Design in Context

1970-1980

1970s

• As we have seen graphic design expanded rapidly during the 1960s.

• Newspaper design,magazine design and design for new media in TV and video were areas of rapid and innovative expansion.

• The work of the designers in the 60s had a direct influence on design/designers in the following decade.

Technology

• Developments in phototypesetting provided designers with greater opportunities to be innovative.

• For example letters could overlap and words could be squeezed into semi legibility.

Paul Rand

Saul Bass

Seymour Chwast

International Typeface Corporation

• The ITC was set up in 1970 by Herb Lubalin and Aaron Burns.

• Its function was to counter type piracy which was very prevalent at the time.

• The ITC became a design agency with enormous impact,bringing new designers,creating new designs and paying royalties on the use of a typeface.

• The tabloid journal which they founded to advertise the work of the ITC is called U&lc and is now published online.

Post Modernism

• Post Modernism is a style that is the opposite to Modernism.

• It represents a move away from Modernism (clean design, functional, form follows function) towards individuality and creative freedom.

• Post Modernism took graphic design into many new directions.

Post Modernism/New Wave

• The designer most widely responsible for what has since become known as New Wave was Wolfgang Weingart.

• Weingart’s entire approach in his teaching was to focus on the expressive, intuitive and experimental.

Weingart…continued• He used both type and photographic

images,broken and cut grids,reversed and stepped blocks, multi-layering of type and images and different ranging areas of text.

• All this created a dynamic quality to the page and its content.

• He explored wide spacing between type and a combination of type styles.

• Despite mixing it up his work was controlled and considered and he worked with a fairly limited range of fonts.

• And all this before the invention of the Apple Mac !!

Influences

• Weingart had a very strong and lasting influence on his students.

• His tour of America in 1972 and also his visiting professorship at the Cranbrook academy near Detroit inspired a whole generation of Graphic designers.

• One of Weingart’s best known students was April Greiman.

Legibility and cleandesign gave way to Something quite different.

Punk and its influences• A second major influence was Punk.• This was a London street style and a part of

the culture of drugs and pop associated with the 60s.

• The do- it -your- self style associated with the golfball type writer and letraset coupled with the anti establishment ideals of the time made for a significant amount of visually interesting and experimental work during the 60s.

• Designers like Jamie Reid embraced this style,and made it world famous with his design for the Sex Pistols record sleeve in 1977 , ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’.

Jamie Reid