Chapter 19 Flashcards
Brownjohn, Chermayeff, & Geismar
The initial contribution of these three to American graphic design sprang from a strong aesthetic background and an understanding of the major ideas of European modern art. A communicative immediacy, a strong sense of form, and a vitality and freshness characterized their work in the early months of the partnership. Images and symbols were combined with a surreal sense of dislocation to convey the essence of the subject on book jackets and posters. A fine sense of both typography and art history enabled them to solve problems through inventive and symbolic manipulation of forms and imagery. Solutions grew out of the needs of the client and the limitations of the problems at hand.
Doyle Dane Bernbach Agency
Opened its doors at 350 Madison Avenue in New York City with a staff of 13 and less than half a million dollars in client accounts. Bill Bernbach was the partner with responsibility for the creative area, and his initial staff consisted of art director Bob Gage and copywriter Phyllis Robinson. They developed a strategy surrounding important advantages, distinguishing characteristics, or superior features of a product. In their approach, a synergistic relationship between visual and verbal components was established. Because concept was dominant, the design of many of their advertisements was reduced to the basic elements necessary to convey the message: a large, arresting visual image, a concise headline of bold weight, and body copy that staked its claim with factual and often entertaining writing instead of puffery and meaningless superlatives.
Visual/verbal syntax
Word and image fused into a conceptual expression of an idea so that they become completely interdependent, the Bernbach approach evolved during the 1950s and 1960s by Bill Bernbach at the New York advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach
“The new advertising”
In new, small boutique advertising agencies, emphasis was placed on creativity rather than on full marketing services. An attempt was made to create more honest, literate, and tasteful appeals to the market audience.
Figurative typography
a playful direction taken by New York graphic designers during the 1950s and 60s. This approach, spearheaded by Gene Frederico, took many forms: letterforms became images, such as the wheel on the Fredico’s ad for Women’s Day; or the visual properties of words themselves, or their organization in space, were sued to express an idea, such as in Don Egensteiner’s “Tonnage” advertisement, in which the visual form of the word takes on a connotative meaning.
Phototypography
The setting of type by exposing negatives of alphabet characters to photographic paper dawned in 1925 with the public announcement of the Thothmis photographic composing machine invented by E. K. Hunter and J. R. C. August of London. A keyboard produced a punched tape to control a long, opaque master film with transparent letterforms. As a given letter moved in position in front of a lens, it was exposed to photographic paper by a beam of light
Typogram
Brief, visual typographic form in which concept and visual form are merged into a oneness
International Typeface Corporation (ITC)
Established by Aaron Burns, ITC designed and licensed 34 fully developed type families and about 60 additional display faces during its first decade. Its fonts had large x-heights and short ascenders and descenders; these became the prevailing characteristics of fonts designed during the 1970s and early the 1980s
Paul Rand
- 1914-96
- More than any other American designer, he initiated the American approach to modern design. He began the first phase of his design career as a promotional and editorial designer for the magazines Apparel Arts, Esquire, Ken, Coronet, andGlass Packer. A thorough knowledge of the modern movement, particularly the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and the cubists, led him to the understanding that freely invented shapes could have a self-contained life, both symbolic and expressive, as a visual communications tool. He manipulated visual form (through shape, color, space, line, and value) and skillfullly analyzed communications content, reducing it to a symbolic essence without turning it sterile or dull, making him widely influential while still in his twenties. His collaborations with copywriter Bill Bernbach became a prototype for the now ubiquitous art/copy team working closely together to create a synergistic visual/verbal integration. Thoughts on Design, his 1946 book, illustrated with over eighty examples of his work, inspired a generation of designers (Figs. 19–1 through 19–9).
Bill Bernbach
- 1911
- the copywriter who collaborated with Paul Rand; the duo became the prototype for the now ubiquitous art/copy team working closely together to create a synergistic visual/verbal integration.
Alvin Lustig
- 1915-55
- During a design career in a life cut short by illness, he incorporated his subjective vision and private symbols into graphic design. His design methodology—searching for symbols to capture the essence of the contents and treating form and content as one—received a receptive response from its literary audience. In 1945, he became the visual design research director of Lookmagazine, a position he held until 1946
Alex Steinweiss
- b.1916
- Named art director of Columbia Records, he searched for visual forms and shapes to express music. Often he approached space informally; elements were placed on the field with a casual balance sometimes bordering on a random scattering of forms
Bradbury Thompson
- 1911-95
- emerged as one of the most influential graphic designers in postwar America. His designs for Westvaco Inspirations, four-color publications demonstrating printing papers, made a significant impact. A thorough knowledge of printing and typesetting, combined with an adventurous spirit of experimentation, allowed him to expand the range of design possibilities. He discovered and explored the potential of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings as design resources. Large, bold organic and geometric shapes were used to bring graphic and symbolic power to the page. Letterforms and patterns, such as the details from halftone reproductions, were often enlarged and used as design elements or to create visual patterns and movements. During the 1960s and 1970s, Thompson turned increasingly to a classical approach to book and editorial format design. Readability, formal harmony, and a sensitive use of Old Style typefaces marked his work for periodicals such as Smithsonianand ARTnews
Saul Bass
- 1919-96
- The sensibilities of the New York School were carried to Los Angeles by Bass when he moved from New York to California in 1950 and opened a studio there two years later. Paul Rand’s use of shape and asymmetrical balance during the 1940s was an important inspiration for him, but while Rand’s carefully orchestrated compositions used complex contrasts of shape, color, and texture, Bass frequently reduced his designs to a single dominant image. He had a remarkable ability to express the nucleus of a design with images that became glyphs, or elemental pictorial signs that exerted great graphic power. Producer and director Otto Preminger commissioned him to create unified graphic materials for his films, including logos, theater posters, advertisements, and animated film titles for the 1955 design program for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm. In addition to his film graphics, he created numerous corporate identity programs
George Tscherny
- b.1924
- headed the graphic design department for the New York design firm George Nelson & Associates before opening his own design office in 1956. An intuitive and sensitive designer, Tscherny possesses an ability to seize the essence of the subject and express it in stunningly simple terms. His vocabulary of techniques for solving design problems includes type, photography, simple calligraphic brush drawing, and bold, simple shapes cut from colored papers
