Monday 26 March 2012

Theory Into Practise Letterpress Research.

General Info
The letterpress printing process is one of the oldest ways of getting the printed word on to a page. It relies on a physical representation of each letter being inked and then pressed against the paper — and this is why it’s both interesting and expensive. Thinking a little further about it for each page the printer needs a piece of metal to represent every single character; a way of applying ink to each character and a machine to force the metal and paper together. It follows that changing from bold to italic, for example, will need a totally new set of metal characters rather than a few clicks of a mouse. Other printing processes like lithography or digital printing are more flexible, quick and less expensive. But while commercial letterpress is in decline there are many who are starting from scratch with this wonderful process.
It’s a constraining process but allows a certain freedom which inspires lots of designers. The time taken can induce a concentration which excludes the immediate world. In many ways letterpress is the antithesis of the modern graphics work. It provides a wonderful and absorbing pastime that demands just as much time, space and money as you would like to allow.

Composition
Leading and other spacing materials
Leading is a term that has made it’s way to the graphic designer’s computer.  It defines the gap between lines and in letterpress printing it is done by inserting a thin strip of lead.Leads are around the same height as spacing and so don’t print.  They vary in length and also width.  On width, leads are supplied in point sizes and are most commonly available in 1, 1½, 2 and 3 points.
Clumps can be thought of as extra wide spaces: they are usually made in multiples of an em and so 12pt clumps will normally be 12, 24, 36 or 48pt wide.  They are made of the same material as spaces and are the same height.  A secondary use here is in word spacing for larger type sizes: a 12 x 36 pt clump makes a useful space for 36pt type.
Reglet is line spacing that is larger than leads.  Almost always made of wood and the same height as leads, it is used to give more space between lines and is most often employed on title pages or notices to create white space between lines.
Next in terms of size are quotations, originally designed to correctly space side-notes and quotations in book work.  They are metal and full spaces that are multiples of clumps.  Typically 48pt and larger they are an accurate way of filling space.
Furniture is the largest of the spacing material.  Originally wood, it is supplied in ems rather than points.  Finding wood to suffer from warping and easily damaged, printers began to use metal furniture (from the same material as spaces), and then aluminium girder pattern furniture which was lighter.  One development was the use of a Formica-dervied material called Resalite.  Stephenson, Blake claimed this was better than metal furniture because damage on one dimension would not cause problems with accuracy.
This rather grand sounding material is used to set curved lines of type.  It’s not used too often now, but the was a fad for firm names to be set in an arc or circle.  These are always supplied in pairs and have two surfaces that match each other.  Type is set between them and then locked up.  There are a number of methods used to get this to work corrrectly: setting type against sticky tape to hold them in place; or spacing them with wet paper to form a sold mass once dry.
Squeeze
Squeeze’ is the term to describe the difference between the length of a line of type as sat in the composing stick; and the same line when locked up in a chase ready to print.  The accepted view was that a compositor should set type a little longer than the measure (line length) but the forces of quoins would squeeze the type together and bring it back to the intended size.
Lock Up
Knowing that all the matter to be printed has to be locked together in a metal frame (the chase) leads to some important questions, the primary one being: how can I make sure that everything will be level and maintain its structure?  This practice is calledLockup.  Where lockup is weak, it allows things to move within the forme and causes inaccuracies.  In addition, loose material (like spaces) can work up from the forme to touch the printed page.  This leaves a black square mark between words where the spacing material has been inked and printed.
In longer-run jobs the impact of rising spaces is magnified: if a space is loose and can work up on each impression, a movement of just 0.001″ per impression will cause the space to print on the page after just 500 impressions.  In the world of commercial, high-volume letterpress this could be a massive problem.

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Postage Stamps Water Conservation Imagery.

I find the aesthetics of these designs, I like the colour and type and I think the composition works well to convey the message. I think the use of rhyme is also very clever as the message will be more likely to stick in the audiences mind.

I like the simplicity of these designs, especially the repeat pattern, as I think it allows the message to be very strong and not confusing. I also like how the imagery being used is a clever play on words about what's being said.

The statistics of water conservation and general facts are being communicated here. The message is very important and serious which really accentuates the importance of water conservation.

This piece focuses strongly on information and puts it across very clearly. I think the use of icons helps this as well as the limited colour scheme.

There has been a lot of thought put into this image and it isn't as obvious as the other designs. The reflection of the dodo is an interesting way of reflecting what is in store. The style of illustration is also very attractive to me.

There is a strong naive quality in this design which I think would be appealing to children. This would be an interesting to focus at but it could also be beneficial, as children are the adults of the future who could help make a change.

I chose this piece as it steps away from the traditional water colour scheme. Although I think it's interesting I want my stamps to be obvious to the audience as they are on a small scale and I think a blue colour will play a big part in portraying the concept.

Finally I like the unusual composition in this poster and the photographic imagery, which is something I could experiment with.

Lecture Thirteen - Visual Communication.

Definitions
  • Visual communication is the layers of communication and context that shapes out understanding. It applies the properties of linguistics to images.
  • Semioticians are people who study signs and unravel the meaning.
  • Denotation is the level of meaning that describes something.
  • Connotation is with a deeper understanding and further knowledge.
  • Ideology is how values and beliefs underpin the way people in a society.
Semioticians
  • Roland Barthes, 'How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?'
  • Rudolf Wittkower, interested in the way that in different times and places we use the same symbols. He believed art communicated experience, one culture picked up and transformed the images of another.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, interested in peoples upbringing Due conclusion in culture by levels of communication and how people understand images.
Image Deconstruction
  • The Only way is Essex.
    • Denotation - group of young people sat on a guilder chair enjoying themselves.
    • Connotation - different meaning for the people who know it.
  • Obama image.
    • Denotation - man stood incidentally stood in front of a building.
    • Connotation - power, confidence. Democracy (building), symbolic ancient greek architecture, roman dome feature referencing power.
  • Reichstag.
    • Nazi building, dome = power
    • 1880's 90's it was decided to change the connotations and symbolism surrounding the building.
    • Reichstag was wrapped in silk to give a new meaning. Signified a break in the past and a new future for Germany.
  • Dragons.
    • Welsh flag - cultural.
    • World of Warcraft - hell, red, fire.
    • Church window - Saint, stained glass, angles, christianity symbol.

Lecture Twelve - Communication.

Theories
  • The Information or Cybernetic theory of communication, Shannon and Weaver Bell Laboratories (1949).
  • Systems theory, links other theories together. Advantage is that you can switch between frames of reference.
  • The Phenomenological tradition, the process of knowing through direct experience. The process of interpretation is central. Communication seen as an extension of the nervous system.
Three levels of potential communication problems
  • Technical - accuracy/compatibility.
  • Semantic - precision of language.
  • Effectiveness - does the message effect behaviour.
Audiences and Social Class
  • National Readership Survey
    • Upper Middle Class
    • Middle Class
    • Skilled Working Class
    • Working Class
    • Subsidence 
  • 2001
    • Managerial/Professional
    •  Intermediate occupation
    • Small employers
    • Lower supervisory and technical
    • Semi routine and routine
    • Never worked
  • Main audience categories: individuals, adults, men, women, housewives etc.
Semiotics
  • Semantics - addresses what a sign stands for.
  • Syntactics - the relationships among signs. Part of a larger system referred to as codes.
  • Pragmatics - studies the practical use and effects of signs.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

45 Designers.

Modernism
The pioneer of swiss graphic design, Joseff muller brockmann changed the face of the graphics industry and inspired a generation. Born in 1914, he studied architecture, design and history of art and in 1936 opened his own studio in zurich, specialising in in graphics, exhibition design and photography. Muller Brockmann was a true aster and rare pioneer of his craft, and even after his death in 1996, his work still sets a benchmark for others in his profession.
I would consider him a modernist designer due to his constant use of sans serif typefaces and strong compositions following the grid.

 Hans Neuburg
Hans Neuburg (1904-1983), one of the pioneers of the swiss "constructive" graphic design style. Neuburg also contributed a text "grafik nach swb-norm": he propagates an ascetic design style without ornaments – in the vein of industrial design, modern architecture and "concrete" art."
In Neuburgs work I really like his choice of colour and his use of overlaid geometric shapes which lends itself to the modernist aesthetic.

 Herbert Bayer
American painter, designer, photographer and typographer, of Austrian birth. After serving in the Austrian army (1917–18), he studied architecture under Professor Schmidthammer in Linz in 1919 and in 1920 worked with the architect Emanuel Margold in Darmstadt. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting and typography; it was at this time that he created the Universal alphabet, consisting only of lower-case letters. In 1925 he returned to the Bauhaus, then in Dessau, as a teacher of advertising, layout and typography, remaining there until 1928. For the next ten years he was based in Berlin as a commercial artist: he worked as art manager of Vogue (1929–30) and as director of the Dorland advertising agency.
Again in Bayers work I am drawn in to his use of shapes to add interest to the composition in a simplistic way following the grid layout to give a uniform and organised appearance.

 Walter Allner
Walter Allner died aged 97. His incredible career reads like a history of Modernist graphic design. He trained at the Bauhaus under Albers, Kandinsky and Klee. He worked alongside Otto Neurath, Piet Zwart and A.M. Cassandre. He founded the International Poster Annual, started his own company and freelanced for Johnson & Johnson, I.B.M. and Life magazine. Allner’s most notable contributions are the 79 covers of Fortune magazine where he was the Art Director from 1962 to 1974.
Allners pieces have a strong leaning to the use of black and neutral designs highlighted with bold, block colour.

Aleksandr Rodchenko was an avant-garde Russian graphic designer from Moscow during the early 1900s who was known as one of the founders of Constructivism art, or the rejection of the idea of autonomous art in favor of art as a practice for social purposes. Rodchenko had experience in painting and sculpting before eventually transitioning to photography.
Rodchenko's choice of blocky lettering is very striking and lends itself solely to a modernist style.

Post Modernism
 David Carson
David Carson (born September 8, 1954) is an American graphic designer. He is best known for his innovative magazine design, and use of experimental typography. He was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun. Carson was perhaps the most influential graphic designer of the 1990s. In particular, his widely imitated aesthetic defined the so-called "grunge typography" era.
To me Carson is solely Post Modern it is clear through his designs that he follows the idea of form over function and that the appearance of his pieces is what matters most and that communication is secondary.

 Stefan Sagmeister
Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in BregenzAustria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm—Sagmeister Inc.—in New York City.
I personally really like the piece of work on the left I think the idea of it is very clever and visually attractive, it as well follows the rule form over function.

April Greiman is a thinker and artist, whose transmedia projects, innovative ideas and hybrid based approach, have been influential world wide over the last 30 years. Her explorations of image, word and colour as objects in time and space are grounded in her singular fusion of art and technology. Greiman has been instrumental in the acceptance and use of advanced technology in the arts and design process since the early 1980's.
I think the main reason she would be considered post modern is her keen belief in combining many aspects of design to create a finished piece rather than following one style and approach.

 Neville Brody
Neville Brody is an internationally renowned designer, typographer, art director and brand strategist. As founder of the Research Studios network and partner in each of our operations, his insight, methodology and appetite for excellence inform every aspect of our work.
On both these examples of his work type has been experimented with in different ways. On the first is the overlaying of letterforms, wheres with the piece on the right the type seems distorted with the effect of using the spaces surrounding the type itself. Both give interesting, post modern looks.

 Wolfgang Weingart
He ignited the spark of ‘typographic anarchy’ that exploded on the verge of the nineteen nineties. He fathered what was subsequently dubbed ‘Swiss Punk’, ‘New Wave’, post-modernism. His name is Wolfgang Weingart. Weingart was born in the midst of the World War II in Germany. Most famous for his experimental, expressive work that broke the mould of classical Swiss typography, Weingart began his typographic career in the early sixties as an apprentice of hand composition at a typesetting firm. He then decided to further his studies at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland, the cradle of classical Swiss typography.
I really like Weingart's approach to mixing scanned imagery, photographs and type to create visually exciting designs. His experiments with size and placement of type is also interesting.

Graffiti/Street Art
Blu is the pseudonym of an italian artist who conceals his real identity. He lives in Bologna and has been active in street art since 1999. Blu’s fame began in 1999, thanks to a series of illicit graffiti painted in the historical center and suburbs of Bologna, the capital of Italy’sEmilia-Romagna region. In the early years of his career his technique was limited to the use of spray paint, the typical medium of graffiti culture. His characteristic style appeared in 2001, however, when Blu started painting with house paint, using rollers mounted on top of telescopic sticks. This new solution allowed him to increase the painted surface area and convey a stronger intensity to his visual vocabulary. Huge human figures, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes dramatic, who looked as if they were borrowed from comics orarcade games, began appearing along the streets of Bologna around this time.
I really like Blu's illustrative style of graffiti and I del it would transfer well to Graphic design work.

 Sheppard Fairey
Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary graphic designer and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. His work became more widely known in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, specifically his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and most influential street artists.
I really like how Fairey has taken the block colour style of graffiti and applied it to his work to create designs with such big impact that gets peoples attention in a similar way to actual graffiti.

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. anksy's work was born of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. According to author and graphic designer Tristan Manco and the book Home Sweet Home, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s. Known for his contempt for the government in labelling graffiti as vandalism, Banksy displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and even going as far as to build physical prop pieces. Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti directly himself; however, art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.


123Klan is a French graffiti crew, founded in 1992 by husband and wife Scien and Klor. Since 1994 the crew have also worked ingraphic design, inspired by the work of Neville Brody, and started to apply it to their graffiti (and vice versa). They describe their art as ‘when street knowledge meets technology and graffiti melds with graphic design’. Dean, Sper, Skam, Meric, and Reso 1 are the other crew members. Now residing in Montréal, Canada - 123Klan's studio has found its niche specializing in character illustration, branding, toy design, and touring the world speaking at conferences. Their client list extends to the likes of Nike, Adidas, Lamborghini, Coca Cola, Stussy, Sony, Nasdaq to name a few.
123 Klan work really focuses on bringing the style of graffiti to a digital world and combining it with graphic design. I like there type style and how it links so well with the source inspiration.

An Italian graphic designer and graffiti writer. He started to paint in '97, after a few years his passion for lettering led him to study the type and graphic design in Milan, where he currently lives and works. He enjoys exploring and experimenting with geometric shapes and typography.
I find this simplistic graffiti style vary effective and I think the use of white space aesthetically pleasing to look at.


Film Theory
Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was a graphic designer and filmmaker, perhaps best known for his design offilm posters and motion picture title sequencesDuring his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Alfred HitchcockOtto PremingerBilly WilderStanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the credits racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that races together and apart in PsychoBass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America.
My favourite aspect of Saul Bass' work is his imagery that communicate the theme of the films in an out of the box way.

 Olly Moss
Olly Moss (born 1987) is an English artist, graphic designer and illustrator. He is best known for his re-imagining of movie posters. His work is regularly featured in the Empire magazine.
I find Moss' simplistic style very attractive, it has a very screen printed look.

 Matt Ranzetta
These illustrated movie posters by Matt Ranzetta are inspired by the imagery from the Star Wars universe but describe other movies.
I love the textural paper stock backgrounds that give a collaged effect.

 Tom Whalen

Illustrator Tom Whalen‘s revamping of classic horror movie posters. I like how he mixes old and new elements of poster design to get pieces with such impact.

 Brandon Schaefer
I like the grungy appearance of these posters which I think is helped by the greyscale colour scheme. I also like the incorporation of photography.

High Low Culture
 Jamie Reid
Jamie Reid's longstanding practice as an artist sits firmly within a tradition of English radical dissent that would include, for example, William Blake, Wat Tyler and Gerrard Winstanley. Like them, the work of dissent must offer, out of necessity, other social and spiritual models and Reid's practice is no exception. Although Reid is known primarily for the deployment of Situationist strategies in his iconic work for the Sex Pistols and Suburban Press, the manifold strands of his art both continue that work whilst showing us other ways in which we can mobilise our energy and spirituality. It is this dialectic between gnosticism and dissent that lies at the heart of Reid's practice and makes him one of the great English iconoclastic artists.
I would say Reid focuses on high/low culture because of how he comments on topics of popular culture that is going on throughout the world through an artistic media.

 pbnl
Their studio, on rue des Cascades in Ménilmontant, specializes in design projects that promote contemporary art and performing arts events. The partners put a premium on typographical excellence, but the visual codes of photography, fashion, and music often find their way into their graphic vocabulary. They are trained in a number of different disciplines: Pascal is a photographer, Olivier’s background is in telecommunication, while Nicolas is an architect. Independent thinkers who share a passion for visual analysis, they reinvent each time the way they collaborate on an assignment — one of the reasons their work never feels stale.
They comment on high culture topics such as theatre and fashion, yet portray this through graphic design which is thought of as low culture.

 Tom Eckersley
Tom Eckersley (30 September 1914, Lancashire – 1997) was an English poster artist and teacher of design.
Comments on worldwide news issues and portrays them through imagery and type posters.

 Alexis Klein
French graphic designer.
I like how this designer combines high culture art imagery and overlays it with popular culture song lyrics.

V&A
Poster designs for a high culture are gallery.

A History Of Type
 Nicolas Jenson
Nicholas Jenson (1420 Sommevoire, France – 1480 Venice, Italy) was a French engraver, pioneer printer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours, and is accredited with being the creator of the first model roman type. Nicholas Jenson has been something of iconic figure among students of early printing since the nineteenth century when the aesthete William Morris praised the beauty and perfection of his roman font. Jenson is an important figure in the early history of printing and a pivotal force in the emergence of Venice as one of the first great centers of the printing press. Jenson's highly legible and evenly colored typeface, based upon Humanistic scripts, has been reinterpreted through the centuries by numerous type designers, most notably William Morris Jenson's fame as one of history's greatest typeface designers and punch cutters rests on the types first used in Eusebiu's De praeparatione evangelica, which presents the full flowering of roman type design.

William Caslon
William Caslon (1692 – January 23, 1766), also known as William Caslon I, was an English gunsmith and designer of typefaces.[1]He was born at Cradley, Worcestershire, and in 1716 started business in London as an engraver of gun locks and barrels, and as a bookbinder's tool cutter. Having contact with printers, he was induced to fit up a type foundry, largely through the encouragement ofWilliam Bowyer. The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage of the leading printers of the day in England and onthe continentCaslon's typefaces were inspired by the Dutch Baroque types, the most commonly used types in England before Caslon's faces. His work influenced John BaskervilleCaslon typefaces were immediately popular and used for many important printed works, including the first printed version of the United States Declaration of Independence. Caslon's types became so popular that the expression about typeface choice, "when in doubt, use Caslon," came about. The Caslon types fell out of favour in the century after his death, but were revived in the 1840s. Several revivals of the Caslon types are widely used today.

Giambattista Bodoni
Giambattista Bodoni (February 16, 1740 in Saluzzo – November 29, 1813 in Parma) was an Italian engraver, publisher, printer andtypographer of high repute remembered for designing a family of different typefaces called BodoniBodoni came from a printmaking background, his father and grandfather both being in that trade. He worked for a time as an apprentice in the Vatican's Propaganda Fide printing house in Rome. There, it was said he impressed his superiors so much with his eagerness to learn, studiousness in mastery of ancient languages and types, and energy of effort, that he was allowed to place his own name on his first books, a Coptic Missaland a version of the Tibetan alphabet.[1] With Baskerville in England and the Didot family in France, Bodoni was a leader in originating pseudoclassical typefaces.

John Baskerville (28 January 1706 – 8 January 1775) was an English businessman, in areas including japanning and papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer and typographerJohn Baskerville printed works for the University of Cambridge in 1758 and, although an atheist, printed a splendid folio Bible in 1763. His typefaces were greatly admired by Benjamin Franklin, a printer and fellow member of the Royal Society of Arts, who took the designs back to the newly-created United States, where they were adopted for most federal government publishing. Baskerville's work was criticized by jealous competitors and soon fell out of favour, but since the 1920s many new fonts have been released by Linotype,Monotype, and other type foundries – revivals of his work and mostly called 'Baskerville'. Emigre released a popular revival of this typeface in 1996 called Mrs Eaves, named for Baskerville's wife, Sarah Eaves. Baskerville’s most notable typeface Baskervillerepresents the peak of transitional type face and bridges the gap between Old Style and Modern type design.

H. Berthold AG was one of the largest and most successful type foundries in the world for most of the modern typographic era, making the transition from foundry type to cold type successfully and only coming to dissolution in the digital type era. Established in 1858 by Hermann Berthold[1] and based in Berlin, the company played a key role in the introduction of major new typefaces and was a successful player in the development of typesetting machines. The H. Berthold foundry's most celebrated family of typefaces is arguably Akzidenz-Grotesk (released 1896), an early sans-serif which prefigured by half a century the release of enormously popular neo-grotesque faces such as Helvetica. In 1950, type designer Günter Gerhard Lange embarked upon a long affiliation with the company, for which he designed various original typefaces, including Concorde and Imago, and oversaw the foundry's revivals of classic faces such as GaramondCaslonBaskerville, and Bodoni.

Media Specificity
Richard Hilton Eckersley (20 February 1941–17 April 2006) was a graphic designer best known for experimental computerized typography designed to complement deconstructionist academic works.

 Allen Hori
Allen Hori is a dedicated designer to the poetics of graphic design and communication, willingly and pragmatically pursues the resultant incongruities and surprising tangents of fancy. His experience covers a diverse range of clients from corporate, fashion, music, culture, art and publishing industries.

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is a book co-created by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published by Bantam books in 1967 and became a bestseller with a cult followingThe book itself is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror (see mirror writing). Some are intentionally left blank. Most contain photographs and images both modern and historic, juxtaposed in startling ways. The book was intended to make McLuhan's philosophy of media and communication, considered by some incomprehensible and esoteric, more accessible to a wider readership through the use of visual metaphor and sparse text.

 Ed Fella
Ed Fella, born in 1938, is an artist, educator and graphic designer whose work has had an important influence on contemporary typography.

Mucca Design is an award winning branding firm that transforms businesses through smart, strategic thinking and uncommon creative solutions.

Advertising
The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profitanti-consumeristpro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as "a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age." Characterized by some as anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism, it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000[4] devoted to challenging consumerism.

 Milton Glaser
Milton Glaser (born June 26, 1929, in New York City) is an American graphic designer, best known for the I ♥ NY logo, his Bob Dylan poster, the DC bullet logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the Brooklyn Brewery logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.

 Wolff Olins
Wolff Olins is a brand consultancy, based in London, New York City and Dubai. Founded in 1965, it now employs 150 designers, strategists and account managers, and has been part of the Omnicom Group since 2001. Wolff Olins was founded in Camden Town, London, in 1965 by designer Michael Wolff and advertising executive Wally Olins. Wolff left the business in 1983, and Olins in 2001, though both are still active in the field of branding. Over the years, Wolff Olins has opened offices in Hamburg, Paris, San Francisco, Madrid and Lisbon, all of which subsequently closed. In 1998, the company opened an office in New York, and ten years later in Dubai.

Volkswagon
This advertising campaign has been credited with changing the way that individuals thought about advertising. At the time, Volkswagen was not the prettiest or the largest car. The advertisement was minimalist and highly effective. In that campaign, the advantages of great gas mileage, low oil intake and the ability to park anywhere were mentioned. People became aware of the Volkswagen design, making sales skyrocket.

Absolut Vodka
The first of the successful print ads, Absolut Perfection, came to Geoff Hayes in the bathtub. Over 1500 advertisements have been created for the company, using over 300 artists from all fields. The company’s popularity has soared since the first advertisement, it is now the third best-selling liquor in the world behind Bacardi and Smirnoff.

Communication
Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics. Saussure is one of the founding fathers of semiotics. His concept of the sign/signifier/signified/referent forms the core of the field. Equally crucial, although often overlooked or misapplied, is the dimension of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis of linguistic description.

Russian Constructavism
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.


AIGA, the professional association for design, believes designers serve a critical role as communicators, educators and innovators. AIGA sets the national agenda for the role of design in economic, social, political, cultural and creative contexts.

Signs are everywhere we go but Michel Sfeir was bored by their mundane appearance and decided to “give life to typography” by creating new and improved versions.

Fashion And Photography
 Nick Knight
Nick Knight is among the world’s most influential photographers as well as being Director & founder of SHOWstudio.com the fashion & art internet broadcasting channel.  He has won numerous awards for his editorial work for Vogue, Dazed & Confused, W magazine, i-D, and Visionaire, as well as for fashion and advertising projects for clients including Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Yohji Yamamoto and Yves Saint Laurent. On the 24th October 2006 Nick Knight was awarded the prestigious Moet Chandon Fashion Tribute for 2006, which he celebrated by throwing a masked ball at Horace Walpoles Gothic revival treasure, Strawberry Hill. As a fashion photographer, Nick Knight has consistently challenged conventional notions of beauty.  His first book of photographs, skinheads, was published in 1982.  He has since produced Nicknight, a 12 year retrospective, and Flora, a series of flower pictures.  Knight’s work has been exhibited at such institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saatchi Gallery, the Photographers Gallery and Hayward Gallery and recently The Tate Modern.  He has produced a permanent installation, Plant Power, for the Natural History Museum in London.

 Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek
Photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek have worked together since October 1994. Inspired by a shared interest in the striking dress codes of various social groups, they have systematically documented numerous identities over the last 16 years. Rotterdam’s heterogeneous, multicultural street scene remains a major source of inspiration for Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek, although since 1998 they have also worked in many cities abroad. They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element. 

A selection of Vogue Covers, combining fashion imagery and type.

 Jay Hess and Simone Pasztore
The new book from Jess Hess and Simone Pasztore explores the effects of graphic design on the fashion labels we know and love today.

Clothing design based on type.