Chapter 22 Flashcards
Postmodernism
a climate of cultural change that took place through almost all the cultural disciplines around the 1970s. In design, it designated the work of architects and designers who were breaking with the international style so prevalent since the Bauhaus. Postmodernism sent shock waves through the design establishment as it challenged the other and clarity of modern design, particularly corporate design.
late modernism
a term proffered as an alternative to postmodernism for late 20th century design. Some observers reject the term postmodern, arguing that it is merely a continuation of the modern movement
mannerism
a term proffered as an alternative to postmodernism for late 20th century design. Some observers reject the term postmodern, arguing that it is merely a continuation of the modern movement
supermannerism
a term first used by advocates of the purist modern movement to describe work by young architects whose expanded formal range embraced the pop art notion of changing scale and context. Zigzag diagonals were added to the horizontal and vertical structures of modern architecture. An architecture of inclusion replaced the machine aesthetic and simple geometric forms of the international style
supergraphics
became the popular name for bold geometric shapes of bright color, giant Helvetica letterforms, and huge pictographs warping walls, bending corners, and flowing from the floor to the wall and across the ceiling, expanding or contracting space in scale changes relative to the architecture. Psychological as well as decorative values were addressed as designers created forms to enliven dismal institutional architecture, reverse or shorten the perspective of endless hallways, and bring vitality and color to the built environment
new-wave typography
Specific design ideas explored by Wolfgang Weingart and his students in the late 1960s and early 1970s and adopted a decade later include letter-spaced, sans-serif type; bold, stair-step rules; ruled lines punctuating and energizing space; diagonal type; the introduction of italic type and/or weight changes within words; and type reversed from a series of bars. This style gave rise to a prevailing typographic approach in the late 1970s and 1980s.
halftone dots
the small dots from which printed photographs are comprised
moire
the patterns produced when halftone dot patterns are overlapped and then shifted against each other
Gutenberg approach
the idea that designers, like the early typographic printers, should strive to stay involved in all aspects of the process (including concept, typesetting, prepress production, and printing) to ensure the realization of their vision
legibility and readability
The first, a quality if efficient, clear, and simple reading, is often in conflict with the latter, which is a quality that promotes interest, pleasure, and challenge in reading
radical modernism
a reaffirmation of the idealism of modernism altered to accommodate the radical cultural and social changes occurring in the late 20th century
Memphis
the Italian design group led by Italian architectural and product designer Ettore Scottsass that influenced the postmodern movement of the late 1970s into the 1980s. The name reflects the inspiration of both contemporary popular culture and the artifacts and ornaments of ancient cultures; form is prevalent in its design, and became the reason for the design to exist
retro design
(from “retrograde,” or backward-looking): a movement based on historical revival that first emerged in New York in the 1980s and then spread quickly throughout the world
vernacular design
artistic and technical expression broadly characteristic of a locale or historical period
Wolfgang Weingart
- b.1941
- Beginning in the 1960s, he began to question the typography of absolute order and cleanness. He wondered if perhaps the international style had become so refined and prevalent throughout the world that it had reached an anemic phase. Rejecting the right angle as an exclusive organizing principle, Weingart achieved a joyous and intuitive design with a richness of visual effects in new-wave design. He used the printer’s camera to alter images and explored the unique properties of the film image. Weingart began to move away from purely typographic design and embraced collage as a medium for visual communication
Robert Venturi
- b.1925
- a controversial and original supermannerist architect. When Venturi looked at the vulgar and disdained urban landscape of billboards, electric signs, and pedestrian buildings he saw a vitality and functional purpose and urged designers to learn from the hyperbolic glitter of places such as Las Vegas. Venturi saw the building not as sculptured form but as a component of the larger urban traffic/communication/interior-exterior environmental system. Uncommon uses and juxtapositions of materials, graphic elements from the commercial roadside strip, billboards, and environmental-scale lettering were freely added to his architectural vocabulary.
Barbara Stauffacher Soloman
- b. 1932
- A San Francisco native and painter who had studied graphic design at the Basel School of Design during the late 1950s, she used a palette of pure hue and elementary shape in compositions that transformed the totality of the space. In 1970, the American Institute of Architects presented its medal to Solomon for “bold, fresh, and exciting designs clearly illustrating the importance of rational but vigorous graphics in bringing order to the urban scene.”
Rosmarie Tissi
- b.1937
- a Swiss postmodernist designer who used strong graphic impact, a playful sense of form, and unexpected manipulation of space in seeking logical and effective solutions to design problems. In a 1964 E. Lutz & Company advertisement, different kinds of copy printed by the client—headlines, text, halftones, and solids—are illustrated by elemental symbols. Rather than align these images in boxes ordered on a grid, the five images appear to have been intuitively and randomly placed
Siegfried Odermatt
- b.1926
- a Swiss designer who broke away from the international style in the 1960s. He designed a trademark for the Union Safe Company in 1966 that is the antithesis of Swiss design: the letterforms in the word Unionare jammed together to form a compact unit suggesting the sturdy strength of the product, sacrificing legibility in the process. In full-page newspaper advertisements for Union (Fig. 22–4), placed during prestigious banking conferences, Odermatt treated this logo as pure form to be manipulated visually, creating a plastic dynamic on the newspaper page.
Steff Geissbuhler
- b.1942
- a Swiss designer and partner at Chermayeff & Geismar. Complexity of form is never used as an end in itself in his design; the dynamic of multiple components forming a whole grows from the fundamental content of the design problem at hand (Figs. 22–9 and 22–10). Careful structural control enables Geissbuhler to organize vast numbers of elements into a cohesive whole.
Dan Friedman
- 1945-95
- An American who studied at the Ulm Institute of Design in 1967 and 1968 and at the Basel School of Design from 1968 to 1970, he rethought the nature of typographic forms and how they could operate in space. Friedman addressed the problem of teaching the basics of a new typography through syntactic and semantic investigations. Texture, surface, and spatial layering were explored in his work; organic and geometric forms were contrasted. Friedman believed that forms could be provocative and amusing to look at, and he freely injected these properties into his designs
April Greiman
- b. 1948
- Typographic design has usually been the most two-dimensional of all the visual disciplines, but Greiman achieves a sense of depth in her typographic pages. Overlapping forms, diagonal lines that imply perspective or reverse perspective, gestured strokes that move back in space, overlap, or move behind geometric elements, and floating forms that cast shadows are the means she uses to make forms move forward and backward from the surface of the printed page.
Willi Kunz
- b.1943
- A Swiss-born designer who does not construct his work on a predetermined grid; rather, he starts the visual composition and permits structure and alignments to grow through the design process. He builds his typographic constellations with concern for the essential message, the structure unfolding in response to the information to be conveyed. He might be called an information architect who uses visual hierarchy and syntax to bring order and clarity to messages, as seen in a lecture series and exhibition schedule announcement
Jayme Odgers
- b.1939
- a photographer who collaborated with April Greiman. Odgers’s wide-angle photographs with extreme depth of field have objects thrusting into the picture space from the peripheral edges.
