotografiks (with design historian Philip Meggs). He has two recently released books, TREK and The Book of Probes with Marshall McLuhan. David is also art director for the Mcluhan estate(“the medium is the message”).

Carson lectures extensively throughout the world, as well as at colleges throughout the U.S., including Cranbrook, ARTcenter, Notre dame, RISD and Cal Arts. He has had numerous one man exhibitions of his work worldwide, and has spoken at over 100professional symposiums, including “Designer As Editor” at the Design Institute in Amsterdam. He teaches a week long workshop at the school of visual arts in nyc each summer.

The International Center for Photography (NY) singled out Carson as the “Designer of the Year” for his use of photography and design. Print Magazine proclaimed his work “Brilliant,” while USA Today described it as “visually stunning,” adding that his design of Ray Gun Magazine “may actually get young people reading again.”
 



Typography, a title published by Graphis magazine (NY), lists Carson as a “Master of Typography.” I.D. magazine chose Carson for their list of “America’s most innovative designers”. A feature in newsweek magazine said of Carson “he changed the public face of graphic design”. The graphic design publication Emigre devoted an entire issue to Carson, the only American designer to be so honored in the magazine’s history. And in April 2004, London based creative review magazine calls David, “the most famous graphic designer on the planet”. David recently picked up 4 gold awards at the Charleston ADDY awards, including a “special judges award” for “professionalism”.

In the past few years, Carson has branched out into film and television to direct commercials and videos. He directed the launch commercials for Lucent technologies and teamed up with William Burroughs in Carson’s short film, “The End of Print”. He also collaborated with Harvard Business School professor John Kao on a documentary entitled “The Art and Discipline of Creativity.” David designed the worldwide branding campaign for Microsoft, as well as the worldwide advertising for Giorgio Armani (Milan). He has appeared in advertisements endorsing Apple Computers, Samsung monitors and various paper companies. Carson has art directed and designed Surfer, twSkateboarding, twSnowboarding, Beach Culture, and Ray Gun magazines. He has an extensive list of international clients: Nine Inch nails, Toyota, mercedes benz, Bank of montreal, Microsoft, Quiksilver, Meg Ryan, David Byrne, Bush, Pepsi, and Xerox.

David is featured in both “The History of Graphic Design” by Philip Meggs, as well as”The Encylopedia of Surfing” by Matt Warsaw.

He designed a special issue of Surfing Magazine titled “Explorations” which came out in July of ’04. He also recently directed a television commercial for the progressive UMPQUA Bank in Seattle, Washington.

David’s work continues to be subjective and largely driven by intuition, with an emphasis on reading material before designing it, and experimenting with ways to communicate in a variety of mediums. Carson remains a hands on designer, keeping his studio small and mobile.

http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/about/



Carson's work will be helpful in my 2D course because it's an example of the flexibility type has. He shows how words can be beautiful as objects rather than a readable words.







Ronny Edry


Ronny Edry of Israel created The Peace Factory, an online movement for peace in the Middle East, when he posted a Facebook image that declared "Iranians, we will never bomb your country."

Why you should listen

Ronny Edry is a graphic designer, teacher and father. While he often posted images on Facebook without much fanfare, in March of 2012 one of his images garnered international attention. The image showed him with his daughter, along with the words “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We heart you.” The image became a catalyst for dialogue between the people of two nations on the brink of war -- and started an online movement. Today, The Peace Factory is connecting people throughout the Middle East, giving them a voice and a face.
Edry grew up in Paris, France, and has lived in Israel since 1989. Along with his work on the Peace Factory, he is the owner and founder of Pushpin, a school for art and design in Tel Aviv. He himself graduated with honors from the BezIalel Academy of Art and Design, and he is a staff member teaching visual communication in design academies in Israel. He has received awards for his works as a graphic designer and is also an illustrator and author of graphic novels.

What others say

"It is not possible to dial an Iranian number from an Israeli telephone. It will simply not go through. That lack of communication stems from the government level, where there is no dialogue between the two countries aside from public speeches meant to carry weighty threats of war to each camp. That is why it was so difficult for Ronny Edry, an Israeli graphic designer based in Tel Aviv, to get his message across to the people of Iran." — CNN







Ronny Edry's work is stunning and innovative. It would have a great impact as a simple poster but by designing it for social media he reaches an enormously larger audience. Using limited colors, repeating phrases, and highlighting the keys words (I.E. "Israel" and "Palestine") the work can be quickly absorbed and is very attention grabbing. It's useful for my 2D course because it shows how to catch people's eyes and the power of work in different contexts.   




Josef Albers



In 1920, the young artist Josef Albers enrolled at the Bauhaus, the recently founded school of art, architecture, and design in Weimar, Germany. With its strong utilitarian emphasis, the Bauhaus placed equal importance on technical and artistic skills. The basis of its education was the "preliminary course," a curriculum designed to prepare the students for further study in the school's various workshops; the course's central concept was the "contrasting effects" of form, texture, and—most importantly for Albers—color.
After completing his course of study, Albers was appointed as a teacher at the Bauhaus in 1925, and he remained there until the school closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi party. He emigrated to the United States with his wife Anni and taught first at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In this way, Albers disseminated his Bauhaus education and his own artistic philosophy to a new generation of artists in America. He also published the influential treatise Interaction of Color (1963), a study of color theory that was used widely in art instruction.

Around the time that he joined the Yale faculty in 1950, Albers began his celebrated Homage to the Square series. This would become a body of more than a thousand works executed over a period of twenty-five years, including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. The entire series was based on a mathematically determined format of several squares, which appear to be overlapping or nested within one another. This geometric abstraction was Albers' template for exploring the subjective experience of color—the effects that adjacent colors have on one another, for example, and the illusion of flat planes of color advancing or receding in space.
With Rays is one painting from the Homage to the Square series (see also Homage to the Square: Soft Spoken, 1972.40.7). Its color composition is comprised of an inner square of dull gray and three surrounding squares in varying tones of yellow. The gray square, the palest of the four, seems to float against its more vivid background; this arrangement also encourages the viewer's eye to move outward from the center of the composition. That optical progression, in addition to the sun-like, golden tones of the three outer squares, may have inspired the title of this work.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/59.160



I find the work of Josef Albers to be calming and intriguing. The mathematical foundation limits the work to simple elements but creates a balanced composition and his skills with color makes surprising optical allusions. At first I wasn't overly keen on his work but, after reading about what he was aiming to achieve, I now have a strong respect for it. Albers will be helpful for my 2D course because he shows the power of colors and well composed elements.       




Herb Lubalin


http://www.printmag.com/interviews/designer-for-the-age-of-austerity-adrian-shaughnessy-on-herb-lubalins-life-and-work/

Most people recognize the name Herb Lubalin in association with the typeface Avant Garde. And he was the typographer and designer behind its creation, after the success of Avant Garde Magazine and its typographic logo. But, his career spanned a much wider scope than that. One of the people behind the culture-shocking magazines Avant-Garde, Eros and Fact, he was a constant boundary breaker on both a visual and social level. Part of the founding team of the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) and the principal of Herb Lubalin, Inc it was hard to escape the reach of Herb during the 1960s and 70s.



His constant search for something new and a passion for inventiveness made him one of the most successful art directors of the 20th century. He had offices internationally in Paris and London and partnered with many talented individuals over the years including Aaron Burns, Tom Carnase, Ernie Smith and Ralph Ginzburg. A graduate of the Cooper Union in New York he spent time as a visiting professor there as well as designed a logo for them. Constantly working and achieving much success throughout his career, at the age of 59 he proclaimed "I have just completed my internship."



http://www.designishistory.com/1960/herb-lubalin/

 http://meetinghouse.co/2013/02/10/inspiration-herb-lubalin/


More information on Lubalin can be found at http://www.aiga.org/interior.aspx?pageid=44&id=3179 

http://fontsinuse.com/uses/2059/1972-christmas-new-year-greeting-card


I love the work of Herb Lubalin. Though his type is illustrative, it is easily read and he knew exactly how to make the type, itself, beautiful. Lubalin also had a wonderful way with words, which made for stunning and memorable designs when combined with his unique type designs. His work is very helpful for my 2D course because he shows how attention to a few elements can be as visually satisfying as a lot of elements.  







Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Anthony Burrill

 
http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/illustration/anthony-burrill-poster-book-gives-you-30-wryly-inspirational-prints/

 BIOGRAPHY

Graphic artist, print-maker and designer Anthony Burrill is known for his persuasive, up-beat style of communication. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York and has been exhibited in galleries around the world including The Barbican, The Walker Art Centre and The Graphic Design Museum, Breda. In 2012, he made his first foray into curating with the exhibition Made in L.A. - Work by Colby Poster Printing, at KK Outlet in London.
Words and language are an important part of Burrill’s output and he has developed a distinctive voice that is sought after not only by collectors of his posters and prints but also by clients including Wallpaper* magazine, The Economist, The British Council, London Underground and The Design Museum. Burrill is perhaps best known for his typographic, text-based compositions, including the now-famous “Work Hard and Be Nice to People”, which has become a mantra for the design community and beyond.
Burrill has a long-standing relationship with the printers Adams of Rye where he uses traditional techniques to compose and print his work. The integrity lent to the process of image-making by hand-made methods is essential to his practice across all media — from print, to screen-based, to three-dimensional applications. In 2010 he worked with Happiness Brussels to design a screen-printed poster made with oil and sand collected from the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Proceeds from the sale of the limited edition poster “Oil & Water Do Not Mix” went to CRCL (Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana) and copies were acquired by the V&A and Cooper-Hewitt for their collections.

http://coolmompicks.com/blog/2013/05/09/inspiring-posters-words-work-hard/

While Burrill’s work is grounded in a serious devotion to his art, he has a lightness of touch and humour that, although often copied, is unique in the field of graphic communication. He frequently embarks on innovative collaborations with friends and fellow creatives. Recent and regular colluders include product designer Michael Marriott, writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, designer Ben Kelly and creative director Erik Kessels.
Installations, events and work in three dimensions punctuate Burrill’s practice. At the renowned annual graphic art fair Pick Me Up at Somerset House in London in 2011, Burrill re-located his studio to the gallery and held workshops and daily collaborations with fellow designers, illustrators, photographers and musicians over the course of ten days. For Graphic Design Worlds at the Triennale di Milano in 2011 Burrill and Michael Marriott built and installed a red-timbered chalet structure, clad with recreations of Burrill’s work cut from multi-veneer board.
As well as his self-authored work and commissioned design, Burrill makes regular appearances at events and talks worldwide. He also runs creative workshops attended by children, students and creative professionals alike. He documents and communicates his work and points of inspiration prolifically via social media, with thousands of followers on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.
Burrill was born in Littleborough, Lancashire. After studying Graphic Design at Leeds Polytechnic he completed an MA in Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art, London. He now lives and works on the Isle of Oxney, Kent.

http://www.anthonyburrill.com/about/biography

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/tags/typography/page/12/ 


Anthony Burrill's work is beautiful. By using the traditional printing press he gives his work a homely and warm atmosphere. It also allows him to create crisp pieces of work that are always slightly varied. This makes every poster it's own exciting piece. The type is basic and bold, simply stating the message with no urgency or abruptness. The works are easy overlooked but, once noticed, they are unforgettable. The simplicity of the coloration and type makes his posters easy to absorb and highlights the individual differences. Burrill keeps us on our toes with clever ideas like the 'Oil & Water Do Not Mix' poster, which was printed in oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster. This brought a completely new message to the poster. The phrases he uses are uplifting and lighthearted when they aren't political messages. If collected together, they would create a fantastic manifesto. His work will be helpful in my 2D course because it provides beautiful examples of how basic, clear designs can enliven a message.