Week Nine - Charles S Anderson

This week’s reading took me down a rebellious and psychedelic path. I found the assigned reading to be interesting but not terribly compelling to me. Little pieces here and there stuck out, but nothing resonated strongly as what I should focus on for this week’s field journal. So I decided to look deeper into one of the designs I was familiar with – the Classico pasta sauce label designed by Charles Spencer Anderson in 1985.  Its design had a vintage inspiration and appeal and combined with mason jars made the product soar in sales - $92 million in just two years, despite limited advertising.

When I dove into researching Charles S Anderson I came to find out he was far more than a designer who focused on packaging and labels – in fact he has been a driving force behind the popularity of retro and nostalgic designs that have flavored the last few decades of pop culture. His upbringing in a small rural town led to a love of drawing and fascination with vintage advertising, comic books and monster magazines and no doubt influenced many of his designs. His work is described as often being fueled by small town boredom combined with an overactive imagination.

His advertising art work is both ironic and artistic and seems to constantly evolve. He now owns his own design firm, charles s. anderson design co. based in Minneapolis, and unlike many of the graphic designers who I studied who passed away long ago or at an early age, he is not only living but still producing an astonishing number of designs every year. Besides Classico, his designs have appeared on products / in advertisements for Target, Urban Outfitters, Paramount Picures, Fossil, Nissan, Ralph Lauren, Vanity Fair, Turner Classic Movies and Rolling Stone. His work also has been featured several times at the Design Triennial of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

This is used as the masthead on his design firm’s website and I think it’s very insightful:

“Design is a brand's signature and its story. We like to think of it as art for commerce, the culmination of research, relationships, strategic thinking, experience, intuition, and aesthetics. We believe that truly great design is about making something that adds richness to people's lives; something inspiring, memorable, funny, abrasive, ironic, elegant, ugly, human – anything but uninteresting.”

As you see above, I included a small selection of his work - and his collection is truly extensive. In fact it is the largest I have seen when researching any graphic designer so far for this class. Here is a great link with just a fraction of his work. Just knowing that he is still producing his work, and the sheer volume produced each year is a bit mind blowing. 

I find his designs to be exactly as his company's masthead describes - interesting, ironic and memorable. I love the retro looks and influences, and am most attracted to his designs that he did in color as he uses bright, complementary colors in his work. From the samples I found online, his black and white designs are as numerous as his colored illustrations and both frequently feature dark, thick lines and strong subjects. 

His design firm's website mentions that he continues to find inspiration in the history of graphic design, and I can certainly see that in his work. I can also appreciate the evolution of his designs and see their influences in products I see on a daily basis. I am a bit surprised that with his considerable influence, vision and history as a graphic designer that he didn't garner a larger portion of Megg's History of Graphic design book. However, I have no doubt that his continued work in the field will lead to much larger mentions in textbooks for graphic design students in the future. With Charles S Anderson continuing to develop, produce and publish his designs today, I find that this is an exciting time to be a graphic design student and have no doubt that his work will influence my designs in the future.

Sources:

https://www.inkling.com/read/history-of-graphic-design-philip-meggs-5th/chapter-22/figure-22-47 - Classico Sauce Image 

http://www.csaimages.com/about.asp - Images of CSA designs and biographical information

http://mcad.edu/125/alumni/charles-spencer-anderson - biography of Charles S Anderson

 http://csadesign.com/ - Charles S Anderson's design firm, source of quote and images of work

Week Eight - Women In Graphic Design

For the focus of my field journal this week I chose to examine the role of women in Graphic Design. Although several of my classmates covered this subject in previous modules, I think this week’s reading really highlighted major contributions from women in graphic design in the twentieth century. We learned about Deborah Sussman, Cipe Pineles, Muriel Cooper and several others, but I thought I would focus on the three ladies I just mentioned as I found their work to be most inspiring to me as a young female graphic design student.

When you search the web for subjects like “women graphic design” you get some interesting search results. I found several results of women as objects within graphic design rather than as designers themselves. Finding information about female graphic designers from 50 – 60 years ago is even more challenging. I did find this great article about inspirational female graphic designers, and it did mention Deborah Sussman, who we studied this week as well as many other contemporary female graphic designers and artists whose names I had not encountered yet. Sussman is known for her work as an environmental graphic designer and spearheaded the designs for the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984 where she incorporated vibrant colors like magenta and teal with elements of the American flag to create logos and designs that were adaptable to the event and its different venues. She went on to work on projects for the Rolling Stones as well as Disney World. I found her particularly interesting due to her extensive use of bright colors in many of her designs, which I find quite eye-catching and appealing.

 

Cipe Pineles is considered to be a major designer of the twentieth century, but finding any online information about her that was more than a just paragraph or two about her proved challenging. Even her article in Wikipedia is just a few lines long. Pineles was an art director for Glamour, Seventeen, Charm and Mademoiselle in the 1940’s and 1950’s who was the first (or among the first, sources vary on this) to commission fine artists to create illustrations for mass market magazines. She was also the very first female admitted to the New York Art Directors Club, breaking ground and through the glass ceiling for female designers and art directors who would succeed her. Her work was considered unconventional at the time, both for her use of fine art in the magazines as well as her personal influence stemming from her background and experience. Pineles passed away in 1991, well before I would study graphic design, but I admire her fearlessness and intuition - I think her work was interesting and provided influence to graphic designers (both men and women) who followed her.

 

I considered writing this entire blog / field journal post about Muriel Cooper. When I read about her in this week in our assigned reading I was intrigued. She sounds like a teacher whose class I would have adored, mostly for her passion for graphic design and pushing the edge of where technology can take it. Sadly, Cooper passed away in 1994. Cooper worked as both a print designer as well as the founder of the Visual Language Workshop at MIT. She created over 500 books as well as logos, like the recognized MIT Press logo. I love this article from the New York Times about her – it really gives a great biography of her and you get a great understanding of how spunky, ambitious and creative she was. While she is known for what she did do with computers and 3D design, it also highlights both her frustrations and willingness to experiment with new technology to create exceptional design and lead other young graphic designers forward with technology. She pioneered digital graphic design and her students and those influenced by her are vocal about her influence and passion. It is easy to find references to her work and influence all over the internet, which I suspect she would have rather enjoyed if she were still alive today.

These significant women of the twentieth century are thought of as great graphic designers for not just their work or their influence, but their legacy of opening the doors for other female graphic designers, editors and art directors. They all chose to push the envelope, show restraint where needed, and use their passion and personal interests to shape their work into amazing and sometimes groundbreaking designs. Looking at my graphic design classes, it seems that half, if not more, of the students are women. Sussman, Pineles and Cooper helped get us here by showing that great graphic design work can not only be done by women, but that women can pioneer new ideas in design and technology and push all graphic designers forward. I think their contributions as female graphic designers are incredible and that all graphic design students, male or female, should take the time to really appreciate their contributions and find inspiration in their work.

Sources:

http://princessajaelu.blogspot.com/ - image for Deborah Sussman’s Olympics work

http://juliettebrooks.blogspot.com/2010/09/deborah-sussman.html - image for Deborah Sussman’s Disney sign and biographical information

http://voices.yahoo.com/cipe-pineles-biography-2999325.html - biography about Cipe Pineles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipe_Pineles - biography about Cipe Pineles

http://theredlist.fr/wiki-2-343-917-999-view-publishing-profile-pineles-cipe.html - images of work by Cipe Pineles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Cooper - biography of Muriel Cooper

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/style/28iht-design1.1.7670693.html?_r=0 - biography for Muriel Cooper

http://designkultur.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/muriel-cooper-polymath-extraordinaire/ - Image of Muriel Cooper

http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2004/?id=5 - Images of Muriel Cooper’s work and biography

http://designfeaster.blogspot.com/2013/10/think-studios-john-clifford-celebrates.html - Image of Muriel Cooper’s work “soft type”

Week Seven - Infographics

Like many of my classmates this week, I found the materials we covered in class a bit challenging to absorb. I usually have no trouble gravitating towards a particular portion of our lesson to write about in my field journal, and I enjoy doing research and thinking about subjects I either already know about and can share my opinion on, or others that I know little about but take time to research and share.  This week I hit a bit of writer’s block however. 

I spent time going over the chapters again, and the one image that resonated the most was image 17-58 on page 367 in Megg’s History of Graphic Design– it is the image shown above, an infographic designed by Herbert Bayer in 1953 for the World Geo-Graphic Atlas.  I think the reason this image was the most interesting to me as opposed to the dozens of others in our reading this week is because of the colors used, the organization of information and symbols and diagrams that Bayer incorporated.  I love reading all the sidebars of bits of information and I enjoy the color coding and details these designs incorporate. Bayer's new map / infographic  was pioneering a new method of delivering information by combining diagrams and assembled information into a new, innovative design that moved away from the traditional maps found in atlases for years. 

Steven Heller wrote a great article for PRINT Mag about Bayer and had this wonderful summary of his work :

"The 1953 World Geo-Graphic Atlas, published by Walter Paepcke’s Container Corporation of America (CCA), is a monument to Bayer’s singular vision, a precursor to current trends in information design, and an example of how complex data can be made accessible."

Modern use of these infographics is alive and well – especially online and in print (newspapers and magazines in particular). After all, we live in a digital era where being able to have instant access to information in a way that is organized and visually appealing is far more interesting than tedious reading and gathering of information. This blog offers insight on the appeal of infographics and how to create a balance between design and data. and I found some infographics that are quite a bit more recent than Bayer’s that I found both interesting and entertaining and included some samples above. This website has a great list of popular and award winning infographics from a couple of years ago. 

I really enjoy this type of graphic design. In fact, my husband and I recently got married and incorporated an infographic as our save the date card. The one shown below isn't ours, but you get the idea. It's found here on the Wedding Paper Divas wedding invitation website. They have quite a few new designs that are also infographics, so the idea must be popular and appealing to their customer base, and as Steven Heller pointed out in Herbert Bayer's work, infographics like these make information much more accessible (and more fun in my opinion). 

This choice was made well before taking this course, and I had no idea what I was looking at at the time – just that we were both drawn to the design, images and symbols and we both thought it was an informative and fun option – and one that I found very visually appealing. I would love to go forward in my career as a graphic designer and have people find the same qualities in my work. After all, graphic design is about communicating and sharing information, so why not make it fun, enjoyable and memorable? I think if a project can incorporate all of those elements it must be considered a successful graphic design.

Sources:

http://nowsourcing.com/2011/12/29/best-infographics-of-2011/  - Images of infographics (wedding, new year and google)

http://blog.crazyegg.com/2012/02/22/infographics-how-to-strike-the-elusive-balance-between-data-and-visualization/ - Information about modern use of infographics

http://www.weddingpaperdivas.com/shop/magnets--save-the-date-cards.htm - Images of save the date cards

http://www.printmag.com/imprint/herbert-bayer-world-geo-graphic-atla/ - article about Herbert Bayer

Week Six - Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandisnky c. 1913

Through our reading on Modern Art and its influences this week we were introduced to many new art movements and artists – the beginning of the twentieth century was both an exciting and tumultuous time for art and graphic design.  One common thread found in the majority of these art movements was a desire to leave traditional work behind and focus on advancing art to new levels, frequently with the desire to promote utopian ideas.  Cubism, Da Da, Art Deco and Surrealism were just a few of the art movements we studied, and we learned about the contributions of major artists such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Man Ray.

One artist whose name came up several times in our reading was Wassily Kandinsky. I admit that prior to our reading and the research I did for this journal entry, I had heard his name but I couldn’t have told you what he was known for, what his influences and ideas were and what some his most popular pieces were. I thought I would use this week's journal entry to focus on him, his art theories and why his work is so visually appealing to me as a graphic design student and photographer.

Landscape with Rolling Hills, Kandinsky, 1910

Kandinsky was a Russian born artist who was quite influential as both a painter and as an art theorist. Kandinsky is well known for creating the first purely abstract work and is considered by many to be the founder of abstract art. His works were a creation of his intense philosophical beliefs, based on his own personal experiences with art. He carried a devotion to inner beauty and passion of spirit – both were a central aspect of his art that he remained true to throughout his life. His art theories included ideas such as artists being prophets (he had some compositions that focused on the apocalypse), and that artists were creating paintings and pieces that were part of an upward moving pyramid – that the tip of that pyramid points into the future, and that what is strange, relatively unknown or avante garde today will be common and popular concepts tomorrow. He also felt that artists were responsible for making these discoveries and presenting them as part of a future reality. 

Squares with Concentric Circles, Kandinsky, 1913

An internet search on Kandinsky will also bring up recent sales of his work  - his 1909 painting Studie für Improvisation 8 was sold last year by Christies for a very impressive $23 million dollars, and in 1990 Sotheby’s sold his painting titled Fugue for $20.9 million dollars. His work rarely featured human figures but his paintings were usually quite colorful, and sometimes he mixed sand in the paint to add texture and a rustic quality. He spent a great deal of time on the concept of inner necessity, which to him was a standard of art, the foundation of which was the basis of forms and the harmony of colors.

Composition VII, Kandinsky 1913

Part of the reason I chose to research Kandinsky and write this journal post about him, is that I initially thought of him as an interesting artist due to the vivid colors and interesting forms in his paintings. As you can see from the three images I used as examples above, Kandinsky's work is quite varied, but to me the common element that they all share is their strong use of color and form. 

While I respected him as an artist and found his work interesting, I initially didn't see how an artist, a painter in fact, from a century ago would have any bearing on my future graphic design work. However, as a photographer and now as a graphic design student I am drawn to color and strong shapes. I like looking at art with these elements and I find color inspiring. I also like creating art and images that are vibrant and interesting to the eye, not necessarily because of their subject per se, but because of the emphasis of shape and color. I find images that contain those elements to be more thought provoking and appealing. Kandinsky's work is more than visually appealing to me now - it is mesmerizing and inspirational. 

Through researching Kandinsky, I also have come to understand some (admittedly not all) of his art theories and I like the ideas he presented. While I have not yet been tasked to create my own graphic designs, I suspect that color will be heavily emphasized in my creations as well, and would be proud to think of the influence that Wassily Kandinsky has on my work in the future. 

Sources:
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/1852 - Landscape with Rolling Hills image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky - Biography, portrait image and Composition VII image
http://artmastered.tumblr.com/post/12975116212/squares-with-concentric-circles-by-wassily - Squares with Concentric Circles Image
http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/ - Biographical information
http://www.wassily-kandinsky.org/ - Biographical information