Psychadelic Posters

1. Sum up the reading in your own words in 1 paragraph:
The reading was relatively short. However, there was a lot of really interesting things to learn about "hippie art". Drugs, hippie mentality, and the cultural revolution of the 60's preaching free love into the 70's made for an exciting time to see some new innovations in art. The reading contributed images that exemplified the psychadelic art style that used a wide variety of merging colors and weird design patterns. Civil rights movements, hippie subculture of the 60's and the Vietnam War were all world events that contributed to this style. The whole anti-establishment idea of the culture was the main inspiration behind most of the posters that one would see from the psychadelic era. Most designers from the era that are well known were self taught and mainly designed posters that were made to sell concerts or ideas (like do drugs, be happy, ect.). Robert Wesley "Wes" Wilson was one of them, making innovations in patterns and typography.

2. Name the one thing (or person) you found most interesting from the reading.
I found psychadelic posters in general to be super interesting. This is really the first time in design history where we see people making posters that weren't necessarily trying to sell you a product, but rather an idea. Psychadelic posters were created to sell you ideas like "take some drugs, go listen to some music, go make love, have fun." I just think that's really cool.

3. State at least one question you have after the reading or from last class.
Did that one free press company go out of business because it was too anti-establishment or what was up with that? The text didn't really elaborate.

Presentations #5

I came late to the fifth and final day of presentations, but I was able to see some movie title sequences and trailers that some dude made. She said that whoever he was, was Saul Bass inspired and it definitely showed. Anyway, it appears that was all he did.

Next was V@rner's presentation on Shepard Fairy. Fairy has the whole rebel punk style and is known for his Andre the Giant "OBEY" sticker, which implies big brother is watching you. He went to Rhode Island School of Design and began putting up his designs in the form of stickers and graffiti around skate parks. Currently, Fairy's most noted work is with the Obama campaign poster design, which he is currently in a law suit with the Associated Press over fair rights since he used and barely altered an image of President Obama from newspapers. Most of his art, also being applied to such band posters as Led Zeppelin, have an Art Deco theme/style to them, and almost always have some hidden political message/agenda.

4th day of Prsentations

4th day started with the man himself, Stefan Sagmeister. He was born in Austria in 1962 and began his studies in Asia. While there, he found his biggest influence and hero, Tibor Kalman, and decided that he would go into graphic design. Most (if not all) of Sagmeister's designs have a hand-written element to them. His style is very unconventional, and as seen by how he carved words into his body, insane to a point. Sagmeister describes himself as computer illiterate, and therefore never used much technological resources. He is most noted for his work with musicians, having done album covers for bands like rolling stone. He even won an award for his design of the Talking Heads CD Box set. I would say Sagmeister's pretty anti-establishment, having made a campaign to cut the pentagon's budget with pig shaped cars.

Next we had Jenna's presentation on Clement Mok. Mok started his career working for Apple in the 1980's, a pretty good company to start off with. He applied his talents not only to design, but publishing and education as well. He's pretty much just known for the wide variety of clients he had and the corporate identities(logos) he created for them. Her presentation didn't really give any influences Mok had, or was at least vague enough that I didn't notice.

Last was Sarah's presentation on Leo Burnett, the guy with the crazy super cool website. I enjoyed playing around with that. Anyway, Burnett is well known for having created some of America's (and the world's) most well recognized characters such as Tony the Tiger and Tucan Sam. I thought that the whole apples theme was really interesting, since it was just a big F-You to those that said he would never achieve success.

Presentatons 3rd Day

The third day started off with Katie's presentation on David Carson. Yet again we have a kind of designer turned CEO scenario. Carson is most noted for his work with Ray Gun, MGM Studios and Xerox companies. He got most of his inspiration from Surfing and it showed in many of his designs (since a lot of them were covers for surfing magazines or promotional material for surfing equipment/places, ect..) Unlike many of the designers we've seen so far, Carson had no formal education after high school. He skipped learning the rules and just stuck to breaking them, as is seen especially in his typographical work.

Next we had Matthew Carter, a big designer from London. His father was a substantially successful typographer and Carter was able to get most of his education in design through an apprenticeship with him. Most of his typography designs were created to make lettering fit nicer (like in phonebooks), and generally look nicer. He had a great Renaissance influence and a love of seraphs which he played around with a lot. Generally, carter created numerous typefaces that are still used today. What I thought was interesting and most noteworthy was his invention of ink traps, little spaces in the letters that allowed for ink to print off the type without smudging. He was really innovative.

2nd Day Presentations

The second day of presentitons started with Barb's look into the life and times of Neville Brody. Not unlike my designer (Storm Thorgerson), Brody started off his career working with musicians. Designing album covers, concert posters, t-shirts for bands such as Depeche Mode. Throughout his career, Brody was able to keep his passion for surfing and sometimes even combine his work with it. As his fame as a designer grew, Brody kind of broke away from work with musicians to start Face Magazine and work with other various british magazines, as well as create new typefaces such as "Fuse". The book that was written about him and his design was and is the best selling book about graphic design. I thought Neville Brody just generally had the best life ever. He got to work with musicians, make designs for international magazines, made one of the coolest looking typefaces I've ever seen, and is still able to just chill and surf. What am I doing with my life?

Next we had Amanda's presentation on Art Chantry, the man who had a rough childhood, but took those experiences and made something out of them. It was nice to see something different. Other presentations so far just had the typical kind of formula: "What'd he do? What'd he make? Where's he now?", but we got a little look into Chantry's childhood sketches. It was interesting and funny to kind of see where a legendary graphic designer's drawing abilities were when they were a kid. Apparently, Chantry never got into using computer technologies for his designs, and I can kind of see why based on the style I was seeing during this presentation. Chantry had a theme of using "recycled art", taking clips of drawings from newspapers or books and then combining them onto a press. A lot of his work is punkish, dirty, and offensive, but that's just his style. A lot of his stuff is compared to Dadaist concepts, and it's pretty obvious why. He would recycle images and put them in offensive or dirty situations which suggests the notion that whether beautiful or disgusting, art can be anything.

1st Presentations

The 1st day of presentations started off with Allie's designer: April Greiman. She was born in 1948 and still operates today owning her own successful design firm. She was inspired by her mother and the sayings she was taught like "you can't fake the cha-cha". Greiman took this to mean that no one could fake who they were. After going to art school, Greiman created a "new wave design concept", a style tat broke from normal typography and played around with stretching the spacing and weight of lines and curves. She went on to use computers to make stunning graphics. I actually didn't like her style since it seems like someone went into photoshop and just took google images and arranged them together. It just seemed like idiotic art that was trying to be avant garde.

Next, Sam presented Milton Glaser. I was already a little familiar with him, since he's famous for his album and poster art for Bob Dylan. He was born in 1929 in New York, studied in Italy, and began his career with push-pin studios. Throughout his career life, Glaser developed his own kind of style that was based on directness, simplicity, and originality. Glaser would go on to found a variety of companies based around design, like New York Magazine in 1968. In 1974, he established his own company, Milton Glaser Inc. Operating his own business, Glaser was free to explore other design styles and came up with his most notable image: the I (heart) NY thing. It was interesting to learn that Glaser created it, since I always thought it was just some thing that started on shirts for tourists by an unknown giftshop man. Anyway, he won the award for best designer presented in this specific class from me, since he was the most dynamic. The man went through a lot of different styles in his career, from Victorian images and type to things with Art Deco kind of feels, he's done it all. The presentation wasn't really clear on what inspired him, but I think there were definitely some psychadelic style influences on his later life

Anna's presentation was on Seymour Chwast. I really enjoyed seeing her design imitations, they were just cool to look at and caught my attention very well. Chwast was born in 1931 and was big into illustration and wood cuts. During his career he created the push pin almanac (from working with push-pin studios). Most of his images were like a different, but similar, version of the work we saw in posters during the World War I&II. However, his images had a more abstract, "new-age" feel.