Reflection Essay History of GIC 3/23/09

It was interesting to look at how Graphic Deign was changing away from what was commonplace from the World Wars.  Futura was a brand new font which came along with the ushering of a new era, which belonged to the movement of "Art Deco" and featured geometric style. People applied what they'd learned from Cubism and De Stijl by making reductive compositional principles. Art Deco was the predecessor to branding in advertising.

AM Cassandre was a Russian Graphic Designer who was considered one of the great illustrators during hte 20th Century who possessed great Typographic skills, who brought about very different approaches to advertising, such as a fictitious character that sells a product. Its interesting to see how much this is used in today's advertising, such as the Camel mascot of cigarettes or the dozens of characters invented to sell cereal. He brought about Bold designs, emphasizing two dimensionality and iconic symbols.

I was fascinated that American Designers were copying Russian Graphic Design. Graphic Design was reaching a point where it was notable to see positive and negative graphic design, and the fact that America was looking up to what the Russians were doing, given their relationship with the USSR at that period, the fact that Americans would even look up at Russian design was very curious.

We covered a lot of the posters of World War II that were obviously influenced heavily by the war. I've learned a lot about it in the past, but its always interesting to see this kind of heavy handed patriotism mixed with subliminal messages designed to insight fear in the average citizen so they don't hurt the war effort or not contribute how they should. As always, war seems to be the foundation of progress for just about everything in the human world, Graphic Design is not exempt.

Swiss show off their exemplary work. They don't do illustrations in their work on the grounds that it is too subjective. One such designer, Herbert Matter, pioneered the integration of B&W photography with signs and color areas, which became a model for later practitioners of the International Typographic Style.  All of his pieces are considered masterpieces of 20th century graphic design.