Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser has some of the finest taste when it comes to Graphic Design. His appointments line up for years and his attention to detail is amazing. Some of Glaser’s work consists of the I love New York logo and slogan and the Brooklyn Brewery logo. He also designed a DC bullet, which DC comics used from 1977 to 2005.

Glaser attended the older Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, known as York’s High School of Music & Art.

Glaser had founded, and noted president of Push Pin Studios with several of his graduate classmates. His work consists of varieties in book jackets, album covers, advertisements and even direct mail pieces. His ads would appear in well-known magazine titles.

His work appears in the Museum of Modern Art and even the Israel Museum. He has been both a professor and a student, as we all are in the world of Art and Performing Arts.

His awards are numerous and his participation in clubs and associations is impressive. In 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and had artwork showed in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

His business now is Milton Glaser Inc. and they produce many design disciplines including: logos, stationery, brochures, signage, website design and annual reports.

He works exhibitions, restaurants, shopping malls as well as upscale hotels.

There is probably a 99% chance you have come in contact with Milton Glaser’s work because his clients include Target, Coach and Trump.

Frank Gehry and Architecture

 

Frank Gehry is known worldwide for his creative gift in architecture. Tourist attractions and art museums, his architecture is amazing in detail and jaw dropping to the eye.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, is a prime example of his abilities as an architect and an artist. Other works of Gehry consist of the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

His own residence however is the project that sparks a full swing in his career. The style of deconstructivism questions the viewer of perspective and balance. DeCon art is specific in that it does not reflect social ideas and laws of form and balance. Gehry’s work goes beyond the limits and presents a new view on structure. The many curves, twists and lines represent new ideas compared to those of much organization. There is much precession as well as swing when developing and creating such creations that Frank Gehry is able to achieve.

Not only is Frank Gehry talented in his art form, he is also known for his keen sense of a businessman. He will be on site running construction teams and noting every application of his buildings. He ensures his organization but also has been known to exceed his clients budgets.

Guggenheim Museum was said to exceed budget limit by 1,400 percent. I’m sure the museum has had well enough tourists to compensate for his budget surpass.

ART©

ART & COPY

ART & COPY

ART & COPY 

ART & COPY  

Advertising, up to the 1950’s was schoolbook and processed. Doyle Dane and Bernbech were the first to place the copywriter with the art director. Advertising from here on out changed due to the persuasive nature advertising has on the public.

The aim to advertising is finding the benefit, and selling what the product does, not what the product is. Advertising creates an interesting way to sell an idea or a product. By creating an atmosphere and a story to a product, the consumers can then place themselves with the product and evaluate themselves before and after use. An advertisement is successful when it encourages or provokes someone to act or buy a product.

Tommy Hilfiger exploded overnight. George Lois worked with Tommy Hilfiger and overnight-created spark in his company. Companies can spend millions of dollars on advertising but if the product is no good the company with fail.

In advertising there is high risk. Authenticity is a key concept to advertising specialists. Their goal is to create a new or improved idea. There are great numbers of good advertisements for bad products. There are also poor advertisements for great products, and this is why the advertisement aspect of a companies business plan is a very important to them and highly concentrated on.

I have taken a few advertisements classes and I have seen many examples of horrible, mediocre, good, great and fantastic ads. Art & Copy was very interesting especially because some of the most prestigious companies were involved and started as small companies with limited employees and limited use of technology.

ART & COPY

ART & COPY

ART & COPY 

ART & COPY

Art Nouveau

 

Art Nouveau was an international movement and style of art, which applied itself to architecture and the decorative arts. Its peak was in the 20^th century around 1890-1905. Art Nouveau in French means, “new art”. Another name for art nouveau was Jugenstil, which meant “youth style” in German.

Art Nouveau flourished due to plays and shows advertising for their upcoming events. Posters were placed around town to attract the audience and these posters did indeed attract an audience. Art Nouveau sprang into popularity with overnight sensation. The style became very popular among artists in Paris. Initally called the Style Mucha, soon became Art Nouveau.

Casa Mila, also known as The Quarry, was designed by architect Antoni Gaudi and built during 1905-1910. Although physically attractive to the eye and very appealing, building codes were not met and this cause the government to fine the owners for their infractions.

Art Nouveau began the era of the Tiffany Lamp. Stained glassed inlayed in metal for decoration and usefulness. Glass was becoming an art-form instead of an exterior piece. Decoration of ceramics and porcelain was also becoming very popular and artistic. Many art nouveau artist dealing with ceramics had much influence from Japan.

 

The other day in class we watched a movie called Kamikaze Girls. The movie surrounds two young Japanese girls growing up in their high school years. Branding and self-identity are becoming more popular as the days go by. The main characters are Momoko Ryugasaki, which is the Lolita girl, and Ichigo “Ichiko”, which is the Yanki.

Ichiko belongs to a biker gang, even though I would call her bike a scooter.  The scooter takes some of the roughness away from Ichiko as she sometimes can display affection or care even though she has a rough and edgy exterior.

Momoko on the other hand is a Lolito girl. She dresses like a baby by wearing stitched bonnets and short frilly skirts. Momoko doesn’t have any friends but her family; her father and grandmother.

The story really kicks off when Momoko’s dad quits selling his fake brand Versace clothes. Long story short, Ichiko finds Mimoko’s phone number in a catalog for the old Versace clothes. As Momoko knows the clothes are close to trash, Ichiko falls in love with the mass amounts of Versace. Ichiko instantly becomes Mimoko’s friend, but they take a while to warm up to each other. They balance each other out, good and evil and soon enough Ichiko helps Momoko find her calling for a career. With Ichiko’s help, Momoko makes new friends along her journey to become a fashion designer. Without Ichiko’s unexpected arrival, Momoko would have never found her calling.

I enjoyed watching the struggle of a normal Japanese girl striving to find what she wanted to become. Without the help of her friends and family, she would probably still be searching for a job.

The style of the film kept even boring scenes exciting. The visual affects weren’t spectacular but were unexpected and very interesting. I especially like the ward-robes of the characters as each fit into their classification.

 

After watching the documentary on Helvetica I realized how much a type face can actually affect society. Helvetica was a documentary about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. Helvetica just recently has celebrated its 50^th birthday in 2007.  The movie looks at the proliferation of one typeface as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffman in a type foundry in Switzerland.  Helvetica was not the typefaces first name, Helvetia which is the original Latin name for Switzerland, so instead of meaning Switzerland’s Type, Helvetica means the type of the Swiss. Due to the changes was Helvetica able to become marketable worldwide.

Helvetica is known worldwide. It is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Helvetica is also a popular choice for commercial wordmarks and companies. Some of these companies include Jeep, BMW, and Target. When a company uses and sticks to a specific typeface, they gain recognition in the commercial business world. They maintain a specific style and a customer can always expect highly of their company. For example, NASA uses Helvetica on the side of their space shuttles.

Whether people like it or not, Helvetica is in their presence more than any other typeface. It has legibility and the ability to hold the surrounding letters in place with style. The counter shapes inside the letters are artistic also. Not only is Helvetica attractive on advertisements, it gets to the point, and gets the job done.

The Bauhaus

 

Founded in 1919, The Bauhaus was born and built in the city of Weimar  by German architect Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus incorporated many forms of art as well as many types of programs. The guilds combined included architecture, sculpture, and painting. It’s school within had a specific based curriculum with preliminary courses, so when students from diverse ranges would come to understand social and educational backgrounds. These students studied materials, color theory, and other formal relationships.

Soon after the Bauhaus theory, students were specializing in metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, typography, pottery and painting. Walter Gropius’s main aim was to unify the arts through craft. With theories like chairs becoming obsolete, the Bauhaus was creating very imaginative and creative pieces of furniture. They were taught to forget a chair has a seat, back, and four legs.

Bauhaus is German for “House of Building” or “Building School”. The Bauhaus was related to the Modernist movement and had influence from many of the fine arts. Developments such as graphic design, industrial design and interior design. The Bauhaus existed in three different cities over the years. In Weimar from 1919 to 1925, In Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and in Berlin from 1932 to 1933. The cities run parallel to their architect directors, Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies.

Unfortunately during World War II, in 1933, The Bauhaus was closed by its own leadership due to pressure from the Nazi regime.

Griffith Winton, Alexandra. "The Bauhaus, 1919–1933". InHeilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bauh/hd_bauh.htm (August 2007)

Source:The Bauhaus, 1919–1933 | Thematic Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Guttenberg Printing Press

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500 years ago, his printing machine was one of the most revolutionary inventions since the wheel.  One of the first and finest books ever created was the Guttenberg Bible. Johannes Guttenberg knew that books were growing in popularity. Universities and Churches were in need of materials for worshippers and students, and Guttenberg sought out to find and create a press that allowed quick adaptations.

Scribes were very important in their day. Scribes wrote out bibles for the churches, alphabets for students, and scripts of everyday life. The main objective of the printing press was printing the word of God in Bibles for the church. Guttenberg would then change the importance of scribes forever.

Mainz Psalter in 1457 combines woodcut illustrations and text together. Two styles developed from the 1400’s to the 1500’s were Black Letter and Old Style. Old style resembled that of the text of the Greek.

The Industrial Revolution came along and the steam press was invented. Koenig Steam Press was built in 1814 and sold in London at the time. Soon millions of printed pages were being printed each week. Graphic Designers came about when these posters were being printed out to quickly to have an exact layout and eye appeal. The objective of the industry was to print out quantity instead of quality.

Soon, printing companies were hiring artists to attain eye appeal in their printed advertisements.

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Comic Booking

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I can say I’ve read a few comic books in my lifetime and I can see how popular they became at their birth. Rising artist’s were very free at the beginning of comic booking. Government brought halts to the industry by coding and limiting.

Superman was created in 1938, and it’s a bird it’s a plane it’s superman became very popular, very quickly. As an industry, they began printing more and more each week. Comic books were becoming very popular and flashy. The skill of the artist started coming into play. Kirby supported the war and the troops by writing his comics. The growing popularity of comic books forced newspaper companies to produce comics in their columns to keep customers interested in news as well as comics.

1950’s were creeping up and the comics themselves were changing. Not only were there superhero comics, there were sci-fi comic books as well as Love comic books.

Comic books were becoming grosser and grosser. The government was eventually looking at comics a different way. Comic books were becoming more mature and grotesque. Great crimes were depicted and also sexual activity and lust. Do not forget that comic books had a young audience and the government was claiming that these cartoons were changing the youth into believing certain ideals. Ideas of stealing or killing were what the government was concerned about. Words like terror and weird were ruled out of comic books due to code changes. The code put anything that was good in comics out of business. A pre-requisite to art was freedom and the code brought down many industries of comic books. Robert Crumb wanted to do things his own way. The media was only buying the mainstream comic books about superheroes. Parody created many artists to become victims of copyrights and lawsuits. American Splendor contained real content and real stories.

Batman was one of only a few superheroes that survived the decades. Many comic book writers wanted to live through their stories, and so they did and created stories they felt were interesting and disregarded the media and government.

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Elbert Hubbard: An American Original

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Elbert Hubbard established a well-known campus named Roycroft. In 1900, the New York Times claimed Roycroft was a crafting paradise. Elbert Green Hubbard knew how to make things happen.  Hubbard began selling soap in Illinois and was a very successful salesman. With his charm he pulled people in and sold the goods. Buffalo was where his company brought him to take over at Larkin Soap Company. As an adult, Hubbard wishes he had never been subject to religious sermons. Even though his village was very religious, he was close to becoming a priest.

Hubbard was a lover of ambition and ego. Society demanded that those who bore children were to be married so when Hubbard and Alice had a child, Alice’s sister took the child and Hubbard and Alice separated. Arts and Crafts were becoming mass-produced by machines and were losing the human aspect of handiwork. At the turn of the century, he was in the eye of the perfect storm.

Middle Class could not afford the furniture that Hubbard was producing. Therefore, Hubbard had to concentrate on the business issue at hand. Hubbard resulted in using machines of many types to ease the process of furniture making. Although he strayed from using machines for many years, his business would explode once he gained the skill of using machinery.

Many people were calling Hubbard brash, because Elbert Hubbard began marking his territory and carved his mark into every piece of work. He was eventually a spokesman for the Arts and Crafts movement in America. He was known to be the embodiment of the American dream. Bertha was a great wife, but Hubbard was secretly writing Alice. After 15 years of writing each other, a public lawsuit came forward from Miriam’s stepparents for unpaid child support bills. Hubbard and Alice would soon become married and their daughter would find out her true parents.

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