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.