Week 2

The chapter begins by telling the history of a poet who began to experiment with breaking conventions by arranging text on a page not based on symmetry but in relation to sound. The book says that he said "the white space was like silence." Which I think is a very intuitive and important thing to remember while designing. I also think it is amazing that it was a poet, an artist that connects words and rhythms, that experimented with this. Also, it is how we consume most poetry today.
Related image

Scottish Poetry Library. (n.d.). Retrieved January 22, 2020, from http://www.emily-isles.com/scottish-poetry-library

The futurist movement's interrogation of text's relationship with art and space on the page has never resonated with me in the way that it is now that I am taking a semiotics class. The way in which the textbook describes a child-like attitude inherent in futurism really makes sense as once you begin to break down the symbols we use to communicate you get to a lot of themes in contemporary photography and art in general. Seeing how that expanded from text into other forms of art it is easier to translate some of the ideas I think. 
Pollack, M. (2014, February 26). 'Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe' at the Guggenheim Museum. Retrieved January 22, 2020, from https://observer.com/2014/02/italian-futurism-1909-1944-reconstructing-the-universe-at-the-guggenheim-museum/

The part of the portion of the textbook that goes on to discuss poster design in Soviet Russia that I found memorable was the use of color to reference different clothing that represented people, like red for worker's shirts and black for priests and capitalist's fabric of the clothes they would wear. This reference to fashion makes me rethink a lot of what I struggle with with fashion as an art form, but the reminder that it can be used to identify people as well as distort observation is important here I think. Also that color can represent people and the fibers of their clothes. It is a much more palpable way of seeing design to me. 

Image result for vintage soviet clothing

Comments

  1. Dolores WilberJanuary 26, 2020 at 6:20 AM

    Terrific comments, "the white space was like silence" is really important.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post 1 (Matthew Donald)

Image
One of the pieces that really caught my eye during the reading was Alphonse Mucha's Job  cigarette papers advertisement. There was something very intriguing about the way he created a background texture using an element from the foreground. "JOB" is written in big letters at the very top of the poster and its accented by "job" written in little letters evenly throughout the background. I think it does a good job at creating an interesting composition while maintaining the central focus around the brand. The big "JOB" flows on top of a large ring where a woman sits. I think the overall shape of the illustration was executed very well because of its emphasis on curves. The curves of the hair and the woman are all reinforced by the circle in the center of the page. Mucha, A. (1898). "Job" poster for cigarette papers. Retrieved from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JOB_(rolling_papers)  on January 1st, 2020. In this piece of typography created ...
Read more

Post 3 - Sam Weible

Image
From the experimentation and norm-breaking designs of the avant garde movement came some of my favorite European designs predating 1940s. From this period, I particularly love the posters advertising the London Underground. I first saw some of these posters at the Art Institute over the summer and was immediately intrigued by their design, how they managed somehow be both artistically beautiful and utilitarian. The elements of each poster followed suit, text and imagery being generally separate from one another on the page yet communicating a since of uniformity. While that was the case for most of the poster I got to see, it wasn't for every Underground poster. There are actually a great variance of design and style between these mass-produced posters. This poster, "Power", from the textbook, for example, hardly has any visual unity. What it's trying to communicate is unclear and the visual ties the artist tries to make between each element isn't as unifying as...
Read more

2/5 in class reflection

I liked learning a bit of back story on Bert Stern. I like learning a more in depth about a designers history. Its interesting to see where these designers are coming from however, I know that the time frame of this class doesn't really allow for too much of that. I didn't really like watching the ted talk at the beginning because, while the message is good, this is the fourth class I have had to watch that talk in.
Read more