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The curator of a new exhibition on punk graphics at Detroit's Cranbrook Art Museum, has selected five key works that explore the movement in the United States and United Kingdom.

The exhibition titled Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 focuses on the visual development of punk culture between 1976 and 1986. It contains approximately 500 of punk's most memorable graphics - including flyers, posters, albums and zines.

"Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression," said curator Andrew Blauvelt.

"The energy of the movement created a powerful subcultural phenomena that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art and design," he explained.
"Punk provided many new opportunities for designers"
The exhibition aims to show punk "as a heterogeneous design practice" by examining its range of influences, including cartoons, comics, science fiction and horror films.

Blauvelt also wanted to explore the development of DIY culture through punk zines and flyers and the use of parody and pastiche.

"For designers, punk was tremendously influential in its DIY ethos. If punk birthed a thousand garage bands, it certainly birthed as many designers," Blauvelt told Dezeen. "There is a clear trajectory in graphic design history, where punk provided many new opportunities for designers to create work in which they passionately believed."

"Its raw amateurism was liberating and effectively 'deskilled' professional design long before the computer did," he explained. "New wave music was the primary playing field of new wave graphics. The authenticity of punk is most appealing today."
Punk "telegraphed a more democratic approach to making culture"
A majority of the pieces were selected from an archive belonging to New York collector Andrew Krivine. "[He] owns literally thousands of works and his collection is quite broad. Its breadth gave me a unique curatorial opportunity to look at punk graphics very broadly," said Blauvelt.

"Not only did punk reinvigorate the music scene by unleashing a thousand garage bands, it telegraphed a new more democratic, open-access approach to making culture in general. Today, things like graphic novels, alternative music stations, and street fashion all owe a debt of gratitude to punk," he continued.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 is on show at Cranbrook Art Museum between 16 June and 7 October.

Below, Blauvelt writes about five key items featured in the exhibition:

Arturo Vega, Ramones showcase poster, 1975
Arturo Vega (1947-2013) was a visual artist and is perhaps best remembered for his graphic design work for The Ramones. Vega created the band's famous logo, a take-off of the Seal of the President of the United States, in which he replaced the eagle's clutched arrows with a baseball bat, and the nation's motto, E pluribus unum, with the Ramone's Hey Ho, Let's Go.

The eagle was a recurring motif for Vega in his own art work and one that he began to associate with the Ramones. This early poster for an unsigned bands contest at CBGB features a photograph by Vega of the artist wearing an eagle-clad belt buckle.

Jamie Reid, poster for The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, 1979
Jamie Reid is perhaps punk's best known graphic designer, having crafted the unique visual look of the Sex Pistols' materials. Reid embraced the situationist technique of detournement, or cultural hijacking.

In this poster to promote the film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Reid appropriates the advertising campaign of American Express credit cards ("Your Name Here"). The music industry itself becomes the target, including the artist ("the prostitute"), the record company ("the pimp"), and the music business as a whole ("the swindle").

The posters were withdrawn and most copies destroyed when American Express threatened legal action.

Peter Saville, poster for Joy Division Unknown Pleasures, 1979
This poster by Peter Saville, who first came to prominence for his designs for Factory Records, was issued to promote the debut album by Joy Division. The image is of successive waves recorded from a pulsar and was found in an astronomy textbook by band member Bernard Sumner. Saville reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black, conjuring the darker atmospherics of the album's sound.

The design has attained an iconic status, particularly of late, even spawning the term "joyplot" in data visualization, which is used to describe a style representing successive and comparative histograms.

M&Co, poster for Talking Heads Remain in Light, 1980
Envisioning the look they wanted for their next album, bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads worked with Walter Bender and Scott Fisher of the MIT Media Lab to create the computer-generated images used on this poster.

Weymouth and Fisher shared a passion for masks that drove the digital manipulation of the band members' portraits. The four fighter planes flying in formation allude to the original title for the album, Attack Melody, and were a nod to Weymouth's father, who served in the US Navy.

Tibor Kalman's M&Co created the graphic design and the typographic treatments for the album and poster, including the use of the upside down "A" in Talking Heads.

Jo Slee, poster for The Smiths The Boy with a Thorn in His Side, 1985
The Smiths lead singer and songwriter, Morrissey, eschewed the stereotypical band portraits used on record covers in favor of images of pop and film stars, including celebrities like James Dean and Candy Darling. Rendered in a range of duotones and designed by Jo Slee of Rough Trade records, The Smiths cover designs were easily identifiable and equally memorable.

For this promotional poster for the hit single, The Boy with a Thorn in His Side, Morrissey chose a photo of a young Truman Capote taken by famed photographer, Cecil Beaton.

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"If punk birthed a thousand garage bands, it certainly birthed as many designers," says Punk Graphics curator

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The curator of a new exhibition on punk graphics at Detroit's Cranbrook Art Museum, has selected five key works that explore the movement in the United States and United Kingdom. The exhibition titled Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics 1976-1986 focuses on the visual development of punk culture between 1976 and 1986.

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This article, encouraging and intellectualizing the use of punk style in graphic design, is not entirely punk. All apologies. That being said...
Sometime in the 70s, the youth started getting dissatisfied. Tired of what they were being spoon-fed by a mainstream media who no longer seemed to care for them, there began a small - but quickly growing - uprising of bands. They took 1950s style rock 'n roll, turned up the volume, and increased the speed.

And punk rock was born.

The Ramones at Eric's Club, Liverpool, England by Ian Dickson
Don't Accept What They're Giving You

With New York and London were at the epicenter of this invention of a subculture, and bands like New York's The Ramones and London's The Sex Pistols led the punk uprising from a small sect to a phenomenon. With these newly formed identities and values came new forms of graphical expression to match their means and their ideals. Punk expounds an aesthetic and a mood that is aggressive and contemporary, urban and raw, ephemeral and instantaneous, regressive and regurgitated. It's about a group of people calling for change through joyful havoc.

F*** Your Typesetter

Seminal album artwork for seminal Sex Pistols album God Save the Queen, design by Jamie Reed

Due to punk's nature as a movement outside of the mainstream, and particularly outside of general capitalist and consumerist media, lots of punk imagery was created by the innate needs of the culture and the access of its' members to the requisite technologies. In their creation of their own graphical style for album sleeves, concert flyers and self-published zines, a general Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos was adopted out of practicality and to show autonomy from what was going on in the industry at large.

Typesetters, aside from being expensive in a poor economy, also situated text on a rigid grid. In order to get around these limitations and restrictions, punk imagery took to a variety of methods to showcase their simple, dirty and aggressive messages. This collage style suggested a ripping up and starting again. The style takes a commercial image and repurposes it for revolutionary purposes. With punk's general disdain for all things conventional the freedom this hand created format allowed punk style to break out of the typographic grid that was limiting to most designers at the time when text was regularly formatted in this standardized method.

Made famous most originally with this album artwork for The Sex Pistol's first major album release, God Save the Queen, the Pistols both subverted status quo opinions on the British monarchy and standard methods of typesetting. Although Reid's use of borrowed and mish-mashed lettering could be seen as an inexpensive shortcut, it was also an imagery 'borrowed' from the graphic language of anger and protest. A ransom note seems to scream GIVE US WHAT WE WANT! Punk music screams that with a fast drum beat.

The Art Critic (1920) by Raoul Hausmann, an Austrian Dadaist. The imagery has shocking similarities to the 'revolutionary' punk montages of nearly half a century later.
The ransom note style fit into the larger scheme of collage in the punk imagery. This reappropriation of current culture imbued these cut-and-paste designs works with an added edge of ideological flair. Take your culture and shove it. Its silly and we're gonna make it our own. These ideas were directly taken from who might be the under-recognized predecessors to punk, the Dadaists, who - much like the punks - valued scissors and glue over paint and brushes. They believed in recycling old material to create new thought. In many cases this was taken to the benefit of certain underrepresented groups, such as females or the working class.

In particular, this famous Buzzcock's cover for their album Orgasm Addict. By using the female body but replacing often sexualized elements, like the face or the breasts, with commonly viewed items, like a steam iron.

Another method of avoiding the typesetter was the use of stencils. Originated in the machine age, stencils had frequently been used for their ease of use and acquisition, their association with the underground through graffiti, denoting something raw and urban, as well as its nature as simply being flawed by design. Afterall, punk always boasted its flaws.

Album artwork for The Clash's first self-titled album (1977) by Roslaw Szaybo
The band's logo shows a uniform font, however its marred edges and seemingly sloppy paint job belie its stencil-style roots.

This album cover also shows another style of this DIY, low-cost, image production. The photograph of the band is darkened and two-toned, much like the way a photo looks when photocopied. This look, in time, became synonymous with the punk aesthetic and highlighted its dark nature and crude edges.

'Haute Ugly' & Zines

While OG punks would have probably never used the word 'haute' to describe themselves, they did prescribe to a certain style that valued not philosophies and beauty and order like the design that came before them, but rather chaos and a dissemination of shock. Using their often illegible and garish styles to shock the viewer out of apathy, the punk movement gave little thought to the commonly perceived 'good' design practices.

One of the most common spaces for this seeming lack of care for aesthetics was the zine. A zine is a self-published, self-distributed magazine, often with countercultural tendencies and propaganda.

Volumes 3 & 4 by seminal punk zine Sniffin Glue, found by Alternative TV frontman Mark Perry

Sniffin Glue, seen above, was highly influential as one of the first of many punk fanzines that featured anti-consumerist ideals and information on the music and scene outside of mainstream press. Its style showed the rushed immediacy of the punk movement. Touches like writing directly onto images before copying them scrawled, nearly illegible, script and hand-drawn logos and imagery showed the independent and urgent nature of the new tribe. Much like the music was an aggressive and minimal bastardization of punk rock, the style of the magazine stripped design down to its basics.

New York punk Zine Punk, designed by John Holstrom

New York's imminent zine at the same time as Sniffin Glue was Punk Magazine. This zine featured other tenets of the punk rock style, like hand drawn crude imagery and logos as well as so-called comics for adults. Just as punk music attempted to free youth from the slavery believed to have been pressed upon them by society, so too did this imagery attempt to free comics from a purely childish message.

Although, much like the use of ransom note style type, the crude compilation of these zines were built of of necessity due to lack of money or material, it was this very anti-consumerism that so thoroughly underlined the ethos behind the culture. Although it was often amateurish and sloppy, anyone could do it. Unlike capitalist society, it was a participational culture where there were no limits or restrictions.

De-volution and Parody

It's no secret that punk has political and subversive messages. Much of the imagery went on to match this, using images from a media saturated culture for new purpose. These parodies were meant to trigger recognition in the viewer and include them on the subversive in-joke.

Logo for The Ramones, featuring similarities to the Presidential Seal of the US
In order to prove The Ramones were 'American as apple pie', logo designer Arturo Vega appropriated the most overt American imagery he could, the governmental logo of the president. Although punk rock music might go against the official ideals of the mainstream culture of America, this appropriation decried a connection to the people of the nation and placed The Ramones on the pedestal as the REAL leaders of the REAL free world.

Post-punk band Devo, actually named after the idea of de-volution, often featured imagery 'borrowed' from the 40s and 50s of American culture, reusing it in such a way to question the materialist and optimistic opinions of the time by re-situating it in an inquisitive punk format.

Devo's 1978 album cover for Are We Not Men? (designer uknown)

This album cover cheekily asks the question proposed in the band's general manifesto, 'Are we not men?' By using the imagery from the US's positivist past and making it look like some sort of overly happy mutant, the imagery throws the standards on their heads and mocks the idealism and consumerism of days past.

Punk Is Dead, Long Live Punk

Punk has always functioned in a tenuous state. By it's very nature it was against capitalism and consumerism and being a part of the majority. However it also survived on album sales and concert attendance. Naturally the major labels began to pick up big name bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and Blondie, theoretically maiming the scene forever. While punk undergrounds carry on through today in various locales (Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Germany, etc...) the original us v. them ethos of punk music was scarred by its acceptance into the mainstream.

It is important to note that these punk aesthetics have largely remained the same over the course of the past 40 years since the scene's inception. Bands still frequently use many of these visual tropes to place themselves within the punk community and associate themselves with the scene although elements like stenciling, graffiti style and crude writing can appear all around the design world to evoke the coarse edge of punk.

But furthering cementing punk's place is the mainstream is the new availability and ease of computers, which have turned DIY into the basics of design in all genres. Anyone can do anything and punk styling is now just another font setting on your Mac computer. Although underground groups and designers could choose from 'ugly' and crude designs or 'beautiful' and flawless ones, there is now the choice to choose punk.

Logo design by thealienfactory for Bakd. Even bread can be revolutionary!
This re-appropriation of punk design with the aim of eliciting a certain feeling almost recalls the original re-appropriation by the punks back in the 70s. However, what would probably upset the punks would be the blatant use of the style for commercial purposes. Fashion houses trying to get in on the edge with punk outfits often creatively use the visual style for their promotional material.

Forever 21's branding material for their 2013 punk collection, using handwritten text, collage style aesthetics and an attempt to appear as the page of a zine. Note the 'all rights reserved'. Very un-punk.
Although this print ad for fashion conglomerate Forever 21 achieves its goal of looking ever-so-cool, it does so at the expense of the culture they are claiming to represent. They use all of the tropes of the style and yet they do it in such a candidly commercial way that it becomes a painful irony to the discerning viewer.

Other works utilize the design elements with more subtlety, focusing on pastiche much like the punks do. This design from one of our 99designers shows the two-tone coloring and collage known to DIY but does so in such a way that it does not exploit the original culture.

Design for Goodform Salon by roban
Punk has even gone so broadly as to be featured at New York's Metropolitan Museum titled Punk: Chaos to Couture, making it official that punk had risen from the garage and warehouses of its inception and all the way to the highest (not to mention most pristine) levels of culture.

The branding for this event featured the two-toned colors and crude stenciling of punk style, immaculately implemented. This styling takes punk most thoroughly out of its original context both literally and figuratively. Although the stencil-style text features imperfections, it does it with a sort of sheen that almost changes the intention of the entire movement. It is perhaps this new height of the style that could eventually work to change the connotations of the imagery as the style grows into its maturity.

While much has changed since The Sex Pistols encouraged anarchy in the UK, these styles have remained at their essence the same. They have taken on more than the sum of their parts to be a beacon of youth culture, counterculture, edge and sass. Punk rock told us that it is ok to get angry, its ok to get loud, its ok to get messy. And when going for the punk aesthetic, its ok for your designs to do the same thing.
Related articles:
Know your design history: the Bauhaus movement
Designing dance: The aesthetics of electronic music since the 1970s
Know your design history: the utopian De Stijl movement
Good call, Bon Iver: Art Nouveau design inspiration

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All ripped up: Punk influences on graphic design - 99designs

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This article, encouraging and intellectualizing the use of punk style in graphic design, is not entirely punk. All apologies. That being said... Sometime in the 70s, the youth started getting dissatisfied. Tired of what they were being spoon-fed by a mainstream media who no longer seemed to care for them, there began a small - but quickly growing - uprising of bands.

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This essay was originally pubilshed on October 11, 2012.

For a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn't averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully devoted to histories, reassessments and eyewitness accounts. Today, there is even an academic journal exclusively devoted to the pursuit of punk and post-punk studies, which has just published its second issue. There can't be much left to say about the music, clothing, media outrage and legendary gigs, but the graphic expression of punk has received less critical attention. Now, within weeks of each other, two thick, illustrated volumes have appeared: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, and The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press/Voyageur Press) by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. Kugelberg and Savage have also curated " Someday all the adults will die!", an exhibition of punk posters, handbills, record covers and 'zines at the Hayward Gallery in London.

The books are nicely complementary, with fewer overlaps in what they show than one might expect. Both address British and American punk, with the Rizzoli survey leaning towards the US, and the Omnibus volume inclining towards the UK, while also showing a strong awareness of punk scenes in other countries. Anyone nursing a serious interest in this subject will need to buy or consult both titles.

The editors' approaches are different, too. Kugelberg and Savage's book is more of an album, with the images presented in art-book style on a plain white page (no objections here - it's good to be able to see the work clearly without punk-inspired page layouts intruding). These are smart writers and Savage, author of He points to the visual influences of England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, is a key participant in the era; his punk archive is now stored at Liverpool John Moores University. But neither author is a historian or critic of graphic art, design or visual culture. "The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown," claims John Heartfield, Martin Sharp's work at Oz magazine, the feminist artist Penny Slinger, the Beach Books 1960s pamphlets, and Dawn Ades' Photomontage (1976). I bought Ades' trail-blazing study when it came out and would love to hear more: which punk image-makers were looking at the book and what did they get from it? Kugelberg, somewhat unpromisingly. Savage made punk collages with the artist Linder Sterling and he has some good observations about punk montage: "In the act of dismembering and reassembling the very images that were supposed to keep you down and ignorant, it was possible to counteract the violence of The Spectacle and to refashion the world around you."

Bestley and Ogg write with a carefulness of phrasing and appearance of academic detachment that only partially masks the same devotion to punk as listeners and fans. Punk graphics was the subject of Bestley's PhD and he curated the earlier exhibition " Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns"; he is course director of the graphic design MA at the London College of Communication. Ogg is author of No More Heroes, a history of British punk, and an editor of the Punk & Post-Punk journal. "It is important to question the notion of a direct association between work by prominent early punk designers and the emergence of a radical new visual language of parody and agitprop," they write. "To an extent, the techniques adopted by Jamie Reid, for instance, were already widely accepted as the natural languages of anger and protest." Such a comment can only be addressed to readers who know nothing about the histories of graphic design and graphic protest. As Savage and Kugelberg point out in their exhibition intro, punk's precursors and putative influences include Dadaist collage, the Situationist International, the mail art movement, the graphics of counter-culture protest, and the 1960s underground press. I say "putative" because none of these connections is explored in depth and definitively established in their book.

It was valuable to revisit so many original pieces in the exhibition after looking at small reproductions in the two books because the show communicates the explosive energy and " messthetic" rawness of punk graphics with persuasive power. This was an art of expediency, making use of collage, cartoon drawings, hand-lettering, rub-down lettering, ransom-note lettering, stencils (Savage and Kugelberg include a fantastic display of used stencils made by Crass), rubber-stamping and black and white Xerox copying, as well as silkscreen and offset litho. Looking at the discordant profusion of examples in the books, I kept trying to single out less familiar pieces that were highly accomplished as "design" from the many pieces that are hugely expressive and exciting, but not original or well resolved when seen in strictly graphic design terms. In the show, savoring scores of examples packed together at full size on the walls, those distinctions seemed irrelevant. These were raucous, vitality-filled transmissions from a turbulent graphic universe totally different in intention and effect from the smooth, orderly, design history-conscious parallel universe of professional design aesthetics, purposes and training. There didn't necessarily have to be any points of contact or interchange between the two co-existing spheres.

But the question of the relationship between punk D.I.Y. design in its most basic or amateur forms and the later development of graphic design cannot be avoided for anyone who is both sensitive to punk's impact and legacy (" the immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots culture among the young" - Kugelberg) and committed to graphic design as a medium. Kugelberg and Savage say that the "anarchic upsurge in graphic creativity . . . revolutionised design," a clear attempt to assert punk graphics' significance beyond the punk subculture, yet this claim, too, can only be substantiated by a lot more detailed research. (In my book graphic design than to what is commonly understood as punk - even allowing for Bestley and Ogg's precautionary advice that No More Rules, I connected punk's anti-design ethos to the late 1980s/early 1990s idea of "deconstruction" in graphic design.)
post-punk"
In the UK, the punk-related designers that had most influence in the early 1980s were a handful of individuals such as Malcolm Garrett, who had been formally educated as graphic designers (in his case at the University of Reading and Manchester Polytechnic), though design's mainstream was, in fact, slow to learn from and assimilate the lessons and styles of subcultural music design's new wave. In any case, the graphic sensibility of Garrett's work for Buzzcocks and Magazine, shown in The Art of Punk, has always seemed closer to ""there is no one standard punk visual language" and that "a notion of a pure or authentic punk style is difficult to justify."

Prag Vec, "Existential" 7-inch single, Spec, UK, 1978. Source: Black Flag, "Jealous Again" 12-inch EP, SST, USA, 1980. Design: Raymond Pettibon. Source:

The Art of Punk

The Art of Punk

It is no accident, too, that the stencil-based graphic identity of Crass, one of the most highly politicized punk bands, is so well coordinated and trenchant. "Both Gee [Vaucher] and myself trained as graphic artists," Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud tells Bestley and Ogg. "Both of us prior to Crass had brought money into the house by doing book design and that sort of stuff. And part of training as a graphic artist wasn't just learning type[setting], it was also thinking in terms of marketing; a lot of the projects at college were: 'This is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you create a corporate idea?' . . . It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image."

Anti, LP, New Underground, USA, 1982

There is an old slogan and rallying cry that insists, " Punk's not dead." Bestley and Ogg certainly believe that. Their book ends with examples of more recent punk design, though I find it hard to get excited by most of them in graphic terms. Punk might, as they say, have employed a fairly broad set of graphic conventions, but they remain as consistent and constrictive over time as those found in heavy metal. Kugelberg deduces from punk a more general lesson for today: "Form a band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor." No one can argue with that, though many might see it as a stretch to claim that, in 2012, these possibilities derive from punk's mid-1970s example - unless, perhaps, one were to view punk prophetically as a form of science fiction. Interestingly, this is just how Savage does regard punk: as a "jump cut" into the future. "[P]eople in Britain see punk in terms of social realism and rock music. It was pure science fiction and it was very informed by J.G. Ballard, and by The Man Who Fell to Earth, among a lot of other things. . . . I think what's important about punk is the idea that it was for a brief period very futuristic." That's another intriguing insight that calls out for more excavation.

I Don 't Want to Die in Your War
Design: Dan Phillips, Ed Colver, Gary Kail. Source: The Art of Punk
See also:
But Darling of Course it 's Normal: The Post-Punk Record Sleeve

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Punk has two graphic histories: Punk: An Aesthetic and The Art of Punk. What conclusions do they draw?

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Youth culture is known for rebellion. But insurgence may have hit a a fever pitch in 1970s Britain with the start of punk and the emergence of the punk aesthetic. Maintaining the ideology that "anyone can do it," the young punks of the time began transforming the music scene from polished and produced to something fast and aggressive. Independently made 7-inch vinyl became the center of design for the nihilistic disruptors influenced by Dadaist collage, the 1960s underground press and counter-culture protest graphics from decades prior.

Punk was about opposition-whether that meant fashion trends, literature, venues or music. According to Russ Bestley's HitsvilleUK site, the general rule of thumb when it came to music was, "if it can't be said in three minutes, it's not worth saying." This credo followed punk throughout its sub-genres, from Proto Punk and Novelty Punk to Anarcho Punk and Real Punk. And was highly reflected in the graphic design of the culture.

Fast, messy, unpolished-whether it was an album cover, a promotional poster or a DIY zine, these tenets held steadfast.

"This was an art of expediency, making use of collage, cartoon drawings, hand-lettering, rub-down lettering, ransom-note lettering, stencils,...rubber-stamping and black and white Xerox copying, as well as silkscreen and offset litho," writes Rick Poynor in an article for Design Observer .

These choices weren't made from lack of planning or knowledge of design. No. Each design was created with the intention of questioning the standards and defying the norms of contemporary culture. Plenty of Punk musicians even had backgrounds in graphic design. For example, both Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, co-founders of the highly-regarded band Crass, were trained in graphic design, specifically working with books and typesetting. "...A lot of the projects at college were: 'This is the product, how do you design and market it? How do you corporate idea?' ...It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image," says Rimbaud.

And it's true-Punk's image is anything but ambiguous. Johan Kugelberg puts it best in his book The Art of Punk , co-authored with Jon Savage, "The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown."

Images of the Punk Aesthetic

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Poly Styrene, X-Ray Spex at The Round House, 1978, lithograph. Collection of Andrew Krivine.

Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli)

Black Flag, "Jealous Again" 12-inch EP, SST, USA, 1980. Design: Raymond Pettibon. Source: The Art of Punk

Pretty Disobedient, screenprinted poster by Shepard Fairey, USA, 2001. Signed by Fairey

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Punk: An Aesthetic edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage (Rizzoli)

Anti, I Don't Want to Die in Your War LP, New Underground, USA, 1982; Design: Dan Phillips, Ed Colver, Gary Kail. Source: The Art of Punk

Prag Vec, "Existential" 7-inch single, Spec, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk

Anarchy in the U.K. fanzine, UK, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic

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Punk for a Day: Graphic Design History and the Punk Aesthetic

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Youth culture is known for rebellion. But insurgence may have hit a a fever pitch in 1970s Britain with the start of punk and the emergence of the punk aesthetic. Maintaining the ideology that "any...

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Punk emerged as a reaction to the rigid restrictions of Modernism and its style ripped up the rules of Swiss minimalism and neutral sans serif typography. As traditional attitudes came to be considered outdated, society rebelled against the mainstream and demanded change. It feels like we are at a similar turning point today, both culturally and typographically. Can we look to...

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How Punk changed Graphic Design and is history repeating itself?

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Punk emerged as a reaction to the rigid restrictions of Modernism and its style ripped up the rules of Swiss minimalism and neutral sans serif typography. As traditional attitudes came to be considered outdated, society rebelled against the mainstream and demanded change. It feels like we are at a similar turning point today, both culturally and typographically.

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Jamie Macgregor Reid (16 January 1947 - 8 August 2023) was an English visual artist. His best known works include the record cover for the Sex Pistols single "God Save the Queen", which was lauded as "the single most iconic image of the punk era."

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Wolfgang Weingart (b. 1941)
Swiss Punk

Wolfgang Weingart is a German graphic designer credited as the progenitor of New Wave typography. According to Weingart, "I took 'Swiss Typography' as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create a "style." It just happened that the students picked up-and misinterpreted-a so called 'Weingart style' and spread it around."
"His typographic experiments were strongly grounded, and were based on an intimate understanding of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions of typography. Whereas traditional Swiss typography mainly focused on the syntactic function, Weingart was interested in how far the graphic qualities of typography can be pushed and still retain its meaning. This is when the semantic function of typography comes in: Weingart believes that certain graphic modifications of type can in fact intensify meaning. "What's the use of being legible, when nothing inspires you to take notice of it?" Excerpt from Keith Tam
How well was his progressive idea about typography received at that time? Weingart recalls, "in my presentations in 1972, there was always a group of audience that hated it, one group that loved it, and the rest would all leave during the lecture."

It wasn't until the early eighties, when his American students like April Greiman and Dan Friedman brought back to the US a wealth of typographic arsenals from Basel and co-opted it into the mainstream of graphic design. From April Greiman's ´hybrid imagery" to David Carson's deconstructive page layouts, anarchy reigned supreme in the nineties. Those were the days for graphic design superstars, whose style many a graphic designer adored and imitated. While no one can give a definitive answer as to whether these American graphic designers took what Weingart did and brought it to new heights, they certainly managed to make it a huge commercial success. "They were doing it as a style and it was never my idea to create fashion," denotes Weingart. The teaching at Basel for Weingart is not about trends but a 'stability' that they try to move away from, but never totally.

, Friedman grew to feel that modernism had devolved into a bland, soulless surface treatment. (His Citibank logo of 1975 above.) He invented the term Dan Friedman (1945-1995)
New Wave/Radical Modernism

Weingart alum, Known for his work at Ansbach and Grossman and Pentagram Radical Modernism to distance himself from both the formal constraints of Modernism and the post modern label. Friedman was attempting to reconcile the social idealism of the early 2oth Modernists with the realities of his life in 1980's New York City.

"Radical modernism is my reaffirmation of the idealistic roots of our modernity, adjusted to include more of our diverse cultures." In his text, Radical Modernism, Freedman illustrates his work in diverse mediums,- experimental furniture, sculpture, posters, logos, books, installations, typographic lessons, and his apartment. "Friedman argued that design was in crisis and urged designers to see their work in a larger cultural context.

Below read Friedman's philosophy (quoted from an interview in Eye shortly before his death in 1995)

'In the 1960s I saw graphic design as a noble endeavor, integral to larger planning, architectural and social issues. What I realized in the 1970s, when I was doing major corporate identity projects, is that design had become a preoccupation with what things look like rather than with what they mean. What designers were doing was creating visual identities for other people - not unlike the work of fashion stylists, political image consultants or plastic surgeons. We had become experts who suggest how other people can project a visual impression that reflects who they think they are. And we have deceived ourselves into thinking that the modernization service we supply has the same integrity as service to the public good. Modernism forfeited its claim to a moral authority when designers sold it away as corporate style."

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) enrolled at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. He studied with Josef Albers and learned from his Werklehre teaching method- the practice Albers had developed at the Bauhaus which emphasis "a fingertip feel for materials.".

It was there that Rauschenberg''s pivotal early engagement with photography began under the tutelage of figures such as Hazel Larsen Archer and Aaron Siskind, and where he began taking photographs alongside his fellow students Dorothea Rockburne, Cy Twombly and Susan Weil. The experience had such an effect on him that for a time he was unsure whether to pursue painting or photography as a career. It is, then, somewhat ironic that subsequent works such as his Silk-Screen paintings were able to combine both.

Personally I think we need to give more credit to Rauschenberg's influence on early digital graphic design. His combinations of image in layers was referenced by the most influential graphic designers, such as April Greiman.

" The human-machine interaction that is so important in Rauschenberg's art as a whole is crucial here. The symbiosis of of the human and the technological."

April Greiman (b. 1948)

Although initially educated in the Modernist style at Kansas City Art Institute, Greiman was later influenced by Wolfgang Weingart in Switzerland to break from Modernism. She moved to California where she was inspired to use the computer as a means of artistic expression and exploration of new image generation. "It's not just Graphic Design anymore. We don't have a new name for it yet."

Ms Greiman synthesized the complex layering style of artists like Robert Raushenberg and the aesthetic of New Wave typography with the new capabilities of the computer to become a visionary pioneer of digital design.

Emigre

In 1984 Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, both Europeans relocated in the US, started an independent type foundry and publication, Emigre Graphics, in Berkeley, California. Their publication, Emigre magazine was a collection of essays, interview, reviews and font showcases that circulated between 1984 and 2005. You can read a selection of past articles here.

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Nicholas Cullinan, Vaporous Fantasies : Rauschenberg's Photograms at the Tate. 2011
Link

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Linda Hults. The Print in the Western World, 1996.

Rauschenberg image from Interview Magazine.

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Wolfgang Weingart (b. 1941) Swiss Punk Wolfgang Weingart is a German graphic designer credited as the progenitor of New Wave typography. According to Weingart, "I took 'Swiss Typography' as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing any style upon my students. I never intended to create a "style."

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Artist page for Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)

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Gallery of works | Room brochure (pdf 4.6mb)

1 September 2007 - 27 January 2008

Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.

Robert Rauschenberg has had an extensive impact on late twentieth-century visual culture. His work has been of central influence in many of the significant developments of postwar American art and has provided countless blueprints for artistic innovation by younger generations. Rauschenberg's radical approach to his artistic practice was always sensational, with the artist producing works so experimental that they eluded definition and categorisation. The National Gallery of Australia holds an important collection of Rauschenberg's works. These works exemplify the artist's striking transition in subject matter and material during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s - a shift from the imagery of American popular culture to a focus on the handmade and unique combinations of natural and found materials. Many of the works exhibited in Robert Rauschenberg: 1967-1978 reveal the artist's overarching aim to 'drag ordinary materials into the art world for a direct confrontation'. It has been Rauschenberg's perpetual mix of art with life that has ensured that his work appears as innovative today as it was 40 years ago.

The legendary Bauhaus figure, Josef Albers, was the head of fine art at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, when Rauschenberg enrolled in 1948. Under the supervision of the strict disciplinarian, Rauschenberg learnt about the essential qualities, or unique spirit, within all kinds of materials. Rauschenberg said of their student-teacher relationship that Albers was 'a beautiful teacher and an impossible person. He didn't teach you how to "do art". The focus was on the development of your own personal sense of looking. Years later ... I'm still learning from what he taught me. What he taught me had to do with the whole visual world'.

It was also at Black Mountain College that Rauschenberg came into contact with several other key art world figures who had a vital and long-lasting impact upon his thinking and artistic pursuits. The artists Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, Franz Kline and Aaron Sisskind were all teaching at Black Mountain. However, the most significant influence on the young artist was the celebrated avant-garde composer John Cage. Rauschenberg and Cage developed a relationship of reciprocal inspiration - a connection that provided both the artist and the composer with the daring that was required in the creation of their most innovative works.

Robert Rauschenberg Horsefeathers thirteen - XV 1972 from the Horsefeathers thirteen series 1972-76 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007

In contrast to the environment of Black Mountain College, the New York avant-garde art scene in 1949 was dominated by Abstract Expressionism. The artistic giants Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had established themselves as the most innovative of the Abstract Expressionists. Discussions focused on the inner emotional state of the individual artist as expressed in highly charged painted gestures. The more free-thinking Rauschenberg, however, worked outside these confines, adopting a methodology that sought to reunite art with everyday life, an ideology that was in complete opposition to the central tenets of Abstract Expressionism. Early in his career, Rauschenberg created controversy within the New York art scene with a series of 'artistic pranks', including his infamous erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing. This rebellious act of destroying an established artists' work gained him instant notoriety and secured Rauschenberg the position of New York's enfant terrible.

Despite his 'prankster' reputation, Rauschenberg was highly self-disciplined and determined to challenge himself. In 1951, he completed a series of white paintings, which were in contrast, followed by a series of black paintings. By limiting himself to a monochromatic palette, Rauschenberg performed an artistic exorcism, rendering the restrictions imposed by media, style and convention obsolete so that there were no psychological boundaries to what he could do from that point onwards. Only after such self-imposed regulation was Rauschenberg prepared for what he was to attempt next. In a radical transgression of artistic conventions, Rauschenberg began to fuse vertical, wall-mounted painterly works with horizontal, floor-based sculptural elements, usually in the form of found objects. His fusion of the two-dimensional picture plane and the three-dimensional object is now of legendary status. It was the invention of a new 'species' of art, which Rauschenberg termed 'Combines'.

Rauschenberg developed his own unique style by combining gestural mark-making with its antithesis - mechanically reproduced imagery. It was this remarkable clash of visual elements in Rauschenberg's art that provided a major aesthetic fracture - a departure from the heroic painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism and a move towards the adoption of popular culture as subject matter. This radical schism, however, would not have occurred had it not been for Jasper Johns, with whom Rauschenberg had a long and intense partnership, beginning in 1954. Rauschenberg and Johns lived above one another in the same building, visiting each other every day and setting artistic challenges for each other. Rauschenberg has said of his partnership with Johns that, 'He and I were each other's first critics ... Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, "I've got a terrific idea for you" and then I would have to find one for him'. The Rauschenberg-Johns relationship was one of the great creative relationships of the twentieth century. It not only propelled them both in radically new directions, but was also a meeting of two minds that contributed to the development of the Pop Art movement.

If there is an overarching methodology that provides a foundation to Rauschenberg's work, it is the collage technique. While collage was initially developed in the 1920s by Dada artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg catapulted collage into the sphere of 'hyper collage'. Rauschenberg's work contains layered image sequences, or image sentences, where the viewer interprets the progression of images as though reading a language system. Rauschenberg's syntax, however, is arranged in multiple, simultaneous combinations and directions. It demands a different kind of looking - a repetitive change of focus, back and forth, in an analysis of the detail of each individual component image in order to perceive the composition as a whole. While this fragmentation of the composition is akin to the multiple viewpoints of Cubism, it has been more eloquently compared by John Cage to watching 'many television sets working simultaneously all tuned in differently ...'

Rauschenberg's series of dense collage works, Horsefeathers thirteen, is a striking example of the artist's innate talent in constructing compositions of detailed sophistication. Mass media action images, such as running races, horse-riding and rowing, are mixed with more generalised subjects that blend the natural environment with the manufactured environment. Each image is poised on the precarious dynamic moment and, in this way, Rauschenberg succeeds in investing his works with a simultaneous sense of movement and suspense. There is no hierarchy of images - the path of visual exploration for each composition is of our own choosing, despite the occasional (and humorous) directional arrow. The Horsefeathers thirteen series is a visual experiment in the 'random order' of experience. By presenting us with a series of signs that encourage multiple complex readings, the artist has attempted a collaboration with the specific memories, associations and thought processes of the individual viewer.

Robert Rauschenberg Storyline I from the Reels (B + C) series 1968 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007

While the images and objects selected for inclusion within the artist's compositions may not be personally symbolic, they do reveal much about the American social events and political issues of the cultural period in which they were created. The garishly coloured Reels (B + C) series appropriates film stills from the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde movie, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, and exposes Rauschenberg's fascination with celebrity and the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion, the photo-collage work Signs operates as a succinct visual summary of the cultural and political events of the 1960s, depicting the tragic musician Janis Joplin, the assassination of John F Kennedy, America's race riots and the Vietnam War. Rauschenberg has always been an artist-activist, skilled in employing art to raise individual awareness of social, environmental and political issues.

Rauschenberg's work from the 1950s and 1960s can also be seen as a presentation of the street culture of the urban environment. During this period, Rauschenberg lived in New York and regularly walked the streets in order to collect the 'surprises' that the city had left for him. Many of these found objects were incorporated into his artwork,the most famous of which is a stuffed goat ( Monogram 1953-59). The Gallery's Albino cactus (scale) with its combination of two-dimensional photographic imagery and three-dimensional found objects can be considered a late 'Combine' work.

A 'found' tyre in Albino cactus (scale) is incorporated into Rauschenberg's artistic expression, but it cannot be completely detached from its life spirit. The Duchampian displacement of the found object from life, and its subsequent transference to art, creates something akin to a split personality; that is, all found objects bring with them a history and/or pre-function which the artist allows to seep into the composition. Thus, in a collaborative encounter with his material, Rauschenberg becomes a choreographer of the historical meaning and value of the found object.

The images collaged along the material panel backdrop of Albino cactus (scale) have been printed via a solvent-transfer process - a technique that Rauschenberg began to experiment with in 1959. However, the look of Albino cactus (scale) also recalls Rauschenberg's many screenprinted paintings, first explored by the artist in 1962. (It was at the same time that Andy Warhol also adopted the screenprinting technique and the two artists traded ideas about the method.) The solvent-transfer process and screenprinting technique liberated Rauschenberg's work. With both forms of printmaking, the artist discovered ways in which he could quickly and repetitively transfer his found imagery to the canvas of his paintings and Combines.

Rauschenberg believed that the printmaking technique of lithography was old-fashioned and is notorious for having stated that 'the second half of the twentieth century is no time to start writing on rocks'. Ironically, it is Rauschenberg who became a significant figure in the resurrection of American printmaking that occurred during the 1960s. He has subsequently worked with many leading print workshops to create more than 800 published editions. Printmaking is a technique perfectly suited to his methodology of layering found images and one which gave him total control over the size and scale of each component image. It was through printmaking that Rauschenberg was able to once again blur the distinctions between media and perfectly unite his obsessive use of the photographic image with painterly techniques.

One of the most successful of Rauschenberg's collaborations has been with the Gemini GEL print workshop - a printmaking partnership that permanently changed the terrain of American printmaking. The artist's highly experimental approach to print processes comes to the fore in the colour lithograph and screenprint Booster, created in 1967. For Booster, Rauschenberg decided to use a life-sized X-ray portrait of himself combined with an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the image of a chair and the images of two power drills. Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for Rauschenberg's ambitious project and the collaboration radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic printmaking. Rauschenberg and Tyler pushed beyond what had previously been done by combining lithography and screenprinting in a new type of 'hybrid' print. The rules governing the size of lithographic printmaking were also ignored, and at the time of its creation Booster stood as the largest and most technically sophisticated print ever produced. Today, Booster remains one of the most significant prints of the twentieth century, a watershed that catapulted printmaking into a new era of experimentation.

Robert Rauschenberg Booster from the Booster and seven studies series 1967 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007

In 1969 Rauschenberg was invited by NASA to witness one of the most significant social events of the decade - the launch of Apollo 11, the shuttle that would place man on the moon. NASA also provided the artist with detailed scientific maps, charts and photographs of the launch, which formed the basis of the Stoned moon series - 30 lithographs printed at Gemini GEL. In the transference of the found images to the stone, Rauschenberg had the stones photosensitised, while vigorously applied lithographic crayon and tusche were used to create lines of motion. Once again, we find a mix of the mechanical and the gestural, a juxtaposition of the mechanically reproduced photographic image and the handcrafted 'television static' appearance of Rauschenberg's painterly and drawn additions. The Stoned moon series of prints is a celebration of man's peaceful exploration of space as a 'responsive, responsible collaboration between man and technology'. Furthermore, the combination of art and science is something that Rauschenberg continued to pursue throughout the 60s in what he calls his 'blowing fuses period'.

Rauschenberg's collaborations with printmakers and print workshops have often not resembled traditional prints at all. In his typical mix of techniques and processes, the artist has radically re-interpreted the traditional notion of what constitutes a print. Seizing upon the notion of multiplicity, inherent in the printed form, Rauschenberg has frequently applied it to sculpture to create multiple sculptural works that are editioned, just as a traditional print can be editioned. His three-dimensional Publicon station multiples are seven physical expressions of the clash of art and religion and a reference to Christ's 14 stations of the cross. Early in his life Rauschenberg was very involved in the church and wanted to become a preacher. His decision was reversed, however, when he was told that the church would not tolerate dancing (an activity that Rauschenberg was particularly good at). Just like this clash of religion and culture in life, the Publicon stations represent a similar clash of visual elements in art. They are austere containers that unfold to display intricately collaged, bright fabrics and electrical components. Akin to the individual steps that make up a choreographed dance, the works are adjustable through various configurations. As box-like containers, the Publicon stations also reveal the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. Rauschenberg closely studied the works of the two masters and repetitively referenced them in his own work.

Robert Rauschenberg Cardbird II from the Cardbird series 1971 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007

A fundamental shift in subject and material occurred in Rauschenberg's work from the 1960s to the 1970s. In the 1960s he relied heavily upon American visual culture, whereas in the 1970s Rauschenberg embraced an international perspective. The works from the 1970s also reflect his incessant experimentation with new materials. Where the 1960s were dominated by repetitive mass media imagery, the 1970s reveal a focus on natural fibres, a simplification of the artist's materials to incorporate fabric, cardboard and other natural elements such as mud, rope and handmade paper. The catalyst for this dramatic change in both subject matter and material can be explained by a change in Rauschenberg's physical environment - his decision to move from New York City to Captiva Island, Florida, had a profound effect on the appearance of his work.

With no city to offer up its detritus, the artist turned to the things that surrounded him in his new environment and the move had yielded numerous cardboard boxes. Rauschenberg has suggested that his choice of cardboard as a new material was the result of 'a desire ... to work in a material of waste and softness. Something yielding with its only message a collection of lines imprinted like a friendly joke. A silent discussion of their historyexposed by their new shapes'. The Cardbird series of 1971 is a tongue-in-cheek visual joke, a printed mimic of cardboard constructions. The labour intensive process involved in the creation of the series remains invisible to the viewer - the artist created a prototype cardboard construction which was then photographed and the image transferred to a lithographic press and printed before a final lamination onto cardboard backing. The extreme complexity of construction belies the banality of the series and, in this way, Rauschenberg references both Pop's Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol and Minimalist boxes such as those by Donald Judd. By selecting the most mundane of materials, Rauschenberg once again succeeds in a glamorous makeover of the most ordinary of objects. This is an exploration of a new order of materials, a radical scrambling of the material hierarchy of modernism.

During the 1970s, Rauschenberg's new international focus required him to travel to several countries where he entered into significant collaborations with local artists and craftspeople. The first was in 1973 with the medieval paper mill Richard de Bas in Ambert, France. Once again, Rauschenberg imposed a disciplined stripping back of his art materials - this time it was not to do with colour but with the notion of the handmade. In particular, the artist wanted to engage with handmade paper as one of the most ancient of artistic traditions. The resulting series, Pages and fuses, is a group of paper pulp works where the Pages are formed from natural pulp and shaped into paper pieces that incorporate twine or scraps of fabric. In contrast, the Fuses are vivid pulp pieces dyed with bright pigments. It was precisely this innovative experiment with paper pulp that sparked a renewed interest in handmade paper, which inspired major paper works by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler.

Throughout his career, Rauschenberg worked with fabric in the creation of theatre costumes and stage sets. In 1974, however, his interest in the inherent properties of natural materials led him to experiment with the combination of fabric and printmaking. The Hoarfrost editions series, created at Gemini GEL, is named after the thin layer of ice that forms on cold surfaces and was inspired by Rauschenberg's observation of printmakers using 'large sheets of gauze ... to wipe stones and presses ... and hung about the room to dry ... how they float in the air, veiling machinery, prints tacked to walls, furniture'. The imagery of the Hoarfrost editions was drawn from the Sunday Los Angeles Times and printed onto layers of silk, muslin and cheesecloth. The artist exploited the transparent layering of material in order to suspend the image within the work itself, enabling the viewer to both look at and look through the work - to see both the positive space and the negative space in conjunction with the environment behind the work. Everyday objects, such as paper bags, are in sophisticated contrast with the ghostly imprinted imagery and the folds and layers of the delicate fabric.

Rauschenberg's quest for continued international involvement took him to Ahmadabad, India, to work in a paper mill that had been established as an ashram for untouchables. Rauschenberg was immediately struck by the contrast between the rich paper mill owners and the absolute poverty of the mill workers. The artist's specific environment once again provided him with materials and in 1975 he set about making the Bones and unions series. For the Bones, the collaborative team wove strips of bamboo with handmade paper embedded with segments of brightly coloured Indian saris. In the creation of the Unions, Rauschenberg sought to incorporate the mud that was used by the villagers to build their homes. He achieved this by concocting a rag-mud mixture consisting of paper pulp, fenugreek powder, ground tamarind seed, chalk powder, gum powder and copper sulphate mixed with water, all of which was then kiln fired. For Rauschenberg, the striking contrast between the sensuous colour of the saris and the aromatic and earthy aesthetic of the rag-mud encapsulated the manifest social and cultural contrasts of India.

The rich textile area of Ahmadabad, India, also provided Rauschenberg with the inspiration for his Jammers series of 1975-79. Apparently, Rauschenberg 'was very excited by what he saw there [in India] ... rolling out bolts and bolts of sari material, each one more beautiful than last. He was feeling the texture, just amazed at the colours. A new sense of fabric came to him there'. Reef (Jammer) is a minimal installation of five white sheets of silk, suspended by pins and elegantly draped to flutter in the breeze. While the work's title is a nautical reference, Reef (Jammer) recalls the 'hyper-sensitive' receptor surface of Rauschenberg's series of 1951 white paintings, which were sophisticated in their simplicity and functioning as 'airports for the lights, shadows, and particles'.

In all of his artistic pursuits, Rauschenberg has been an enthusiast for collaboration, working with numerous artists, composers, papermakers and printmakers. His joy in creating works of art within a reciprocal exchange has also extended to his materials. By looking beyond the apparent ordinariness of everyday experience, Rauschenberg celebrates the life spirit of all things, realising the unique qualities of everything from individual colours, mass media clippings, paper, fabric and mud to electric lightbulbs and old tyres. In this way, Rauschenberg has imbued his art with the visual 'poetry of infinite possibilities'.

Jaklyn Babington
Curator, International Prints and Drawings

John Cage, 'On Robert Rauschenberg, artist, and his work' (first published in Metro, Milan, 1961); republished in Silence, 4th edition, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1970, p 98.
Walter Hopps, 'Introduction: Rauschenberg's art of fusion' in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: A retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p 29.
Calvin Tomkins, Off the wall: the art world of our time, Doubleday & Co, New York, 1980, p 32.
Tomkins, p 118.
Charles F. Stuckey, 'Rauschenberg's everything, everywhere era', in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p 34.
Cage, p 13.
Robert Rauschenberg, 'Random order', Location, New York, Volume 1 Spring 1963, pp 27-31.
Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg: art and life, Harry N Abrams, New York, 1990, p 178.
Robert Rauschenberg, 'Note: Cardbirds' in Rauschenberg: Cardbirds, promotional brochure, Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles, 1971, np.
Ruth Fine, 'Writing on rocks, rubbing on silk, layering on paper' in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p 384.
Kotz, p 206.
Cage, p 105.
Cage, p 103.

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Gallery of works | Room brochure (pdf 4.6mb) 1 September 2007 - 27 January 2008 Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look. Robert Rauschenberg has had an extensive impact on late twentieth-century visual culture.

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wolfgang weingart - typo/graphic posters

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wolfgang weingart, who was born in 1941 in salemertal in southern germany, attended the merz akademie in stuttgart from 1958 to 1960, where he familiarised himself with typesetting and the process of making linocuts and woodcuts. after this he trained as a typesetter and discovered swiss typography.

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Wolfgang Weingart is an internationally recognized figure for his iconic body of work in the field of graphic designing and typography. His work is characterized as Swiss Typography. Moreover he is deemed the pioneer of 'New Wave' or Swiss Punk typography.

Weingart was born in 1941 in Constance at the northern foot of the Alps in southern Germany. He spent most part of his childhood in Germany and for a brief period moved to Lisbon with his family, in 1954. Four years later, he returned to Germany and enrolled himself at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart. There he opted for a two year program in applied graphic arts. While studying, he developed certain skills including linocut, woodblock printing and typesetting. Then he began a three-year apprenticeship at Ruwe Printing, where he learned typesetting in hot metal hand composition. He also had the opportunity to come across the company's consulting designer, Karl-August Hanke. Hanke took up the role as his mentor and encouraged him to continue his studies in Switzerland.

In 1963, Weingart relocated in Basel after meeting Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann. He attended the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design), as an independent student. In 1968, he was requested to teach typography at the institution's newly established department Weiterbildungsklasse für Grafik. He was one of the highly inspiring teachers the international Advanced Program for Graphic Design had until 2005. He accepted the teaching position at the Yale Summer Program in Graphic Design in Brissago, Switzerland, upon Armin Hofmann's request. In 1976, he designed a poster for photographer John Glagola which presented wide silver bars printed across the artist's name. The poster depicted the decline of foundry type as a viable commercial means of printing.

For over four decade Weingart has extensively taught and delivered lectures across Europe, Asia, New Zealand, North and South America, and Australia. According to him, he never influenced his students to adopt a certain type of style, especially his own. However, his students misunderstood his teaching as his own style and spread it around as 'Weingart style'. A retrospective of Weingart's work was mounted by The Museum of Design in Zurich from May to September in 2014. The exhibition, Weingart: Typography, was the first one to showcase his personal work along with the product of his teaching.

Weingart wrote a retrospective book on typography, which Lars Müller Publishers compiled in a volume in ten sections, Weingart: Typography -- My Way to Typography, in 2000. Furthermore, several designers, Knapp, Susan, Hofmann, Dorothea, Michael, collaborated on Weingart: The Man and the Machine. The book, published by Karo Publishing in 2014, is comprised of statements by 77 of Weingart's students at the Basel School of Design during the period 1968-2004.

From 1978 to 1999, Wolfgang Weingart served as the member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). Also he offered his services on the editorial board of the magazine, Typographische Monatsblätter, for eighteen long years. The honorary title of Doctor of Fine Arts was conferred upon him by MassArt in 2005. The American Institute of Graphic Arts recognized his creative genius and for his typographic explorations and teaching, awarded him the highest honor of the design profession, AIGA Medal, in 2013. The following year the Federal Office of Culture presented him the Swiss Grand Prix of Design award. He was nominated for the award for his life-long merits as a designer.

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Wolfgang Weingart | Biography, Designs and Facts

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Wolfgang Weingart is an internationally recognized figure for his iconic body of work in the field of graphic designing and typography. His work is characterized as Swiss Typography. Moreover he is deemed the pioneer of 'New Wave' or Swiss Punk typography. Weingart was born in 1941 in Constance at the northern foot of the Alps in southern Germany.

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Dan Friedman was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1945. He received his education at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, the Hochscule für Gestaltung in Ulm and the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel. In the early 1970s, at Yale University, he developed and published teaching methods in design and the 'New Typography' which became a basis for the New Wave which followed.

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If you're ever in New York City, make sure to stop by AIGA's National Design Center, the ground floor of which serves as a gallery for rotating exhibitions of work in design. Currently they have an excellent show devoted to the career of Dan Friedman, a pioneer of "new wave" design in the 1970s and 80s whose life was tragically cut short.

Friedman is a figure that all designers should be familiar with, so for those who can't see the show in person, we put together a sneak peek.

Radical modernism is ...

These days, it's easy to look back at modernism as merely a "style" of art and design. In fact, it was much more, comprising an entire worldview and ethics based on the principles that technology and aesthetic innovation could materially improve people's lives, create a ground for authentic experience and foster political agency.

Friedman was a true modernist, but like many in the 1970s, he became disillusioned with aspects of the modernist program - particularly the way it had been co-opted by corporations. His response was a new, vibrantly humanistic style that maintained a belief in the political ideals of modernism, while shedding its formal orthodoxies in favor of a more exuberant expressionism.

But before we get to that, a look at Friedman's early days is in order.

In Switzerland ...

After graduating from college in the United States, Friedman went on to study at several Swiss design institutions. Here, he clearly picked up the country's hallmark emphasis on the grid and meticulous typography.

Posters by Friedman for the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the New Haven Dance Ensemble
At the Schule für Gestaltung Basel, however, Friedman had the opportunity to study with Wolfgang Weingart, a designer with novel attitudes toward the Swiss tradition. Known as the father of New Wave or "Swiss Punk" typography, Weingart encouraged his students to take conventional Swiss type in new directions.

In Corporate America ...

Back in the United States, Friedman taught at Yale University and then took a position at Pentagram, becoming one of the first employees of the famed agency. Here, Friedman accomplished a broad swath of branding work, for example, developing the branding of banking giant Citicorp.

Posters by Friedman for Citicorp Center
In the East Village ...

In the 1980s, Friedman became increasingly wary of the role of design in corporate culture. Around the same time, he enmeshed himself in the lively and eccentric East Village arts scene, becoming close with graffiti artist Keith Haring, whose book Friedman would design, painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and dealer/curator Jeffrey Deitch.

One of Friedman's sculptural works
Friedman's own work became more experimental, often veering into the world of sculpture and furniture design. One project involved continually re-decorating the interior of this apartment from top to bottom, the results of which you can see below.

Parting words ...

Friedman would spend his last years working mostly as an educator, before dying of AIDS-related complications in 1995. Shortly before he passed away, he composed 12 pieces of advice that should resonate with any member of the design community:

Have anything to add about Dan Friedman or Radical Modernism? Share in the comments!

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Looking back at Dan Friedman's radical modernism - 99designs

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If you're ever in New York City, make sure to stop by AIGA's National Design Center, the ground floor of which serves as a gallery for rotating exhibitions of work in design. Currently they have an excellent show devoted to the career of Dan Friedman, a pioneer of "new wave" design in the 1970s and 80s whose life was tragically cut short.

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In the 1980s the computer hit the consumer market on a variety of different fronts. At the time the computer was seen as a tool for technology based industries, but April Greiman took advantage of its potential as a new visual medium and helped usher in the digital era of design as she pushed the boundaries of design. A graduate of the legendary Basel School of Design in Switzerland, Greiman was well educated on the standard practices of design and typography when she began to break them.

It was in Basel that she studied with Wolfgang Weingart, whom taught her the ideas and philosophies of new wave typography. Not limited to the basics of graphic design she is also an accomplished photographer and works in a variety of mediums. She finds the title graphic designer too limiting and prefers to call herself a trans-media artist. Her work has inspired designers to develop the computer as a tool of design and to be curious and searching in their design approach. She operates and works out of a studio in Los Angeles titled Made In Space, where she "...blends technology, science, word and image with color and space..."

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History of Graphic Design, Graphic Designers, Art and Design Movements, Motion Graphics, Typography, Color, Design, graphic, Design, Reference, Referenced, A collection of information intended to be used as a primer and a reference tool in relation to the history of graphic design

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Opus Design - Boston Web Design and Graphic Design

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April Greiman is the second influential woman designer in our mini blog series: Celebrating Women in Design after we kicked it off with Cipes Pineles. Greiman is considered one of the leading women designers in the New Wave, post-Modern style.

The early years

April Greiman grew up in New York City. From 1966 to 1970, she attended the Kansas City Art Institute studying graphic design. Then during the early '70s, she enrolled at the Basel School of Design (then Allgemeine Künstgewerberschule Basel) under the supervision of two renowned masters of that period-Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart. This is also where she developed her interest in International Style, as well as her later well-known 'New Wave' style.

Introduction to the digital tools

Before the digital revolution in 1984 with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer, graphic design had been a manual, hand-done and photomechanical process. During the 1970s and 80s, many modernist and contemporary fellows of Greiman were afraid of digitalization and the advancement of computer technology. However, she saw beyond the threats and decided to make the best use of what it had to offer. Her experimentation and curiosity in digital art soon liberated her from the traditional approach to design. By involving advanced technology in her design process, her work soon encompassed a unique and multidisciplinary aesthetics. This marked Greiman's name among other leading voices for the New Wave style in this turning era of the American graphic design landscape.

"The digital landscape fascinates me in the same way as the desert."
-April Greiman

Experimenting with digital media and multi-disciplinary approach to design

In her work, Greiman explored the various meaning of typography and ways to alter the flat two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional space through the process of "layering". This was something that had been difficult and almost impossible to achieve with traditional analog tools.

Beyond print design, she also experimented with video and motion-based media. Her ongoing experimentation in digital media continued to showcase in her best-known "hybrid" pieces. Here, she integrated New Wave typography with traditional design elements. She sets an example for the upcoming generation to strive for new ways of creating work and embracing the newness in design.

April Greiman was also one of the leading voices to advocate for the importance of Macintosh in graphic design. In addition, she demanded more recognition and influence of woman designers. Greiman and other's advocacies for woman designers have continued to this day and contributed greatly to the current gender landscape of the graphic design world.

Currently, April Greiman is teaching at the Woodbury University, School of Architecture as an art instructor. She also teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She was presented with the Gold Medal for lifetime achievement for her invaluable contribution to the American graphic design landscape. Greiman also received four honorary doctorates, awarded to her by different institutes, including Kansas City Art Institute, Art Center College of Design, The Art Institute of Boston and Academy of Art University.

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Celebrating women in design: April Greiman - Opus Design

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April Greiman is the second influential woman designer in our mini blog series: Celebrating Women in Design after we kicked it off with Cipes Pineles. Greiman is considered one of the leading women designers in the New Wave, post-Modern style. April Greiman grew up in New York City.

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April Greiman is an influential contemporary American graphic designer. Her innovative ideas and transmedia projects have taken the world by storm. She is considered one of the first designers to see computer in a different light, who realized its potential as a design tool. She is recognized for introducing the 'New Wave' design style in the US. Greiman is the director of a design consultancy, Made in Space, based in Los Angeles.

Born on September 10, 1948, April Greiman grew up in the New York City. From 1966-1970, she attended the Kansas City Art Institute and during her undergraduate study in graphic design for the first time. During early 70's she went to Basel, Switzerland, where she enrolled herself at the Allgemeine Künstgewerberschule Basel (now the Basel School of Design). Under Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart supervision, Greiman developed interest in the International Style and the style later known as 'New Wave'. In 1976, she moved to Los Angeles and founded Made in Space, the multi-disciplinary approach that extends into her current practice.

During 1970s, when other designers were afraid of digitalization and that the advancement in computer technology would comprise the International Style, Greiman embraced the idea. Unlike her contemporaries, instead of being repelled she saw beyond the threat the technology posed and exploited the digital tool. She made use of pixelation and other digitization "errors" as integral parts of digital art. She has been instrumental in exploring and spreading the idea of involving advanced technology in the arts and design process. The California Institute of the Arts appointed her the head of the design department, in 1981. In the following years, she lobbied the institute to rename the department as Visual Communications since Graphic Design seemed to limit the scope of the subject. While teaching there, she also examined in greater depth the effects of technology on her own work.

Greiman bought her first Macintosh and later received the Grand Prize in Mac World's First Macintosh Masters in Art Competition. In 1986, she published an issue for a magazine, notable for its development of graphic design, Design Quarterly. The Walker Art Center published her edition, titled Does it Make Sense. She owns a desert spa retreat, Miracle Manor, with her husband, architect Michael Rotondi. It represents the three-dimensional design of space in natural landscapes which her recent works are based on. To commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Women's Voting Rights), the U.S. Postal Service commissioned Greiman to design the stamp for the occasion, which was launched in 1995. Moreover, a one-woman show of her digital photography, entitled Drive-by Shooting, was held by the Pasadena Museum of California Art, in 2006. The following year, she presented her largest ever designed work, a public mural spanning seven stories of two building facades, named Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice. She also participated in a major exhibition [email protected] Pompidou, held at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Currently, April Greiman is appointed at the Woodbury University, School of Architecture as an art instructor. She also teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Her invaluable contribution to graphic design had the American Institute of Graphic Arts present her with the Gold Medal for lifetime achievement. Besides, four honorary doctorates were awarded to her by different institutes, including Kansas City Art Institute, Art Center College of Design, The Art Institute of Boston and Academy of Art University.

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April Greiman | Biography, Designs and Facts

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April Greiman is an influential contemporary American graphic designer. Her innovative ideas and transmedia projects have taken the world by storm. She is considered one of the first designers to see computer in a different light, who realized its potential as a design tool.

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The Rise And Fall Of Grunge Typography
by Sharan Shetty

Hop on the nostalgia train for a second. Think back to the 90s. To Nirvana, Linklater's Slacker, and the flannel-clad rebels on the run from the 80s. To skateboards and graffiti and toe rings and VHS tapes. Things were messy then. And type design was messy, too. Words were splayed and chaotic, letters blurred. Textures were thick and heavy. Concert posters looked like someone had splattered paint on paper and then scratched out band names. You may have noticed it, you may not have, but at its peak, this typography style, called grunge, was ubiquitous. Alternative music cds, videogames, and zines - all the aggregate products of a wayward generation - appropriated its unfinished and frenzied aesthetic, and it became the largest, most cohesive movement in recent font design history.

It was everywhere - and then it wasn't.
THE RAY GUN EFFECT
David Carson, the acclaimed graphic designer who created Ray Gun magazine, is the so-called Godfather of Grunge. His method was simple, his gospel twofold: you don't have to know the rules before breaking them, and never mistake legibility for communication. Carson's technique of ripping, shredding, and remaking letters touched a nerve. His covers for Ray Gun were bold and often disorienting. He once disliked a Ray Gun article on Bryan Ferry, and so set the entire spread in Zapf Dingbats.

David Carson's infamous Zapf Dingbats spread, featured in a 1994 issue of Ray Gun. (.)

Carlos Segura, a Chicago-based graphic designer and founder of Segura Inc. and such type foundries as T-26, was a close witness to the grunge explosion. Signature grunge fonts, such as Hat Nguyen's Droplet, Harriet Goren's Morire, and Eric Lin's Tema Cantante were all distributed by his foundries.

Like many other of the 90s' best things, grunge typography was rooted in angst and discontent. "Grunge typography came in as a backlash, very much like how punk music came in," Segura told me during a recent phone conversation. "It was almost like a societal complaint, if you will: everything was getting too clean. Design by people like David Carson also made it a very accessible direction to go on. We, as human beings, tend to follow more than lead, and everyone just started to do that David Carson look. ... And there was, for a certain period of time, a certain refreshing look to it that had not been seen before."
David Carson on "grunge" design and his method.
The aesthetic was fueled by raw emotion, but Carson's tactics were made imitable by technology. The rise of grunge typography coincided with the burgeoning popularity of the Macintosh, which, introduced in 1984, permanently altered the landscape of graphic design and typography. The art of designing by hand - a painful craft of precision and consistency - was no longer the only option. Designers were liberated; the screen and their imagination were the only constraints. In many ways, the modifier "grunge" denotes for typography what it does for music: unfettered, unrestrained, a cry against convention. The experimental typographer is almost always the young typographer, and young typographers in the 90s, armed with new software and ideas, rejected the rule-based fonts of their forebears.

Pearl Jam and Blink-182 were two of many 90s bands that adopted grunge typography in their image.
From the viewer's perspective, the appeal of grunge was based on a basic idea: it had not been seen before. It wasn't just the experimental design of the letters, but the way they were placed on page. Its bedlam, its body language, resonated with the culture at large. This resonance produced a vital change in typographic method: in a field that was for decades dictated by the principle of neutrality - of meaning being implicit in the text rather than the typeface - fonts were succumbing to association with the genres or ideas with which they were paired.

Silent Hill, along with other late 90s videogames, incorporated grunge typography into commercial advertising and covers.

Indie movies like Fight Club often utilized the anarchic look of grunge typefaces.
THE STORY OF A SINGLE FONT
The beginnings of most grunge fonts were couched in moments of spontaneity, rather than purpose and precision. The idea was to instantly express. The story of Harriet Goren's Morire is an ideal example: the design, inspired by a 16th-century Monteverdi love song entitled "Si ch'io vorrei morire", is all sketch and shadows, as though the letters are in perpetual and subtle vibration. And yet, for such an intricate typeface, its creation was one of fleeting inspiration rather than premeditated artistic vision.

Harriet Goren's grunge typeface Morire.

Morire-inspired art, created by Goren. (Used with permission.)
"When I made Morire, I had been a designer for a couple of years and was really bored with what I was doing," Goren told me. "I spent a lot of time looking at contemporary typography and observing what was going on. I didn't really consider myself part of any movement. I read an article, in Time magazine of all places, of a school in Camden, Maine called the Center for Creative Imaging. The article said it was like being in Florence during the Renaissance. I immediately thought 'I have to go there.'"

"It was incredibly expensive, like $1,700 for three days, and there was an intensive weekend course called something like Experimental Typography. Now this is 1994 or 1993, so these concepts were fairly new. The teacher was P. Scott Makela, who died fairly young but was brilliant and part of that whole David Carson school. Not really knowing anything about the course, I registered, and paid the massive amount of money. The workshop turned out to be three people and the teacher in the class, and it was basically a three-day intensive experience. We didn't even sleep. It was just three straight days of type design. They had state-of-the-art computers, at that time Macintoshes, and I had never had facilities like that. Makela gave us an assignment and over the weekend I designed the whole typeface. I wasn't even on drugs."

Makela was impressed enough to suggest sending the font to Carson. Goren, flattered and flush with doubt, copied it to a disc and sent it through the mail. A few months later, she bought a copy of Ray Gun; Morire was emblazoned all over the pages, fully credited and even used on the cover. Carson had previously left a voicemail expressing interest in the typeface, but had never guaranteed its inclusion. That was the nature of things: fast, inspired, and without pretense or hierarchy.

"I had no other connections with grunge typography, it was just my being influenced at the time," said Goren. "I personally thought that a lot of what I was doing, and what other people were doing, wasn't exactly aesthetically attractive. But I think it was an important step in getting people to break boundaries and really use the computer for what it's used for now."
THE DECLINE
In retrospect, it "was an amazing experience, and one that changed me creatively and entirely, really. At the time, I worked at a design studio and everything had to be done according to clients' rules. You can do that for so long, but then you need another outlet. It felt very exciting to design letters that didn't have to be read, in a way. Right after I designed Morire, I broke up with a long-term boyfriend. A friend of mine in Portland asked me to design a spread for his magazine, and I remember using my typeface and thinking 'I'm gonna make this look really ugly.' The spread was an illustration of a story, and when I was done you couldn't read the story at all. It was just an expression of pure emotion and design. That's really what it was all about."

Goren's narrative is not unlike other font designers of the era; Carson was notorious for his techniques, which largely involved slashing letters apart, overlapping and omitting vital words, and wreaking general havoc upon the spreads he produced. There was no method to the madness. At the peak of grunge typography, ideals such as kerning, leading, and spacing were stomped, forgotten, and left for dead. Letters became art. The uniformity of ascenders and descenders, the consistency of x-heights and baselines - these were archaic principles, and had no place in the type designer's canvas.

The old guard was scandalized by this rebellion. In the documentary Helvetica, Maximo Vignelli, an Italian designer strongly based in the classical Modernist tradition, tears apart the extravagant tendencies of the grunge typographers, a "wasted generation" that was not "for anything" but "against everything."

"There are people that think that type should be expressive," Vignelli said in the film. "They have a different point of view from mine...You can say, 'I love you,' in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work." Designers like Vignelli believe that typography should be a shell shaped by words, meant to hold language but never to elaborate upon it. It should, in their view, be unobtrusive, elegant, and, above all, timeless.

Such classical notions may triumph in the end. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, clean lettering and subtle spacing experienced a resurgence in popularity, and the use of grunge typography went into decline: conservative became modern, and chaotic became clichéd. Now, in 2012, this reversion to classicism is nigh complete - during our conversation, Segura noted that most demand for grunge fonts he gets comes from Latin America and Europe rather than the U.S. Segura founded T26 Digital Type in 1994, at the very peak of the movement's dominance, and initially provided almost entirely grunge fonts. Now, almost 20 years later, T26 has around 100 grunge fonts licensed, but the vast majority of its database focuses on other styles of typography.

"At the very beginning...we were pigeonholed into that grunge segment for a few years," Segura said. "A couple of years later, we made a concentrated effort to change our personality from a grunge type foundry to a type foundry; we didn't accept any more grunge or unfinished typography, or fonts that didn't have a full character set."

One of those fonts was Goren's Morire, which T26 stopped distributing in 2004. Demand for such typography weakened as the marketplace became oversaturated with grunge fonts and design trends turned toward simplicity. Ray Gun folded in 2000, one of many print casualties of the decade. And young typographers, once so enamored with the idea of throwing caution to the wind, started realizing the merits of restraint. Slowly and surely, the utility of grunge typography narrowed, until it was applied mostly as a novelty and very often as a gimmick. It began to look cheap, formulaic, boring. The cycle had come full circle, and technology facilitated the end as much as it did the beginning.

"There's definitely still a conservative, classical movement in the type industry, but I do also think that movement is largely being dictated by web fonts," said Segura. "Web fonts are obviously for the web, but, more importantly, what's used on the web is made with the intention of clear readability. That emphasis on readability is really determining the current direction of where fonts are going. That's exactly why at T26 we firstly focus on web font conversion with the more classical, readable fonts. It's very rare for a web designer to use an experimental typeface."

The disappearance of grunge typography can also be credited to human nature: techniques become less appealing, less refreshing, once they are used incessantly for nearly a decade. Cleansed of the burden of precedent, typographers began experimenting within the boundaries of convention. More importantly, grunge typography, like most things that outlive their relevance, simply didn't possess the power of association or expression it once had.

As Goren put it, "I think after people got that out of their system and realized what they could do with their tools, typography became a lot more classic and reliant on the rules people thought were boring then. Now, pretty much everyone with the skills can design a typeface, so there are so many different voices and perspectives. There's a lot of mediocrity, because that's what happens when the tools are distributed to everybody. But I think the pendulum is now swinging toward good, elegant design, and that sort of trendiness of the 90s looks a little dated now. It was definitely a movement of its time."

These days, Segura believes classic design has been overemphasized and overexposed, to the detriment of the industry. He believes true innovation has become rare. Though experimental typography should never be defined as solely grunge typography, he sees a troubling lack of originality in current type design.
Sharan Shetty is an Awl summer reporter.
"What I think happened is that it got so excessive that simple, clean typography became the 'in' thing," Segura said. "Almost to the extreme, because then everyone started using Helvetica, and Helvetica was suddenly used as the default answer for every type design project. In my view, that's also the wrong way to go, because I feel you should pick the right font for the right message. So typography got a little bit too conservative at that point."

In many ways the demise of grunge is in perfect accordance with its ideals: change is constant, and rules can never be sustained. Despite what the classicists believe, design is not timeless. Neither was grunge typography. It belonged to and defined a very specific period of rebellion. It did so the same way blackletter strongly evokes daily newspapers and stiff men in suits and hats smoking cigarettes, or the way cursive suggests old, coffee-stained diary entries and dusty historical journals. It's a testament to the enduring power of typography that the way a letter is designed - its curves, its thickness, its heft - can embody an era.

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by Sharan Shetty Hop on the nostalgia train for a second. Think back to the 90s. To Nirvana, Linklater's Slacker, and the flannel-clad rebels on the run from the 80s. To skateboards and graffiti and toe rings and VHS tapes. Things were messy then. And type design was messy, too.

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designboom | architecture & design magazine

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different rock stars talked about teachers they had lusted after in school in this beach culture article 'hot for teacher'. I loved this image of a 'teacher' sitting on some books, and the way the type lustfully leans toward her.

ray gun magazine - one of my favorites, an opener for a long article and interview with singer songwriter morrissey. reading through the article I found this great quote 'I have no interest whatsoever in any aspect of whordom'. I chose to use this large in the opener and cropped him a bit - as he was a bit mysterious in this interview - and in general at that time.

ray gun magazine - experimenting with columns of type, space, or the lack of it between them, and changing fonts in title and body copy. the first issue of ray gun it seemed as if I used a zillion new custom typefaces that people were sending me from all over the world, and for the 2nd issue I self imposed the restriction on myself to use only the 5 fonts my rented computer came with. an interesting challenge and I think the results still stand up pretty well, though I abandoned this idea on the third issue. my font choices lately have returned to slightly tweaked, but are still somewhat basic.

opening spread for the ray gun story 'choice comes to pensacola' - an abortion clinic in florida had been attacked and a dr killed, the day before the band L7 arrived to give a concert. the article talked of the strangeness of the situation they found upon arriving in pensacola, with police, FBI, media, murder, and fanatics on both sides of the issue.

opening spread for article on singer kate bush in ray gun - I listened to the new album, read the interview, and this is where it sent me. I've not used any of the actual article in the opening spread, so the following spread needed a lot of copy on it, but I feel the trade off is worthwhile sometimes - to get a better opening that has a bigger impact - one that hopefully promises an interesting article. communication begins, as always, way before anyone actually starts reading.
DB: what type of brief or project do you enjoy working on the most?
DC: anything I haven't tried before, any new challenge. I had great 2 month working experience on microsoft for example, and it was fascinating learning experience. but so was working with a new fashion line from vietnam... like most designers I enjoy anything that gives me a lot of creative freedom, but when they don't, it's just a different type of challenge, it's like 'hmmmm, THAT'S a lot of restrictions, how can I still do something that works for them - but that I'm still happy with as a designer?'. I also love working with great creative teams, where we all can learn form each other, grow professionally and creatively and push each other.

having had my own small studio all these years, I'm really at a stage now where I'm looking to join a great creative team, mentor and hopefully motivate some younger designers, while still learning and growing professionally.

ray gun spread - we had a new writer from a much bigger music mag, and I was really excited to read this article when it came in. but I was really disappointed to find it was like sooo many others: the writer had been given 10 minutes before the performer went on stage to do his entire interview, and as such he reported the typical stuff like what the singer was wearing, what was in the room etc. boring stuff I'd read so many times before. I started going through my fonts, finding nothing that felt right, then came across dingbat. which would have been the last one on my very extensive list, as it's known by the designers name zapf dingbats. I'm sure I chuckled a bit, then thought, well, why not? it was a really boring article. so the entire article was set in zapf dingbat.

'mixed messages' from beach culture magazine. my starting point in my editorial work is always to read the article. sometimes just the title was interpreted, as is the case here. I felt the title mixed messages should be mixed up. this was a result from printing out the title page in 4 pages, as it was the largest I could get on my printer at that time, then laying them out to cut and tape them together. but stopping midway through the process, I realized there was something nice happening with the 4 single pages laying on my studio floor, as they were - so I used them in that way.
DB: what would you say is your strongest skill?
DC: the ability to speak visually and emotionally to a wide variety of audiences and topics.

I've worked for numerous clients, from auto makers, airlines, fashion companies, surf companies, to hi-tech companies and bands like nine inch nails. it's a very diverse group and I think they come to me because I'm able to speak to their specific audiences or demographics, visually.

a strong concept and or great writing, combined with great design is when the most effective communication occurs, and where the best work happens. as my life experience changes and grows, so does the work. but I feel the basic approach of me interpreting subject matter visually, remains similar. just the other day got an e-mail that I felt expressed what I hope my posters do:
'dear david, I kind of blame you for taking up graphic design. whilst studying film making in bristol a poster of yours' caught my eye, announcing that you were giving a lecture on graphic design (never even thought of graphic design before that point having been kicked out of art class aged 14). I was so intrigued by the poster I went along (around 1999). from then on I ditched filming-making, finishing the degree and never picked up a video camera again. instead I taught myself graphic design. collecting as many copies of ray gun as I could. I'd just like to thank-you for the journey you sent me on, I've loved it. DB: what are your thoughts on specialization vs generalization? '
I'd say that poster was very effective communication. you have to love what you do, you have to enjoy going to work. I say in my talks, find that thing you would do even if you were independently wealthy. that's a good job. or as marshall mcluhan said in our book PROBES 'if your totally immersed in something, it is no longer work, it's play or leisure.'

NIKE air challenge advertisement - a turning point in my career, after a couple years of doing mostly editorial work, NIKE contacted me, via agency weiden +kennedy to do a huge series of ads, billboards and more, world wide, in numerous languages and formats, focusing largely on the type. I kept portraits small, and used a lot of white space. my work uses very few software tricks, or even color. it's about font choice, cropping and basic, often intuitive design decisions, ones that are appropriate for the client, audience, and myself. worldwide agencies started calling me soon after these broke.
DB: how do you think online design resources have influenced the graphic design being produced today?
DC: generalization tends to make you more employable, especially in small shops, or on very unexciting projects. but also the old saying seems to hold true 'knowledge in all areas, master of none'. so, I would lean more toward some sort of specialization, now more than ever, as anyone can buy the same software and do reasonable, work. professional and forgettable. I believe strongly the more one can bring personal uniqueness into the work, the better the work becomes. you enjoy it more and you also do your best work. it has the most impact if you can put some of yourself into each project. otherwise we don't really need designers, anyone can buy the same software and do reasonable work. I think overall designers today have gotten lazy, and let the programs and computers make too many decisions for them.
DB: what are you currently fascinated by and how is it feeding into your work?

quicksilver poster explorations for pro surfing event in france, 2011 - this was a collaboration using elements drawn by illustrator george bates and photographs by steve sherman (the surfer shown here is dane reynolds).

poster for art exhibition opening in montreal, 2013 - if you liked the poster you probably would have enjoyed the opening and the artists that were featured. hopefully it at least perked your interest and you attended, finding a few gems that really spoke to you - a wide range of work was on show. the illustrated elements in the poster are by ola carson.

DC: it's made everything less experimental, less memorable, less unique and less effective. its homogenized the work overall and made it easier to forget, with less impact.
DB: what are you passionate about besides your work?
DC: I'm most fascinated about how social media can work with good design to produce desired and effective results. I still think it's largely an untapped area. I'm always following world events, news, scanning everything really. life in all its details continues to fascinate me endlessly. I'm watching the various eco movements, politics, new products, and constantly wondering how design can play a bigger, more effective and more important role in all of this.
DB: do you have any superstitious beliefs or rules that you live by?

poster for a A.I.G.A. (Austin Institute for Graphic Awesomeness) spring 2014 conference - there are a very few rules one simply does not break. ever. one does not change another designer's work. ever. especially without any discussion with them. I was invited to speak, spring 2014 for the A.I.G.A. in austin, hosted by its founder, armin vit. I was not paid for the speaking event (although the elvis impersonator that opened for me was) but that's fine, I was getting to design the poster and had been given total freedom to do 'whatever I wanted'. I designed two posters that I really liked, and asked mr vit if we could print two posters for my event. he emailed 'yes, no problem. no reason we cant print two'. but when mr vit received my two posters, he said in a post that this poster was 'lazy and not up to par' so, he had added his own design, placing large type, OVER the top of the poster, never saying a word to me, even before and up to the start of the event, only telling me the posters 'hadn't arrived from the printer, but would probably show up after my talk in times for signing'. it doesn't matter if it's me, a student, or whoever the designer is , you simply don't change or alter someones else's work without discussing it with them, and, in this case, hiding what you are doing. indefensible.

here is my 2nd poster for the A.I.G.A. talk - which, mr vit had agreed to print. upon seeing it, he deemed it unfit for printing, again not up to his standards, and told me when I asked what happened to the second poster, that 'the printer didn't have time'. I liked the idea of one poster being simpler and the other more complex. by the way these posters were not given out, or shown anywhere until after the event, so they were not used as promotional tools. though they certainly could, and should have been (in their original form). the poster done with vit's redesign was available as part of the admission price, a souvenir of the event. I feel that if you liked the poster you probably would have enjoyed the lecture and if you didn't like the poster, well, you still might have enjoyed the talk!
DB: what's the best piece of advice you have heard?
DC: family, surfing, music...

DC: I try not to tell family or friends about POSSIBLE new work, especially new exciting projects, as I'm afraid I'll jinx them and not get the job. over the years it feels like I've lost a few projects this way...

bangkok international type symposium 2014 poster - given the subject manner and audience, I believe this to be an effective tool for raising interest, and attendance in such a specialized event that is now on its way to selling out with attendees coming from all over the world. there are MANY ways to communicate - I like the emotional ones.
DB: what's your personal motto?
DC: my dad once told me that whatever the experience - 'if you'd either laughed or learned something, it was probably worthwhile'.

saul bass once told me 'just keep doing what you do, don't care or follow the critics.' - which I thought was great advice and still try to follow to this day.

years ago an anonymous fax arrived congratulating me on a front page feature story that the NY times had published about me. the fax said that they 'hoped I was saving money, because once they build you up, they love to tear you down' - I probably shoulda taken more notice of that one!

DC: why not?

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interview with graphic designer david carson

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different rock stars talked about teachers they had lusted after in school in this beach culture article 'hot for teacher'. I loved this image of a 'teacher' sitting on some books, and the way the type lustfully leans toward her. ray gun magazine - one of my favorites, an opener for a long article and interview with singer songwriter morrissey.

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https://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/david-carson

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https://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/digital/

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https://medium.com/swlh/a-deconstruction-of-the-old-the-new-5313ab7a5102

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https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/anti-grid-icon-david-carson-on-why-computers-make-you-lazy-and-indie-mag-design-needs-to-liven-up/

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Without getting too fangirl or sycophantic, I feel it's accurate to say that David Carson is a man who has transformed the field of graphic design throughout his career. Self-taught, resolutely grid-free, and unafraid to speak his mind (he's also very funny), Carson's work made designers realize that editorial layouts didn't have to stick to the rules around image placement, consistent typography, or doggedly flowing copy issue after issue.

His attitude-one he sees as partly underdog, partly "why not?"-carries through not only his most famous projects like art directing Ray Gun magazine or his work for Transworld Skateboarding, but also branding projects, surfboard designs, packaging design for potato chips, and more; making him as relevant today as ever.

It's rare to speak to a young designer who's into zines, music, and a generally less strict aesthetic, and have them not cite Carson as an influence. Someone has even gone so far as to create a meme-like button reading: "Dont give up, David Carson Wasn't Built in a Day." The American Center for Graphic Design has exalted him as having made "the most important work coming out of America," while Creative Review has called him "the art director of the era." In 2014, he was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal. But for all the praise he's received, he's rather lovely when we chat-and pretty humble to boot. He's also still really into surfing.

Carson has just released a new book of collages, entitled , which gathers 360 pages of recent collage work alongside insights into his processes and inspirations. While the designer's seminal books like The End of Print and 2nd Sight took a broader, industry-wide look at design through his work, things get a lot more personal with this title, offering snaps of his family life and surfing near his Caribbean second home.

Here, we have a long chat with Carson about collage-making, that infamous Dingbats-set Bryan Ferry interview, why he thinks the new Ray Gun book was a "missed opportunity," how computers have made too many designers lazy, and a lot more.
Why collage? Why now?
It just kind of happened naturally, starting around a year ago when I was living in Southern California near Manhattan Beach. I had a great garage space and I'd been collecting work from all my travels throughout my career, especially recently. I'd tear off bits of posters in the cities I visited, or posters I'd made for a talk, or that someone else had made-or sometimes something I'd found on the sidewalk like a discarded container or cardboard box. If it appeals, I'll take it home. I don't know what tipped it off, but I was able to get an exhibition scheduled in Barcelona at the end of last summer. I said that we should do a catalog, then I realized I could do a book. That was my full-time project for a while.
You said that your goal with the book was to share your work "in a more meaningful and intimate way." What do you mean by that?
For me, this book is more of an object than my previous books. It has open, lay-flat binding, which I really like for the look, the feel, the smell. I wrote all the captions, too, and they read like how I talk about my work in some of my lectures, what I'm feeling or thinking about that piece. All of that makes it a more personal book, in a sense, instead of just showing a bunch of commercial work. There was no client, no brief, I was just doing something that felt right with no one overseeing me.
The freedom of no client and no brief always brings up the thorny issue of whether something is "art" or "design." Where do you sit on that?
Well, it's a very blurry line. This is a graphic design book, but if people want to see it as fine art, it's fine with me. Collage has been an abused word over the years, sometimes it's been designated as quite "cute." There's some amazing exceptions, but that's my take as I'm new to it: it doesn't have the same clout as fine art or graphic design.

"Designers have become lazy and let computers make too many decisions for them. There's a renewed interest in being able to tell that there's a human behind it."

Plenty of graphic design is fine art to be put on walls. Recently, I've started to notice a move away from the perfection of the last decade or two, which can be very clean and boring and not very imaginative. It's starting to loosen up again; maybe people are tired of everything being perfect and formatted and looking the same. Designers have become lazy and let computers make too many decisions for them. There's a renewed interest in being able to tell that there's a human behind it.
Collaging seems to fit in with the very manual way you've practiced design throughout your career-scanning, iterating, cutting things, shifting different images around, and so on.
I think that's a good observation. I've never said I've done collage as such, and I still feel that. But if I go back to early magazine work, especially on art boards and moving things around until they're communicating what I want to say-in a way, I've always been working that way. I've never used grids; I still don't. I never studied or learned about them, and when I did I saw no reason to use them, so that's how I've been working. But that wasn't collage for collage sake. People said I was "painting with letters and images."
Sorry in advance for this question, but so many people I interview cite you as an influence-what is it about your work that's been so influential, do you think?
I think it's got to be some odd combination of things. Without formal training, I had a different approach to design. I was a bit of an outsider to the field, and I think in general people like that sort of thing in any profession, but you also have to be able to deliver. If anything [the interest in my work] seems to have grown as people are working so oppositely-everything has been grid- and computer-driven for so long now.

"I've never used grids; I still don't. I never studied or learned about them, and when I did I saw no reason to use them."

You've mentioned that since you weren't taught the "rules" of design, you've made your own. What rules are those? Have they changed over the years?
I think the basic approach has stayed similar: Who's the audience? What are we trying to say, and what would that look like? How would the design reinforce the message, or get people into it? How do you get people to dive into an article or website? All these are considerations that a lot of designers take into account, but from there I go a little more abstract or looser or more intuitive. Design sends a message-whether or not it "feels" right is a hard thing to quantify.

"Sometimes I feel I'm one of the few voices out there trying to keep graphic design a little more emotional or intuitive or give it some spirit."

It's not like I have no rules or set out to break rules, I just have a different approach. Sometimes I feel I'm one of the few voices out there trying to keep graphic design a little more emotional or give it some spirit, which is what intrigued me early on. The fact that you can create a lot of reaction just based on the way you arranged things shows that design is such a powerful language.
Thinking back to the 1994 Bryan Ferry Ray Gun interview, which you typeset in Zapf Dingbats [the story goes that Carson read the interview, deemed it boring, and so rendered it unreadable]-I feel like you don't really see art directors or designers taking those sort of risks now. What was the reaction like?
Well, it was largely pre-internet, so there was not a lot of immediate reaction to it-almost none. You might get letters sent in, but there was no testing beforehand, you just did it. I'm sure I chuckled then... as I often do, I thought, "Why not? Says who? Let's try it." I'm a bit surprised it became such a big thing. I don't show it in my talks, and design-wise it's average, it's okay-it's kind of funny and quick. Sometimes you hear a band say they wrote the song they're best known for in 10 minutes, like a throwaway thing, so it's a bit like that. But it fit with the attitude of the magazine, and you have a responsibility to the audience to represent them and the subject matter.
What do you think of the current state of magazine design?
People used to say about Ray Gun, "Oh that magazine's just for photographers or designers or illustrators, not real musicians." That was fine, I'd take that, as I knew they were getting the music followers since their favorite bands were in there. But if they found a new typeface or photographer, I'd take that readership too.

"It would be hard to do something as fresh and original [as Ray Gun] now. It was easier then, as less had been done."

In general, the newer increase of independent magazines are all done at a professional level-like a B+ level-solid, professional, ultimately forgettable. It's the same software, the people from the same designs schools. The general level was raised [with the rise of indie titles] a bit, but very few get out of their grids and systems. There was more of that with Interview and when Ray Gun was around, but I don't see that so much any more.

With the indie thing, it's really fun and mind-boggling that some of these obscure titles and publications are able to publish. They're perfect vehicles for experimentation in that they're independent, so why not have a little more impact inside? It's certainly healthy and exciting to go into a magazine store again, which it wasn't until recently, but I want to see more experimentation and attitude shown in the design.
With the new Ray Gun book, is there a chance that Ray Gun might come back?
There's a few issues there. Number one, the Ray Gun name was sold to a new publisher who bought it and found it was bankrupt and hasn't done anything with it, and I don't know if he will. But you can't go back and repeat something; it would be hard to do something as fresh and original now. It was easier then, as less had been done.

I also want to mention that I think the book is a horrible missed opportunity. I'm really surprised and disappointed how Rizzoli put it together. It's bad quality photos, the colors and the credit information are wrong... But the publisher of Ray Gun felt he didn't get enough credit for the magazine and just put out his own book. It shows you what happens when you don't have a good art director involved.
Do you think magazine relaunches, like with The Face, are a good idea?
I haven't seen one [at the time of publishing, there hasn't been a print issue of The Face]. I'm curious to see how they're doing it and if there's an audience for it. I hope I'm pleasantly surprised. To be effective, a magazine has to get someone's attention and move them in some emotional way-grab them other than only through the reading. They have to feel some of what they're about to read, and the design's got to be consistent with the subject matter and audience and promise me something that's worthwhile reading.
I have to ask since I'm a mega-fan: How did David Byrne come to write the foreword for your book The End of Print?
One year in the early '90s, the first week after New Years, I got two calls: one about a Nike ad from Wieden+Kennedy in Amsterdam, and one from David Byrne wanting a cover for his new video. I remember turning to my assistant and saying, "This is going to be a good year." It really was the turning point of me getting other work besides magazine work. David Byrne had noticed my Ray Gun stuff early on and wanted a cover for his live video called Between the Teeth, so he got in touch totally out of the blue. I met with him in L.A. and we went to this old movie place to make the credits. They had all this 1960s equipment where the camera just scrolls down the words.

We hit it off it; it was really interesting. Then when it came to doing The End of Print, the publisher Laurence King said "What about asking David Byrne to do the intro?" I thought, "Oh gosh I don't think so, we're not really friends-we got along and I did this work, but we're not in constant contact." I felt odd but also thought "Heck, why not?" so I sent him a fax asking if he'd be interested in doing the introduction one night. The next morning I get this fax back saying he'd love to. He couldn't have been any more positive. I was like, "Wow, no way!" It was a surprise to me-he's so amazing and talented.

"If you have to find your creativity through Google, then you're probably not very creative."

Do you listen to music while you work? What are you listening to at the moment?
I can't work without music; it's always been a huge part of my process. My taste is all over the place. At the moment I'm enjoying Car Seat Headrest, Pavement, Courtney Barnett-it's all over the map, but maybe not as wide as I think. On iTunes I go to "alternative" and usually find stuff I like. I grew up with The Beatles and REM but I like to think I stay fairly up to date with the stuff I like. I took a watercolor class about 100 years ago and the teacher told us you always do your best work if you do it while listening to music you like.
You often speak of the Nine Inch Nails projects as being a highlight [Carson designed various album covers and other collateral for the band]. What is it about those projects that stand out?
That's one of my best projects, maybe because when I was working on it I wasn't a huge fan. It came about when I was flying back to my studio in New York and reading Rolling Stone, and there was a big piece on a new Nine Inch Nails album [ The Fragile, from 1999], which came out after a long time [since the previous release]. I was thinking "Wow, that's getting a lot of press! It would be a great one to get a job on." A week later I get a call just saying "Send all your books and materials by Fedex overnight to this address in New York," and I did it. Then I got a call saying that Nine Inch Nails' management needed me to fly to New Orleans. I thought, "I think I can find time for that!"
You've said in talks that creatives should find inspiration from everything around them, rather than having to look for it. To play devil's advocate, does that mean you're not inherently "creative" if you don't find inspiration easily?
We [Carson and Trent Reznor] met and he played the double album for The Fragile for me. I went back to New York and thought about what it could or should look like, flew back, and the project grew to their MTV music awards commercial, their next album postcards... He was so good to work with. He was so normal. People would probably be a bit disappointed, but he's a really nice, intelligent, normal guy-that's why it worked.

If you have to find your creativity through Google, then you're probably not very creative. It's about naturally being drawn to everything around you, and somehow using everything you experience and see. Reaching within and finding your uniqueness, that's gotta drive your decision-making. I often see in agencies that the first step for designers is to go to Google and look for ideas. If you need to do that, you're not in the right field. Anyone can do that.

Those kinds of jobs are going to be replaced soon, when there will be software that you put the brief and guidelines into and it gives you a deck ready to present. It'll have obscure typefaces and all that stuff, so that's going to eliminate a whole slew of designers. You need edginess, to be personal and subjective, as those who aren't will soon be replaced by those sorts of programs. I'm not sure you can teach creativity: you have that eye or sensibility, or you don't.

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Anti-grid Design Icon David Carson Says Computers Make You Lazy + Indie Magazines Needs to Liven Up

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Without getting too fangirl or sycophantic, I feel it's accurate to say that David Carson is a man who has transformed the field of graphic design throughout his career. Self-taught, resolutely grid-free, and unafraid to speak his mind (he's also very funny), Carson's work made designers realize tha

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https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/06/04/keeping-the-human-touch-graphic-design-according-designer-david-carson

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http://www.designishistory.com/1980/neville-brody/

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http://www.designishistory.com/1980/ray-gun/

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While the contents of its pages were not related to graphic design, Ray Gun magazine proved to be an exploration of typography, layout and visual storytelling that would shift the approach of many graphic designers. The magazine was founded in 1992 and led by the work of David Carson, who served as its art director for the first three years of its career, which lasted 7 years and over 70 issues.

Carson's style of typographic experimentation influenced the development of the deconstruction style of design and a whole new generation of designers. The experiments by Carson and other Ray Gun designers were chaotic, abstract and distinctive, but sometimes illegible. The magazine's radical subject matter often related to music and pop culture icons and the magazine became a reliable source for the prediction of up-and-coming stars.

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History of Graphic Design, Graphic Designers, Art and Design Movements, Motion Graphics, Typography, Color, Design, graphic, Design, Reference, Referenced, A collection of information intended to be used as a primer and a reference tool in relation to the history of graphic design

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https://www.fusedmagazine.co.uk/neville-brody-design-style/

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Capturing the zeitgeist of the 1980's, designer Neville Brody's style set the tone of graphic design for the decade and beyond. Known for his work with seminal magazine The Face, and men's style bible Arena Homme Plus, Neville Brody design & style has covered album sleeves and his type systems are admired throughout the world.

Are there any rules or habits that help you do your job more efficiently?
I don't think it's about doing the job more efficiently, but more effectively. This is predicated on the basis that you are aware of your intention, that you are clear about the purpose behind what you are creating. That can be to develop a system to help a client operate better, like a typeface family or broad set of design tools; an attention-holding image or piece of typography that has a clear message to communicate; or an experimental project that pushes boundaries and establishes new thinking. The other key component to working effectively is to ensure that there has been a period of deep research before jumping in with creative exploration. This always ensures a context for our work and creates a better sense of tension or alignment with the viewer or user.

Out of all the projects you've worked on what has given you the most satisfaction?
I would say Arena Homme Plus. I designed three issues of the magazine in 2009 and 2010, and it was the first time I'd worked in editorial for many years. In magazine design, you're able to use the pages and flow of the magazine as a blank canvas that can evolve a visual narrative or line of enquiry. You set up core rules and a framework, but make sure that they are not too rigid. Then you use the space to improvise and try and break the rules you've set up by pushing them as far as they can go. Sometimes they do break and fall apart, but that adds to the energy. With AH+ I enjoyed working with the photographers to understand how we could dynamically create stories through how images were juxtaposed, and the movement and visual poetry I was able to create on the page. Each issue evolved the typographic and textual story from the previous issue to create a complete cycle.

You recently mentioned that designers should take more risks and help draw attention to social issues. What do you think is the lasting responsibility of designers to the public?
As translators of ideas, we imbue everything we do to a certain extent with our own interpretations. Any form of communication is inevitably political, in that it affects the way we see the world in some way. Designers have to understand and realise the responsibility that comes with this, and the trust our communities place in us. As such, we have a responsibility to be aware of the consequences of our output, whether positive or negative.

Today's design community faces a rising wealth gap, climate change, shifting paradigms of nationalism, and myriad other challenges. How can designers rise to the challenge of creating a more positive future?
Where possible, we can apply our skill sets to promote beneficial ideas, as well as being conscious as to how our work itself might impact the world. How can the work we do better embrace inclusivity and diversity? Can we encourage a more creative, less conformist cultural environment? Education is key here, and we have the opportunity to actively feed into the dialogue around change and social benefit.

At a time when Britain is estranged from its European neighbours, what are new ways we can work together?
I have always thought of myself as a European, and this current climate will only serve to strengthen that. How, in this modern world, can we be so parochial and isolationist? Thankfully, there are many bemused Europeans who still consider us as compatriots and colleagues. I believe and hope that, culturally at least, we will continue to exchange ideas and thoughts in culture, education and social imperatives.

What is influencing you at the moment?
I think the main source of inspiration for me continues to be music, particularly jazz and more experimental creators. This seems to be one of the free-est areas where ideas can still be explored unfettered by political doctrine and conservatism. The other source of inspiration has always been other global cultures, ones we should respect as opposed to try and change.

You have been influenced by punk attitude as well as the work of William Burroughs. Is this rebellious spirit something that is lacking in today's design and creative community or can it still break though?
Like the history of radical and experimental thought, the main thing about these philosophies is that they both embraced the idea that anything is possible, and that limitation and belief were simply constructs to be ignored in the pursuit of living ideas.

In developing his cut-up technique, Burroughs in particular applied mechanisms that allowed us to imagine thoughts and ideas beyond our normal capacity. What we experience today is an increasingly populist culture driven by fear and quantitative ambitions, that seems to exclude any sense of difference or risk. I believe that this will change, that there is still the desire to take creative leaps and explore non-populist ideas.

You've been quoted in the past as saying: "London has a particular set of politics and cultural influences that have been absolutely instrumental in developing the work that I do." How does the UK and London influence your work today?
London is still an amazing, frustrating, inspiring place! So multicultural, unpredictable and possible. It is often like having the whole world at your doorstep every day. You can live life at any level here, quiet or fast, cultural or recluse.

What's the most important piece of advice you have received as a designer that's helped you?
When I was at Hornsey doing my foundation course, my tutor then suggested that the difference between an artist and a designer was that a designer needs an external brief to react against, whereas an artist sets his or her own. It made me understand that a designer sets a new brief based on an external catalyst.
Neville Brody Neville Brody is acknowledged as a seminal designer specialising in digital design, typography and identity. Neville Brody 's style & design as well as an insight and passion for pushing creative boundaries informs the work of Brody Associates, the collaborative creative agency he founded. His work over three decades ranges from magazine art-direction, album sleeves and identities for cultural institutions to key strategic systems and typeface design for global businesses. In 2018 Brody became Professor of Visual Communication at London's Royal College of Art, continuing his long association with the College, having served as the the Dean of the School of Communication for seven years from 2011. He is a Royal Designer - the UK's highest design accolade - and past president of Design & Art Direction, which promotes creative excellence. He lectures globally on design and education. brody-associates.com

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NEVILLE BRODY DESIGN & STYLE NEVILLE BRODY DESIGN & STYLE

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Are there any rules or habits that help you do your job more efficiently? I don't think it's about doing the job more efficiently, but more effectively. This is predicated on the basis that you are aware of your intention, that you are clear about the purpose behind what you are creating.

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https://www.zilliondesigns.com/blog/infographics/designer-spotlight-neville-broody/

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"An electrician isn't an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible."

Ladies and Gentlemen that's Neville Brody, a design thinker who unrevealed pop art and stitched it into the fabric of reality. That's a design thinker working ahead of time for designing the future. He contributed to the design industry with his brilliant ideas that were not easily accepted by the masses, but eventually revolutionized design trends and along with it, the traditional perceptions.

Neville Brody is the English designer, typographer and art director who is highly criticized yet widely acclaimed. His eccentricity and relentless experimentation gave way to wild design ideas that garnered criticism for the famous designer. His designs shows the influence of punk rock which means he's a free thinker. Learn about his outstanding designs jammed up in this infographic.

Also Explore: 10 designers and their stories of passion

Update 11/Jan/2018

The typography whiz recently designed a custom typeface for the world's most popular drink company, Coca-Cola. The font's name is an acronym that is TCCC Unity stands for The Coco-Cola Company Unity. It was revealed to the public at an event at the Museum of Design Atlanta d by James Sommerville, the VP of Global Design at Coca-Cola and posted the news on Instagram.

Image Source

An exclusive app has been created to explain the philosophy behind the custom font that'll be used in the brand's branding and marketing. The Brody Associates shed light on the following:

Typeface's personality

Technical details such as weights and styles

Depiction of brand's heritage

So what do you this about this new font? Share your opinions.

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Embed this Infographic on your site using the html below:

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Designer Spotlight Neville Brody - Punk Rock Typography

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"An electrician isn't an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible." Ladies and Gentlemen that's Neville Brody, a design thinker who unrevealed pop art and stitched it into the fabric of reality.

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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wQxvx7QLQsM

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The Blank Sheet Project: Chapter 1 - Neville Brody - Inspiration

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Cranbrook Academy of Art meaning-making exercises in the 1980s collect + present images (esp. typographic images) here a few places to read about this school and the student's work key figures to present images, exhibitions and work: Ed Fella, Mixing Messages: Typography! ( Cranbrook), Allen Hori and his piece syntax (BatesHori) Luption's Article on Cranbrook, Cranbrook from the book Graphic Design: A New History, and about Cranbrook from the book No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism. An article in Eye by Ellen Lupton, Cranbrook Academy of Art is producing some of the world's most challenging graphic design.

Allen 'Typography As Discourse,' 1989: "New directions in America typography are the subject of the lecture announced by this poster. The poster bases its composition on a communications theory diagram discussed in the lecture. Information clusters become smaller diagrams that question the conventions of written language." Quoted from the book: Cranbrook Design the New Discourse, 1990.

Allen Hori ( BatesHori): 'Too Lips' Poster, 1989" " Oral communication and storytelling are the subjects of a promotional poster for Typocraft, a commercial printer. Quotations from John Berger and Italo Calvino and communications theory terminology are montaged with photographic imagery. A verbal/visual pun connects tulip-petal imagery with the title." Quoted from the book: Cranbrook Design the New Discourse, 1990.

Allen Hori ( BatesHori)

Ed Fella (click to see the entire image.)

Ed Fella's polaroids of signs and letters. (check them out!)

Ed Fella's polaroids of signs and letters. (check them out!)

Ed Fella's drawing - "Ed Fella (born 1938) is an artist, educator and graphic designer whose work has had an important influence on contemporary typography. He practiced professionally as a commercial artist in Detroit for 30 years before receiving an MFA in Design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1987. He has since devoted his time to teaching at the California Institute of the Arts and his own unique self-published work which has appeared in many design publications and anthologies. In 1997 he received the Chrysler Award and in 1999 an Honorary Doctorate from CCS in Detroit. His work is in the National Design Museum and MoMA in New " - Wikipedia. Emigre also released typeface "parts" by Ed Fella: "OutWest" and "Fella Parts".

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Typographic History, Influences & Influencers: Cranbrook Academy of Art & Ed Fella

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Cranbrook Academy of Art meaning-making exercises in the 1980s collect + present images (esp. typographic images) here a few places to read about this school and the student's work key figures to present images, exhibitions and work: Ed Fella, Mixing Messages: Typography!

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Emigre magazine was published a total of 69 times, usually irregularly, over the years between 1984 and 2005. One of the first publications to use Macintosh computers, Emigre influenced the move towards desktop publishing within the graphic design community. But that was not the end of its influence. Art directors Rudy Vanderlands and Zuzana Licko entranced designers, photographers and typographers alike with their use of use of experimental layouts and opinionated articles.

The focus of the magazine moved from culture to designers to design itself, with an increasing focus on the publication and promotion of varied articles on design by many different authors. The magazine also changed formats several times during its career switching from an oversized publication to a text-friendly reader and then to a multimedia format, from issue 60 to 65, which came with a CD or DVD.

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History of Graphic Design, Graphic Designers, Art and Design Movements, Motion Graphics, Typography, Color, Design, graphic, Design, Reference, Referenced, A collection of information intended to be used as a primer and a reference tool in relation to the history of graphic design

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"The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people."

"The investigation of material volume and construction made it possible for us in 1918, in an artistic form, to begin to combine materials like iron and glass, the materials of modern Classicism, comparable in their severity with the marble of antiquity. In this way, an opportunity emerges of uniting purely artistic forms with utilitarian intentions.... The results of this are models which stimulate us to inventions in our work of creating a new world, and which call upon the producers to exercise controls over the forms encountered in our everyday life."

"Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums. It must be spread everywhere - on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes."

"We hold that the fundamental features of the present age is the triumph of the constructive method.... Every organized work - whether it be a house, a poem, or a picture - is an object directed toward a particular end, which is calculated not to turn people away from life, but to summon them to make their contribution toward life's organization."

El Lissitsky and Ilya Ehrenberg

Summary of Constructivism

Constructivism was the most influential modern art movement in twentieth century Russia. With its aesthetic roots fixed firmly in the Suprematism movement, Constructivism came fully to the fore as the art of a young Soviet Union after the revolution of 1917. The movement was conceived of out of a need for a new aesthetic language; one benefitting of a progressive new era in Soviet socialist history. Constructivism also borrowed elements of other European avant-gardes, notably Cubism and Futurism, and at its heart was the idea that artmaking should be approached as a process of cerebral "construction".

Released from the old romantic notion of being tied to the studio and the easel, Constructivist artists were reborn as technicians and/or engineers who, much like scientists, were seeking solutions to modern problems. By the early 1920s Constructivist art had evolved to accommodate the idea of Productivism which took the aesthetic principles of Constructivism and applied them to "everyday" art such as photography, fashion, graphic and textile design, cinema, and theater. Nevertheless, by the early 1930s the Soviet avant-garde had rudely fallen foul of the new regime that wished to promote the more transparent style of Socialist Realism.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

The shared goal of the founders of Constructivism was to produce artworks and buildings using modern materials and designs that would awaken the proletariat to imperialist class divisions and other bourgeois inequalities. The Constructionists sought, in Aleksei Gan's words, "to find the Communist expression of material construction [and] to establish a scientific base for the approach to constructing buildings and services that would fulfil the demands of Communist culture".

Constructivism became closely aligned with the idea of agitprop (agitational propaganda) which applied to an artwork that aimed to educate and indoctrinate its audience to the prevailing Bolshevik cause. By employing arrangements of basic industrial geometric forms and colors the new Soviet Union would be represented by the new languages of industry and modernity. However, most of the country were semi/illiterate land workers, and these remote communities were reached through Agit Trains. These featured (amongst other things) purpose-built cinemas which delivered the Bolshevik message through unambiguous propaganda films, known as agitki.

Once evolved into Productivism, Constructivist art promoted the idea of an industrial production must directly address the needs of the proletariat. Without abandoning their commitment to basic geometric shapes and colors, Productivists moved away from abstraction and engaged with design activities including furniture design, ceramics, textile design, graphic design and advertising, and theater set design.

Constructivist art often aimed to demonstrate how materials behaved and to test, for instance, the properties of materials such as wood, glass, and metal. The form an artwork would take would be dictated by its materials rather than in traditional art practice whereby the artist transforms his or her base materials into something different (and possibly beautiful). These inquiries were often in and of themselves. For many Constructivists, this entailed a commitment to the "truth to materials", that being, the belief that materials should be employed only in accordance with their capacities, and in such a way that demonstrated the uses to which they should be put.

Overview of Constructivism

Calling his Proun paintings "the station where one changes from painting to architecture," El Lissitzky's architectonic works became a bridge between the diverse disciplines within Constructivism.

Artworks and Artists of Constructivism

Constructed Head No. 2

Artist: Naum Gabo

While visiting his brother Antoine Pevsner in Paris in 1913-14, Gabo was introduced to Cubist sculpture by Alexander Archipenko and others involved with the avant-garde. He then moved with Pevsner to Oslo during the First World War. It was in the Norwegian capital that the brothers first encountered the work of Vladimir Tatlin. Gabo began to experiment with Constructivist principles, working with modern industrial materials including glass, metal, and plastic. Constructed Head No. 2, which embodies both Cubist (it bears a close resemblance to Picasso's bust of his lover, Fernande) and Constructivist principles, was executed in celluloid and galvanized metal. Here, however, Gabo uses his materials to form his figures, rather than letting the material dictate the artwork. It was one of Gabo's first works and pre-empted the abstract kinetic sculptures, through which he explored the relationship between space and time, and for which he would become best known.

However, Gabo (and Pevsner) baulked at the idea that art should express specific political doctrines, or that it should meet prescribed utilitarian goals. Indeed, on their return to Russia (after the Revolution) Gabo and Pevsner were alarmed to find that Constructivist art was so inextricably bound up with agitprop, that being the belief that art and propaganda were conjoined, and that art must "awaken" (or agitate) its audience to the Bolshevik cause. In response, the men co-authored the "Realistic Manifesto" of Constructivism in 1920 which was printed on newspaper and distributed on the streets of Moscow. Like the Constructivists, they espoused the value geometric shapes and industrial materials, but they insisted that "true art" must be independent of all state interests. Gabo, therefore, never "fully qualified" as a principal Constructivist and became better known, in fact, outside of Russia in Germany, England and, lastly, the United States.

Galvanized iron and celluloid - Private Collection

Monument to the Third International

Artist: Vladimir Tatlin

In 1917, with the anticipation of a socialist revolution hanging heavy in the air, Tatlin had started to conceive of a mammoth structure that would commemorate this momentous turning point in Soviet history. By 1920 he had finalized his design for the now famous Tatlin Tower, or to give it its full title, the Monument to the Third International, or Comintern, (a committee established to overthrow the international bourgeoisie and to work towards the establishment of an "international Soviet Republic"). The original Tower was a spiralling 15-foot-high wooden structure that, although never put into construction, became an emblem to Communist utopianism and, to this day, remains the great symbol of the Constructivist movement.

The Tower was a blueprint for a fully functional conference center for the Comintern and, had it been built, would, at 400 meters (1,300 feet) been the tallest steel structure in the world (not only one-third taller, but more beautiful, from a Soviet perspective, than the Eiffel Tower). The upward spiralling tower, anchored by a diagonal girder, was to include three rotating glass units. These were a cylinder, which would house the legislature and revolve once over a period of a year; a cone designed to hold the government's executive offices, which would revolve once a month; and a smaller cylinder, that rotated daily, would house the press office. Atop this structure would sit an hourly rotating hemisphere that would contain a radio station and project Bolshevik slogans onto the clouds. The Tatlin Tower would symbolize industrialism and construction, and the dynamism of the modern age.

St. Petersburg, Russia

Stage set design for, The Magnanimous Cuckold

Artist: Lyubov Popova

Popova was one of the key figures within the early Russian avant-garde. She experimented first with abstract and semi-abstract Cubo-futurist painting which featured overlapping planes and dynamic juxtapositions of shapes and colors. She arrived at Constructivism, via Suprematism, maintaining her interest in dynamism and movement, and in geometry and the efficiency of machines. By the early 1920s she had moved away from painting to follow her faith in Productivism which brought Constructivism into the everyday lives of ordinary Russians through such mediums as fabric, graphic, book cover, and stage design.

Opening at the Actor's Theater, Moscow, on April 25, 1922, Vsevolod Meyerhold's landmark production of Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynk's farce, The Magnanimous Cuckold, brought Constructivist art into popular theater. Meyerhold was known for his "biomechanical exercises" whereby the human body was treated as an "apparatus" that would synthesize with a set which was itself conceived of as a machine. Actors would thus express themselves through forceful gestural performances that would combine with the moving set to "agitate" the audience. Meyerhold had asked Popova to design a stage that could respond to the athletic gestures and twists and turns of his performers' nonverbal cues and, at a more practical level, to design a set that could be easily and quickly dismantled and reassembled with the view of touring the production to other Russian cities.

Historian Marc Arthur writes, "Magnanimous Cuckold was a tragic farce about a desperately cuckolded husband who punished his wife by insisting that she sleep with every man in the village [...] Popova's interactive set, consisting of multi-level platforms, staircases, revolving doors, and three wheels, the largest containing the letters "CR ML NCK" (the playwrights' name), that could be spun by the performers, it was a hilarious, circus-like performance that was part vaudeville and part athletic demonstration. Popova also designed the boxy, primary-colored worker uniforms of the actors".

Oil on canvas - Tretyakov Gallery

Proun Room

Artist: El Lissitzky

Of all the Constructivists, it was perhaps Lissitzky who maintained the closest ties to Suprematism. Between 1919-27, he worked extensively on his Proun ("Projects for the Affirmation of the New") series. For this project he produced many Suprematist-inspired paintings that contrasted light and dark, and created architectural and three-dimensional space within a two-dimensional image. The effect was the illusion of geometric forms floating in space, which, for Lissitzky, was symbolic of the transformation of Russian art into a way of life.

In his Proun Room, unveiled at the Great Art Exhibition in Berlin in 1923, he extended what had been two-dimensional works into an installation. His Room consisted of geometric shapes, in colors of black, white, and gray, and linear wooden vectors that reached across floor, wall, and ceiling (six surfaces in all). Lissitzky was exploring the idea that art should establish a new and elementary balance between art and living space and his ideas exerted great influence over the teachings at the Bauhaus and De Stijl schools.

Installation - Great Art Exhibition, Berlin

Still from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera

In 1923, Dziga Vertov published his "Kino-Eye" (Cinema Eye) manifesto. He wrote: "I am an eye. A mechanical eye [...] This is what I am, a machine that runs in chaotic manoeuvres, recording movements one after the other, assembling them in a patchwork. Freed from the constraints of time and space, I organize each point of the universe as I wish. My route is that of a new conception of the world. I can make you discover the world you did not know existed". Although not to everyone's tastes (Eisenstein, probably Russia's greatest exponent of formalist filmmaking, dismissed the film as "pointless camera hooliganism"), his Man with a Movie Camera stands as the pinnacle of his vision and many believe that it was the last of the great Soviet agitprop films (in 2012 the British Film Institute's journal, Sight and Sound, voted Man with a Movie Camera 8 th in its survey of the best films ever made).

The film, divided into six numbered sections, has no human agent to carry a plot with that role taken on by the camera (operated by Vertov's brother, Mikhail Kaufman). It represents "day in the life" scenarios in three unidentified Soviet cities (it was shot in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa) that are populated with people from different economic classes. The movie, co-edited with Yelizaveta Svilova (Vertov's wife) makes use of any number of avant-garde montage techniques - precipitous juxtaposition, double-exposure, slowed down, speeded up, and stop motion photography (a walking camera tripod, for instance), superimposition (the cameraman filming from inside a beer glass for instance), and so on - and is described in its credits as an "experiment in cinematic communication of visible events".

MoMA of New York said of the director, "Like others of his generation, Vertov believed that the creation of an objective 'cinema eye' would, in destroying old habits of viewing, help build a new, proletarian society". Indeed, on the film's release, Vertov (who just a few years earlier had been honing his technique on agitki propaganda films for the Agit Trains) issued a statement which read: "This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature". However, Vertov's unwavering commitment to avant-garde experimentation saw him marginalized by the early 1930s when Constructivism (in Russia at least) was rudely usurped by Socialist Realism.

The Results of the First Five-Year Plan

Artist: Varvara Stepanova

Photomontage became, perhaps, the favored medium of avant-garde artists such as El Lissitzky, Rodchenko and Stepanova. Stepanova (Rodchenko's life partner) was a leading member of this group and later in her career she contributed to the journal USSR in Construction which published between 1930-41. The journal, which was published in English, was intended mostly for overseas markets, and was a propagandist publication that celebrated Russia's technological, agricultural, and social progress under the totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin. But the journal was unusual in that it published images that went against the regime's preference for Social Realist art.

Stepanova restricts this image to three color tones - black, white, red - with red geometric planes giving the photomontage a sense of narrative structure. The montage features found photographs which sit in front of her geometric planes. The speakers and the number 5 on the left reference Stalin's Five-Year Plan and the letters CCCP (USSR) face the dominant portrait of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union (who, incidentally, had not liked Constructivist art but backed its goals and principles) who is looking forward towards the future. Art historian Jessica Watson writes, "Historical hindsight can make it difficult for contemporary viewers to engage the overtly propagandistic aspects of these images, in fact their exaggerated euphoria can even be mistaken for irony. Nevertheless, despite our increasingly sophisticated understanding of the distinction between image and reality, Stepanova's photomontages are an important reminder of how an artist can blur the line between aesthetic passion and ideology".

State Museum of Contemporary Russian History, Moscow

Beginnings of Constructivism

Roots in Suprematism

Suprematism was a radical abstract art that, mostly through the efforts of Kazimir Malevich, went in search of a "zero degree" in art; that being the point at which art could be reduced to its "vanishing point". Malevich reduced art to basic shapes (squares, circles, crosses) as a means of making art that was about the "supremacy of feeling" over pictorial art that was always about "meaning". In 1915, Malevich was joined by Russian artists Kseniya Boguslavskaya, Ivan Klyun, Mikhail Menkov, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, and Lyubov Popova. They announced themselves as the Suprematist group at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10.

Commenting on Malevich's famous Black Square (1913-15) art historian Charles Harrison stated that he did not believe "that 'revolutions' in art cause social revolutions or provoke wars. [Rather] the faith in human capacities which impelled those [such as the Suprematists] who entertained ideas of abstract art may have been realistic to this extent: firstly that the form of faith involved may have been consistent with the state of mind (the bravery) required to envisage a progressive social and historical change, and secondly that there may have been practical grounds for believing such a change was worth pursuing". While the "difficulty" of Suprematism made it unsuitable for the political Constructivism agenda, the link between Suprematism and Constructivism was nevertheless pursued by the likes of Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky (both of whom had worked in the Suprematist idiom) who took its basic colors and shapes, and the idea of movement, forward in the name of Constructivist goals.

History usually attributes the birth of Constructivism to two artists, Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, both of whom had been associated hitherto with the Cubo-Futurist movement (an amalgam of Cubism and Futurism). On a visit to Pablo Picasso's Paris studio in 1913, Tatlin became mesmerized by a series of three-dimensional wooden reliefs. Following Picasso's influence, he produced his own abstract assemblages which he called Corner Counter Reliefs. The reliefs constructed primarily from metal and wood, were "a new kind of object" (somewhere between sculpture and architecture) and were unveiled to the public at the "Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10" in Petrograd in 1915-16. At the same exhibition, Malevich revealed his Suprematism paintings which were composed of basic geometric forms and colors that, when placed against a plain white background, appeared to "float" in space. Suprematism was, in the words of its creator, the search for "supremacy of pure feeling of perception in pictorial arts".

Also in 1916, Wassily Kandinsky, one of the earliest pioneers of abstract art, had returned to Moscow (from Germany) where he mixed with some of the key names (Tatlin, Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and Naum Gabo) in the burgeoning Constructivist movement. Kandinsky supported state funded proletariat arts and education initiatives - such as Proletkult ("proletarian culture"), a country-wide proletariat arts program established by the Bolsheviks in 1917 - but Kandinsky's relationship with Constructivism was uneven and short lived. One of his most vocal critics was Stepanova, who (having served as assistant director of the art and literature section of IZO Narkompros, a government agency charged with the enlightenment of the people through culture) argued that educators should be able to "characterize and express" artistic concepts "in words" and through clear channels of communication. Kandinsky's search for pure spirituality rubbed against these utilitarian goals and, in 1921, he accepted an offer from Walter Gropius to join him at the Bauhaus.

Agitprop

The disjunction between Suprematism and Constructivism can be attributed chiefly to the idea of agitprop (agitational propaganda). The Suprematist's search for the "supremacy of feelling" was overtaken by the idea that domestic art (ergo Constructivism) should explicitly support the interests of the nascent Soviet Union. It was a state backed policy that even warranted its own bureau, The Communist Party's Department of Agitation and Propaganda (established in 1920). The term itself refers to the idea that art and/or popular culture would become politicized and act as a vital tool in the promotion of political ideology. To be fully effective, agitprop had first and foremost to "grab the attention" of its public and, moreover, (if it was to reach its potential) agitprop would need to reach beyond the confines of the museum and art gallery. Historian Kevin Brown makes the point that the Bolsheviks "came into power under the guise of popular support" when this was in fact "far from the truth" and that the regime had "seized power against the will of the majority". To gain the "will of the majority", therefore, the Bolsheviks initiated a '''cultural' bureaucracy for whom culture was only a form of propaganda, and propaganda the highest form of culture".

Brown describes how "Agitprop theatre was used after the October Revolution to indoctrinate the working proletariat". It was a style of theatre that "quickly and easily spread the Bolshevik's political message, as it evoked a powerful emotional reaction from spectators". Indeed, Brown explains how the "accessibility, mobility, and spontaneity of these productions made them perfect for Bolsheviks who, without agitprop theatre, had no way of making contact with the working class". One of the devices employed by agitprop theater troupes was the so-called "Living Newspaper" whereby actors "read newspapers aloud to a large group of people [and to] liven up these events, actors began to perform the news, 'using music, clowns, acrobats, cartoon style, and montage techniques'". But the Bolsheviks had also to spread their dogma beyond its industrial city/centers, and for this purpose, cinema would emerge as a more effective means of agitprop.

Agit Trains

Historian Adelheid Heftberger explains how, in 1919, Anatolii Lunacharskii "The Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment", stated that "Education in the wider sense of the word consists in the dissemination of ideas among minds that would otherwise remain a stranger to them. Cinema can accomplish both these things with particular force: it constitutes, on the one hand, a visual clarion for the dissemination of ideas and, on the other hand, if we introduce elements of the refined, the poetic, the pathetic etc., it is capable of touching the emotions and thus becomes an apparatus of agitation". Given the fact that most rural communities had never seen the moving image before, the simple agitki (propaganda films), became the key medium for the dissemination of Bolshevik propaganda. (It would be another five years or so before the Russian Formalist cinema reached, through individuals who had cut their teeth on the production of agitki movies, the artistic and political goals that Lunacharskii had envisioned.)

The "agitation-instructional trains" were initiated as early as 1918. They consisted of 16 to 18 carriages and became the key means by which the Bolsheviks would disseminate their political dogma amongst Russia's rural population, most of whom were illiterate or semi-illiterate peasants, or children. The trains, which also serviced Red Army soldiers fighting in the civil war, distributed printed media (pamphlets, brochures, newspapers etc.) and, as the historian Michael Russell notes, the train carriages were "distinctively and brightly decorated with paintings and slogans [by Constructivist] artists of the standing of [Vladimir] Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky". Agit-Trains were also equipped with newsreel filmmaking facilities and a cinema carriage. The Agit-Train initiative proved so successful it was applied to the waterways where, between 1919-20, the Red Star ( Krasnaia zvesda) steamer cruised the length of the Volga River. It docked at various points where visitors boarded to watch agitki films. It is estimated that during this period, the Red Star presented some 400 screenings, attended by a total audience of around 500,000.

Productivism

Often, movements are launched with the publication of a manifesto, but by the time Aleksei Gan published Konstruktivizm, which coincided with the official formation of the new Soviet Union in 1922, the movement was moving into its Productivism phase. Challenging the pure abstraction of Suprematism, and sculptor Naum Gabo's contention that Constructivism should devote itself solely to the exploration of abstract space and rhythm, Gan introduced his manifesto with the blunt avowal: "WE DECLARE UNCOMPROMING WAR ON ART!" (original casing).

The Institute of Artistic Culture ( INKhUK), which existed between 1920-24, involved artists, graphic designers, painters, architects, scholars, and sculptors who debated the purpose and function of Bolshevik arts and culture. From these debates grew the idea of Productivism. The essence of Productivism was based on the socio-economic principle that societal growth could only be truly measured by that society's levels of productivity. The belief was that this idea could be transferred to the arts once Constructivists abandoned obscure avant-garde experimentation and committed to industrial-like working practices. It was a philosophy backed by the likes of Rodchenko, Stepanova, Tatlin, Malevich, Lissitzky, Popova, and the Stenberg Brothers who engaged with activities ranging through furniture design, ceramics, clothing design, typography, advertising, and theater set design.

In the Productivist spirit, Tatlin turned his talents to designing furniture, worker's clothing and even a fully functioning stove. Others introduced Constructivist design into advertising for workers' co-operatives using bold and spare colorful geometric designs. Rodchenko, Stepanova and Mayakovsky, even went by the name "advertising constructors" and produced print advertisements promoting commodities ranging from cooking oil, through confectionary and bakery items, to beer. For her part, Stepanova ventured into the field of textile design. In 1926 the artist and critic Boris Arvatov published Art and Production which acted as a manual for Productivist art. However, by the end of the decade Productivism had, like all forms of Constructivism, been all-but abolished under a Stalinist regime which threw its support behind the more immediate Socialist Realist art.

Concepts, Styles and Trends

Architecture

Constructivist architecture grew from the radical theories on design as espoused by Tatlin, Lissitzky, and Malevich. Their ideas translated into architectural jargon as "stereometric forms" which described an architectural style purged of all decorative elements and all references to past styles. Architecture historian, William C. Brumfield, explains how the Institute of Artistic Culture ( INKhUK), "attempted to establish a science examining analytically and synthetically the basic elements both for the separate arts and for art as a whole", but that its "first program curriculum, developed by Kandinsky, was found too abstract by many at INKhUK". Despite differences in opinion over the future of Constructivist architecture, there was, nevertheless, a shared "concern for the relation between architecture and social planning [and all sides] insisted on a clearly defined structural mass based on uncluttered geometric forms and drew inspiration from modernism in painting and sculpture".

In what is arguably the most iconic of all Constructivist artworks, the 400 meters high Tatlin Tower prototype (or to give it its full title, Monument to the Third International), unveiled in 1919, offered a utopian vision of post-revolutionary Russian architectural design. The hollow spiralling steel tower housed a series of geometric sculptural forms but was quickly dismissed by members of INKhUK as impractical. However, Tatlin's iconic edifice, in the words of Brumfield, "gave notice of a new movement that glorified the rigorous logic of undecorated form as an extension of material and that intended to participate fully in the shaping of Soviet society". It was not until the mid-'20s, however, that working Constructivist structures came to fruition (in Moscow and other Russian cities) through the efforts of pioneering figures such as Alexander Vesnin and Moisei Ginzburg.

Sculpture

There were many overlaps between Constructivist artforms, not least in sculpture and architecture. Discussions on Constructivist sculpture typically begin with Tatlin's Tower (1919) because it amounted to an attack on the "carved" and "cast" academic sculpture which it replaced with a preference for modern industrial materials (steel, glass, plastic and so on). The Constructivist sculpture thus rejected the academic principles of harmony in "mass" and "volume" in favor of constructed geometric forms that embraced the aesthetic quality of the mechanical age.

However, not all Constructivists bought into the functional element of Constructivist art. Some, such as Naum Gabo, rejected Tatlin's design because of its emphasis on function. Gabo's geometric sculptures used Constructivist materials such as glass, plastic, and metal but, in 1920, he and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, wrote and distributed their "Realistic Manifesto" (of Constructivism) in which they asserted that art should function independently of all state interests. They wrote: "The plumb line in hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a mind as tense as a compass ... we construct our work as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician formulates his orbits". Gabo maintained that art (if it was to be timeless) should be about energy, force, and rhythm. In 1920 he produced, Kinetic Composition, in which a motor rotated a steel blade as a demonstration of relations between of space and time. Gabo's sculpture is the first known work of Kinetic Art.

Photomontage

Photomontage has been the medium of choice for producers of propaganda and agitprop. Following in the vein of the Dadaists, the Constructivists favored the photographic image because it communicates with an immediacy and objectivity that can be lost with painting and written text. Indeed, Lissitzky declared that "No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography". By combining images with text, photomontage was seen as a modern, attention-grabbing, technique that was perfectly suited to the goals of Bolshevik agitprop.

Figures such as Rodchenko, Stepanova, Gustav Klutis and the Stenberg Brothers showed their support for formalist cinema by creating posters (and also film prospectuses, advertisements, periodicals and even promotional photocollages and maquettes). Indeed, the film poster became a Constructivist artform in its own right and its greatest exponents were the Stenberg Brothers. As Vladimir Stenberg put it: "Ours are eye-catching posters, designed to shock. We deal with the material in a free manner. . . disregarding actual proportions. . . turning figures upside-down; in short, we employ everything that can make a busy passerby stop in their tracks. The inventive results included a distortion of perspective, elements from Dada photomontage, creative cropping, an exaggerated scale, a sense of movement, and a dynamic use of color and typography, all of which created a revolutionary new art form: the film poster".

Textile Design

Following the Revolution, Russia had become distanced from the major international fashion centers (notably, Paris). Addressing the need for new designs in clothing and other textiles, artists like Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova worked on new designs geared specifically towards mass production. Both worked at the Tsindel ( First State Textile Factory), for who they produced over 150 designs, and both taught textile design at Vkhutemas ( Higher Technical Artistic Studios). In fact, the two women were, as art historian Christina Kiaer notes, "the only Constructivists to see their designs for everyday, utilitarian things actually mass-produced and distributed in the Soviet economy".

Stepanova was perhaps the most influential women in the Constructivist movement (Popova's career was cut short by disease in 1924). She had an oeuvre that encompassed painting, poetry, photography, graphic design, and set design and was the life-partner of Rodchenko. The fashion historian Jacob Charles Wilson writes, "The workers of the new world would live and play in the very best materials and designs: casual jumpsuits and overalls that drew on both traditional peasant clothing and the latest modernist artistic trends of futurism and cubism. Stepanova's designs use dynamic shapes that emphasise the human body in action, with sharp angular forms, printed abstract patterns and contrasting colours: bold reds and blacks. Her clothes would enhance the flexibility and comfort of moving through the streets and the city, in the factory and on to the playing field, while unisex clothing patterns would no longer confine men and women to stifling gender norms".

Constructivism and Cinema

In 1923, Constructivist artists organized themselves into a sub-group called "Left Front of the Arts" under whose name they produced the highly influential avant-garde journal LEF, (1923-25), and then, New LEF (1927-29). The journal defended the avant-garde against the rise of Socialist Realism and the threat of a rebirth of a traditional bourgeois/capitalist art. For the contributors of LEF, the medium of cinema held the greatest potential for defence against easel painting and traditional narratives. Pioneers of the Formalist cinema, some of whom had cut their teeth on the Agit Train films, agitki, were Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Esther Shub, and Dziga Vertov.

A former student of Lyubov Popova, Eisenstein was the most influential of the group. He developed five stages of dialectical montage - metric, rhythmic, tonal, over tonal, intellectual - that combined to bring a revolutionary dynamism to commercial filmmaking. He wrote in his famous treatise on montage, The Film Sense, "the fact [is] that two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of a juxtaposition". Battleship Potemkin features what now ranks as one of the most influential sequences in the history of international cinema: the Odesa Steps sequence. The film told the true story (occurring in 1905) of a mutiny against a tyrannical ship's officer. The final straw comes when the men are served with rotten meat at their mealtime. Their revolt spills onto the streets of the port town of Odesa (now Ukraine) where their uprising is supported by the ordinary citizens (comrades) of Odesa. The protesters are then mercilessly mown down by a Cossack army on the famous Odesa Steps. In Eisenstein's model, shot A: thesis, is placed next to shot B: antithesis, which results in C: synthesis. This process, which disobeys all rules of temporal and spatial continuity, demands an intellectual engagement from the viewer and, in theory, the audience is transformed (agitated) from passive to active spectators.

Later Developments - After Constructivism

Constructivism had, following a steady decline, all but ceased in Russia by the early 1930s. The movement had fallen victim of Stalin's hostility to intellectualism and avant-garde art and gave way to the new regime's preference for Socialist Realism. Nevertheless, the style of Constructivism (now divested of its original political purpose) would continue to inspire artists in the West, firstly as a movement called International Constructivism which, initiated by El Lissitzky (who was appointed Russia's Cultural Ambassador to Weimar Germany in 1921), flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and which endured into the 1950s. Its style extended across typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design.

Lissitzky's Proun forms influenced the industrial design of László Moholy-Nagy (who was Course Director at the Bauhaus) and, in the Netherlands, Constructivist principles influenced the De Stijl movement. Constructivism also found a home in England through Naum Gabo who resided, before and during the Second World War, on the Cornwall coast where he joined Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and others as a member of the St. Ives movement. Constructivism crossed the Atlantic, too, with the sculptor George Rickey penning what is often cited as the first comprehensive guide to Constructivism, in 1967.

Constructivism also found a home in Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s with Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica gaining recognition for a series of neo-Constructivist works. These pieces shared many formal similarities with Russian Constructivism, and their work also carried an element of agitprop in that it sort to "activate" their audience with pieces that could be rearranged or even worn performatively, as in Oiticica's Parangolés (1964-79). These were layered nylon, burlap and gauze capes made with colored fabrics containing photography, painting, pebbles, straw, and shells, and even text carrying political and poetic messages. Participants would wear the capes and express themselves through movement and dance.

Useful Resources on Constructivism

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

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"The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people."

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Russian Constructivism was an artistic movement that triumphed in Russia in the 1920s. The paintings, graphic design, photography, and cinema of the time all show evidence of its influence, but it was in architecture that it found its most concrete and revolutionary application.

The movement rose out of the rejection of the decorative and ornamental excesses that were seen as belonging to bourgeois art. While Neoclassicism and Art Nouveau prevailed in the rest of Europe, the Russians were going to create a type of art based on simplicity, pure lines, and geometric shapes, that was inspired by Cubism and Futurism.

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Art that served the revolution

Following the success of the Russian Revolution, Constructivism became its official art style and the manifestation of the aesthetics of the new Socialist society. Constructivists saw the style as a tool for the revolution that could, and should, contribute to the shaping of a new social order and the dissemination of Socialist ideology. Artists saw their work from a utilitarian and functional perspective, in which the aesthetics were always there to serve the purpose of the art, and they wanted to change the world with their work.

The design style was influenced by the Industrial Revolution that the Soviet Union experienced after the Russian Revolution. We can see this in Tatlin's Tower, designed by Vladimir Tatlin, one of the main examples of Constructivism and which was never built. It combined a machine aesthetic with dynamic components that celebrated technology, such as reflectors and projection screens.

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At the end of the 1920s, the Communist Party began favouring the doctrines of Socialist Realism, which would reign over Soviet art for decades. Its influence, which inspired the Bauhaus and major architects, can still be seen today.

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Constructivist architecture and the new Socialist city

The use of Constructivist principles in architecture was their most concrete and revolutionary application. The Socialist way of life meant changes to daily life and work and Constructivists took on the job of designing a new city for this new society. They focused their attention on creating new infrastructure that were required for community services, applying the criteria of functionality.

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For this reason they would use "poor" materials (e.g. concrete, glass, and metal) and a style based on simplicity, pure lines, and geometric shapes. It was all about providing simple and cheap answers to new urban problems, and in the process, occasionally creating new architectural typologies. This is how workers' clubs, leisure centres, and group homes came to exist. Centres for communication, garages, factories, and schools were some of the other highlights of this movement. All of them were utilitarian buildings that served the people.

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Some of the best examples that still exist today include the House Hive and the Rusakov Workers' Club (Melnikov, 1929); the Zuev Workers' Club (Golosov, 1929); the Mosselprom apartment building (Strukov, 1917); the Intourist garage (Melnikov, 1933); the Shábolovka Communications Tower (Shujov, 1922); the Communal House of the Textile Institute (Nikolaiev, 1930), the Communal House for the Narkomfin (Ginzburg and Milinis, 1930). And let's not forget the more than 140 Constructivist structures that have been preserved in the city of Yekaterinburg as well as the other buildings constructed throughout the territory of the former USSR.

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After a political fall from grace in the mid-1930s, some of the buildings had to hide their avant-garde structures with ornamental elements. This was called "enriched Constructivism", contrasting with the movement's bare beginnings.

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Russian Constructivism in graphic design

Pure geometric forms, linearity, symmetry, repetition, simple, sans-serif fonts, the dominance of red and black, photomontage. Using these elements, Constructivists would create a graphic design style that rejected all artifice and that we still associate with post-revolution Russia today. Its purposes included informing a population of mostly illiterate people about the politics of the new government. That was the reason for one of the its main characteristics: font manipulation in order to give each part of the text the characteristics (e.g. a shape or colour) that reflected its importance within the message.

The main figures behind it were Aleksandr Rodchenko, his wife Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and the Stenberg brothers. The advertising agency founded by Rodchenko and the poet Mayakovski released more than 150 designs and ads between 1923 and 1925.

How far did Constructivism get? Photography and cinema

Rodchenko was also a pioneer of photographic Constructivism, which sought to free the photographer from the conventions of the time by showing common objects from unexpected angles, to the extent that they were difficult to recognise, as well as producing contrasts with light.

Closely linked to photography, cinema also became a field of experimentation for Constructivists. Alongside the intertitles created for some films by artists like Rodchenko, the montage style of Sergei Einseistein and Dziga Vertov are also considered Constructivist. In a similar way to Rodchenko's photography, Vertov's Kinoks sought to embody "a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye".

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Russian constructivism: what is it? | Connections by Finsa

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Russian Constructivism was an artistic movement that triumphed in Russia in the 1920s. The paintings, graphic design, photography, and cinema of the time all show evidence of its influence, but it was in architecture that it found its most concrete and revolutionary application.

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A world where art was created in Factories

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A world where art was created in Factories

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One of the 20th century's most influential movements amounted to nothing less than an attack on art. In 1922, a Russian artist named Aleksei Gan penned a manifesto that began with words in glaring uppercase: "WE DECLARE UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART!" The Russian Revolution had taken place five years earlier, in 1917. The country was in the process of freeing itself from the grips of a powerful ruling elite; now it would revolutionize Russia's cultural life, too, and put art to work in service of a new, Communist society.

Gan and his artistic compatriots-including Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, considered the founders of the movement known as Constructivism, as well as Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, El Lissitzky, and others-sought new art forms and modes of making art to serve the masses. Art, they believed, had no place in the hermetic space of the artist's studio. Instead, it should reflect the modern, industrial world; be formulated in laboratories and factories; and be deployed as an active agent in the broader Communist revolution. Together, the Constructivists would seek "to find the Communist expression of material construction," Gan wrote, "to establish a scientific base for the approach to constructing buildings and services that would fulfill the demands of Communist culture."

What is Constructivism?

Hanging Spatial Construction No. 9, Original work 1920-1921 / Edition 1993

The movement emphasized building and science, rather than artistic expression, and its goals went far beyond the realm of art. The Constructivists sought to influence architecture, design, fashion, and all mass-produced objects. In place of painterly concerns with composition, Constructivists were interested in construction. Rather than emerging from an expressive impulse or an academic tradition, art was to be built.

A new, Constructivist art would look toward industrial production; approach the artist as an engineer, rather than an easel painter; and serve the proletariat. Constructivists used sparse, geometric forms and modest materials. From paintings to posters to textiles, they created a visual language out of forms that can be drawn with utilitarian instruments like compasses and rulers. They placed visual culture under the microscope, analyzing materials like wood, glass, and metal, to judge them for their value and fitness for use in mass-produced images and objects.

Influenced by and closely associated with the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Naum Gabo, as well as Cubism, Futurism, and Suprematism-the latter being the Russian avant-garde movement pioneered by Kasimir Malevich, famous for his iconic Black Square (1915)-the Constructivists sought to break art down into its most fundamental parts, challenge the legitimacy of established traditions, and create an art form relevant to a rapidly changing world.

Boris Arvatov, an important Constructivist theorist associated with Moscow's Institute of Artistic Culture, where abstract painting pioneer Kandinsky also taught, suggested that modern art developed along an axis that could be pegged to three groundbreaking artists: Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Tatlin.

The icons of Constructivism

Painterly Relief, 1914-1916

"In Search of 0,10 - The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen

Constructivism began with Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist who was profoundly impacted by a visit to Picasso's studio in 1913. There, he saw the artist's experimentations with collaged objects. In 1915, Tatlin demonstrated the influence of the Spanish artist in his own abstract, three-dimensional collages made of metal and wood, which he showed alongside Malevich's Suprematist paintings at what was called the "Last Futurist Exhibition" of that year.

By 1917, during the first throes of the Russian Revolution, Tatlin had begun to conceive of a monument to the seismic social changes that were taking place. Two years later, in 1919, he began developing a design for the Monument to the Third International, known simply as "Tatlin's Tower." A wooden curvilinear model spiraling upwards, it became an icon of Constructivism even in its own time, and was intended to host The Third International, an organization that advocated for global Communist revolution. Though never built, Tatlin's tower made waves in the sculpture, architecture, and design communities, and came to be considered an icon of utopian design that has inspired (and been quoted in) several films.

Russian artist El Lissitzky's Proun Room (1923), another exemplary work of the Constructivist movement, is an installation of dynamic abstract forms-primarily rectangles-that appear to float, propelling the viewer around the space. Lissitzky and other Constructivists sought to "activate" the viewer, thereby awakening a mass consciousness. Similarly, Lissitzky's Abstract Cabinet (1927-28), made for the Landesmuseum of Hannover, Germany, but destroyed in World War II, was a modular space that actually responded to the viewer's participation. The walls, constructed of a series of vertical laths, would change in appearance as the viewer walked by, from dark to light and back again.

Alexander Rodchenko would craft objects from a similar impulse, such as his "Spatial Constructions" (1918-21), which consist of concentric geometric shapes. When suspended from the ceiling, the "Spatial Construction" transforms from a flat, two-dimensional artwork into a kinetic sculpture responsive to its environment.

This kind of experimentation with activating a viewer-and, by extension, the masses-would go well beyond the space of the art museum. Constructivism made leaps and bounds in the field of graphic design, primarily at the hands of Rodchenko, who advocated for the incorporation of avant-garde art activity into everyday life. Rodchenko's bold designs, using stark geometric forms and striking diagonal lines, were used in propaganda posters, such as his famous Books (Please)! In All Branches of Knowledge poster, made in 1924. The photograph of a woman shouting the titular cry appears within a frame of crisp, linear forms that extend outward, giving the artwork a sonic dimension.

Kasimir Severinovich Malevich

Suprematist Composition, 1915

"In Search of 0,10 - The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting" at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen

The Constructivists harnessed form and design to advance concrete social and political goals, a phenomenon that came to be known as "agitprop"-a combination of the words "agitation" and "propaganda." Between 1919 and 1922, the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) published more than 1,500 original posters to be placed in vacant windows, a project that came to be known as "ROSTA Windows." Artists like Rodchenko, Valentina Kulagina, and Viktor Koretsky used photomontage techniques to create posters that would speak to the social and political concerns of citizens, both locally and globally. Kulagina's posters mobilized workers, particularly women workers, with bright and bold forms and text.

Textile designers Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, meanwhile, were, as art historian Christina Kiaer has written, "the only Constructivists to see their designs for everyday, utilitarian things actually mass-produced and distributed in the Soviet economy." Both artists had started out as painters, and Popova herself joined Malevich's Suprematist group in 1916. Though Popova and Stepanova have different backgrounds-Popova was born into a wealthy family in Moscow, while Stepanova, five years younger, came from peasant origins-both artists ended up working at the First State Cotton-Printing Factory in Moscow.

The same flat, geometric forms in their paintings can be seen in their textile designs, which are characterized by their regularity and formal simplicity. Creating Constructivist textiles meant that Popova and Stepanova were making avant-garde art within the very means of production that served the masses. A 1924 photograph of Stepanova wearing a dress made with her own fabric design, taken by her fellow Constructivist and life partner Rodchenko, shows just how livable avant-garde design could be. Relaxed and casual in her shift dress, paired with sandals, Stepanova exemplifies the artist as producer.

Why does Constructivism matter?

In keeping with its global aims for Communist revolution, Constructivism was taken up by artists in other countries, too, especially in Germany-where László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus felt its influence-and in Latin America. Though Constructivism as a historical movement had ended by the 1930s, when avant-garde activity became increasingly distasteful to the Communist regime, its influence could be felt throughout much of the 20th century.

Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, for example, are well-known for their neo-Constructivist works of the 1950s and '60s. Though their works share many formal similarities with Constructivism, such as flatness, geometry, and a system-based approach to artmaking, their affinities run much deeper. Clark and Oiticica's later work would commit itself to making participants out of its viewers, activating them with pieces that could be rearranged or even worn performatively, as in Oiticica's "Parangolés" (1964-79).

Constructivism radically reimaged the role of the artist as an engineer with tools, rather than an academy painter with a brush. The Constructivists conceived of artworks as part of a greater visual program of awakening the masses toward revolution, and an awareness of class divisions and other social inequalities. Its ripple effects on art of the 20th century can be seen not only in movements like Brazilian neo-Constructivism, but also in Minimalism, which sought to further reduce form down to its most essential elements.

Portrait of Gustav Klutsis by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

Jenna Gribbon, Luncheon on the grass, a recurring dream, 2020. Jenna Gribbon, April studio, parting glance, 2021. Jenna Gribbon, Silver Tongue, 2019

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One of the 20th century's most influential movements amounted to nothing less than an attack on art. In 1922, a Russian artist named Aleksei Gan penned a manifesto that began with words in glaring uppercase: "WE DECLARE UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART!" The Russian Revolution had taken place five years earlier, in 1917.

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Exploring Russian Constructivism: A Revolutionary Movement in Art

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A movement with origins in Russia, Constructivism was primarily an art and architectural movement. It rejected the idea of art for arts' sake and the traditional bourgeois class of society to which previous art had been catered. Instead it favored art as a practise directed towards social change or that would serve a social purpose. Developing after World War I, the movement sought to push people to rebuild society in a Utopian model rather than the one that had led to the war.

The term construction art was first coined by Kasmir Malevich in reference to the work of Aleksander Rodchenko. Graphic Design in the constructivism movement ranged from the production of product packaging to logos, posters, book covers and advertisements. Rodchenko's graphic design works became an inspiration to many people in the western world including Jan Tschichold and the design motif of the constructivists is still borrowed, and stolen, from in much of graphic design today.

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History of Graphic Design, Graphic Designers, Art and Design Movements, Motion Graphics, Typography, Color, Design, graphic, Design, Reference, Referenced, A collection of information intended to be used as a primer and a reference tool in relation to the history of graphic design

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Varvara Stepanova - AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

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Varvara Fyodorovna Stepanova was born to a family of civil servants and in 1910 enrolled in the Kazan Art School, where she met her future husband and artistic collaborator Alexander Rodchenko. In 1913, she attended the workshop of Konstantin Yuon in Moscow. At the start...

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Pioneering Russian artists take the center stage at New York's Museum of Modern Art for " A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde," which opens on December 4. In addition to showcasing the work of well-known male artists such as Alexandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich, the show, which spans the period from the end of World War I to 1932, also shines a spotlight on the women that helped drive the movement.

The Russian Avant-Garde movement can be traced not only through painting but also through the period's poetry, film, and photomontage. So it comes as no surprise that the women included in "A Revolutionary Impulse" worked across fields, demonstrating their creativity in countless forms.

In anticipation of the exhibition, here's four female Russian artists to see up close this December.

1. Olga Rozanova (1886-1918)
Even without a formal arts education, Olga Rozanova made a name for herself as a major innovator of the Russian avant-garde with her Italian Futurist-influenced painting, which incorporated elements of poetry.

Her abstract work was part of Malevich's Suprematist movement, but with a more decorative touch. Shortly before her death, Rozanova created a series of "color painting" works that are now seen as a pre-cursor to the Abstract Expressionist movement developed by American artists over 30 years later.

2. Lyubov Popova (1889-1924)
Lyubov Popova's career was short but memorable, securing herself a place in the Russian art historical canon with her artistic innovations, which blended Cubism and Futurism. Widely travelled, Popova made work with a broad range of international influences. In addition to painting, she also designed textiles, typography faces, and Bolshevik pamphlets, later abandoning the canvas as part of the Constructivist movement.

Her work hung alongside that of Malevich, in "Tramway V: The First Futurist Exhibition," held in St. Petersburg in 1915, and Moscow's Stroganov Institute in 1924 held a posthumous retrospective of her work.

3. Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962)
A painter, writer, costume designer, and set designer, Natalia Goncharova studied at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture before dropping out to help form the group Jack of Diamonds.

Inspired by Russian icons and folk art, Goncharova blended the Russian Primivist movement with Fauvism and Cubo-Futurist art. She was a divisive figure, choosing to wear men's attire and to live with her life partner, Mikhail Larionov, for decades before marrying him.

4. Alexandra Exter (1882-1949)
After exploring Cubism in Paris in 1910, Alexandra Exter, a friend of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, returned to her native Russia, where she was a leading light of the new Constructivist movement.

Straddling Suprematism and Curbo-Futurism, the experimental artist was known for her stage and costume design. She also influenced the Art Deco movement.
"A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde," is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, from December 4, 2016-March 12, 2017.

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a revolutionary impulse: the rise of the russian avant-garde

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Revolutionary Russian Avant-Garde Women | artnet News

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Pioneering Russian artists take the center stage at New York's Museum of Modern Art for " A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde," which opens on December 4.

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Italian Futurism is Translated into English, German and Russian

Blast Magazine 1914-1915

Marinetti's Futurist speech in England insulted and provoked his audience by analyzing their shortcomings, "To a degree you are victims of your traditionalism and medieval trappings, in which there persists a whiff of archives and a rattling of chains that hinder your precise and carefree forward march."
English artists initially embraced Marinetti but later rejected him to start their own Modernist movement, Vorticism, manifesting elements of both Cubism and Futurism. Two members, painter Wyndham Lewis and writer Ezra Pound, founded the Vorticist magazine, Blast, a folio edition of art and poems. Despite abrogating Marinetti, they embraced his expressive typography and asymmetrical page layouts in the publication. Only two issues were completed as World War I began shortly after the first issue. Click here to see the entire issue

Dada

In 1916 Zurich was a safe haven for artists fleeing the war in Europe. The international mix brewed up a post-Futurist development, named Dada. Considered an anti-art movement, it spawned a number of collage and photomontage artists who influenced later graphic designers. Collage masters, such as John Heartfield, worked in images while while others pushed forward the typographic energies begun in Futurism.

Shown above, Ilia Zdanevitch, (1894-1975) Dada-esque design for a program for the second staging of Tristan Tzara's Dadaist play, "Le Coeur à Barbe, (Evening of the Bearded Heart), 1923 in Paris. The combination of several typefaces and various sizes in a word or line is known as paragonnage .

"The only thing worse than a serif typeface is a sans-serif typeface" Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's reaction to what he called "the tyranny of the alphabet" led him to substitute dingbats and punctuation for letters.

Plenty of information about Dada is available on line at the University of Iowa's International Dada Archive.

From Tzar to Avant Garde

Sandwiched between the Academic and Social Realist styles of Russian art was an intense period of artistic exploration. Russian writers and artists embraced parts of the Futurist dogma but nationalized it by integrating Russian myths and folklore as well as Cubism into a hybrid style known as Cubo-Futurist.

By the time Marinetti visited Russia in 1914 he declared that Russians were not Futurists, but rather savage primitives. The Cubo-Futurist reveled in shocking the public by dressing in outlandish clothing and producing controversial works such as A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912, (above).

Enjoy a full selection of Russian Avant Garde Books at the Getty

Russian Artist Books

Small handmade artist books were a Russian artistic tradition redefined by the Futurists and carried forward by the Cubo-Futurist and Constructivists. These small editions included etchings, bold prints and tipped-in pages of art work. Shown above, The Revolt of the Misanthropes, 1922, designed by L iubov Popova.

In 1918, Vera Ermolayeva organized a gang of artists "Today," which produced tiny children's books, decorated with linocut. Unfortunately she was shot in 1937. Link to her work on the Moma website.

The use of asymmetrical type, white space and weight variations of the Futurists was continued, although in some cases the text was organized in a more readable configuration. It is easy to see the influence these books had on future typographers, especially Jan Tschichold who articulated his text and page layout in a similar, albeit more refined, manner.

Varvara Stepanova + Alexander Rodchenko

Artistic Revolution in Russia

In 1915 Kasimir Malevich introduced his final logical evolution of Cubism in an abstract non-objective style he named Suprematism. His stark color field paintings demonstrated the theories from his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. (Black Square, 1915, above). Among other things he believed that geometric shapes could evoke strong emotions.

In revolutionary-minded Russia the acceptance of avant garde waned in a new era of practicality and rejection of individual expression. By 1921 Constructivism, an art form that conformed to the needs of the state, was the accepted means of graphic expression.

Much of the graphic work was in advertising but with a distinct difference from Western advertising, as historian Stephen Eskilson observed- Russian advertising did not promote desire for an object, rather it inspired feeling of guilt and duty. Constructivist advertisements promoted industry or political propaganda. The work was dominated by the color red, the color of the Communist Revolution.

The Constructivists

Leading the Constructivists were husband and wife team Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). They rejected fine arts to create images that served the new worker state, replacing the word artist with the more productive term constructor.

Stepanova was among the founders of Constructivism having participated in the Moscow 5 x 5 = 25 exhibition held in 1921. She was significant in shaping Russian's visual culture during the turbulent years following the revolution. In addition to paintings she created geometric constructions, sets and costumes, fashion designs, posters, and typography.

In 1923 Rodchenko formed an advertising office, Ad-Constructor with Stepanova where they served the people by creating constructivist style advertisements, such as the poster for Red October Cookies, 1923, shown below.

They were joined by writer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), one of those involved with The Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Mayakowsky also helped launch LEF (Left Front of the Arts) magazine, for which Rodchenko designed covers and photomontages. One of Rodchenko's covers montages the image of art critic, Osip Brik, with the name LEF. (top)

Rodchenko is most celebrated for his photographic contributions. Thanks to Oskar Barnack's invention of the hand-held Leica camera in 1925, Rodchenko was able to shoot from extreme angles to force the viewer to see the world from new perspectives.

Liubov Popova

VKhUTEMAS

Liubov Popova (1889-1924)

Born into wealth, educated and well traveled, nevertheless Popova became one of the leading artists for the proletariat. (in fact the Tate Museum exhibited her work equally with Rodchenko's in the 2009 Rodchenko and Popova Defining Constructivism Exhibit.

In 1921, Popova turned away from studio painting to execute utilitarian Productivist art: she designed textiles, dresses, books, porcelain, costumes, and theater sets. She sometimes collaborated with Stepanova on various Agitprop projects. (Agitprop was the Department for Agitation and Propaganda, which produced stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message)

LEF.

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Painterly Architectonic

VKhUTEMAS Art Institute, 1920

The first art school established after the Russian Revolution was Svomas "to spread awareness of and competence in the arts to the previously underprivileged workers and peasants." There were no entrance requirements, no exams, art history courses were optional, all faculty were avant-garde artists, and students choose their professors.

When the lack of structure of Svoma descended into chaos the school was reorganized and renamed VkHUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios). As the main state sanctioned art and technical school in Moscow it served 100 faculty and 2500 students through 1930.

"Like the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas was a state-sponsored initiative to merge craft traditions with modern technology. Both schools flourished in a relatively liberal period and were later closed under pressure from increasingly totalitarian regimes."

Both Liubov Papova and Varvara Stepanova taught at Svomas Art School, and at the new Vkhutemas school. Women in the new Soviet society were afforded all of the opportunities of their male counterparts.

"Part of the school's mandate was to serve as a specialized educational institution for advanced artistic and technical training, preparing highly qualified master artists for careers in industry or education. A major achievement of VKhUTEMAS was the three-tiered Basic Course. Students first developed studio art techniques, then incorporated them into a specialized industrial/ professional education.
Augmenting this basic course were chemistry, physics, mathematics, geometry, the theory of shadows, military training, scientific theory of color, a foreign language and the history of art."

El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky (1890-1941)

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was a visionary artist/designer who worked in exhibition design, photomontage, poster and book design. Mostly notably he integrated typography and page elements into a new and dynamic compositional style.

Trained originally as an architect, he began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books. He met and was greatly inspired by Malevich and others in the Supremacist movement while working as a teacher at Vkhutemas Art School.

Lissitzky developed his own variant of Suprematism, Proun (an acronym for Project for the Affirmation of the New). Proun was Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of Suprematism but with dimensional elements, existing half-way between painting and architecture, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives.

Prouns were initially paintings but later were expressed as fully dimensional works. They also influenced Lissitzky's commercial work as shown above in Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. The 1919 lithograph, printed during the Russian Civil War, marries the compositional aspects of PROUN with geometric symbolism to tell a revolutionary inspired story.

Like Rodchenko, El Lissitzky's used his art to promote the state. His The Story of Two Squares (1920) was a symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a red square and a black square. "When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. His revolutionary typographical layouts were a synthesis of the composition of Proun with his command of page layout from his earlier book designs."

See all of the pages of The Story of Two Squares on on ibiblio.org

Lissitzky's Influence in Europe

El Lissitzky moved to Berlin as an artistic ambassador of Russian art and culture, bringing with him the language of Constructivism and Suprematism. While in Europe he experimented heavily in typographic design and photographic montage. Because he could speak German, he became a major conduit for ideas flowing between Europe and Russian.

While in Berlin he was commissioned to produce prints based upon the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun. Lissitzky analyzed the text's celebration of man's technological capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.'

The cover sheet (shown top) is composed with an arrangement of bold and light type aligned on a grid. Horizontal and vertical bars are balanced with the type in a vocabulary of space and organizational relationships that were emulated by designers in the following decades.

Lissitzky's fluency in German helped him advance his theories in Europe through lectures, articles, and commercial graphic design. Dada artist Kurt Schwitters commissioned Lissitzky to work on a special issue of the Dada journal Merz .

Lissitzky's work was highly influential at the Bauhaus school through his relationship with Walter Gropius. He also deeply influenced The New Typography of Jan Tschichold and the De Stijl movement.

Lissitzky fell ill to tuberculosis in 1923 and went to Switzerland for treatment. He financed his recovery by designing advertisements for Günther Wagner's Pelikan division, an office supply company. With this assignment he combined his typographic theories with Proun spatial composition to create a new visual vocabulary for advertising.

For the Voice (1923)

"For the Voice, first published in 1923, has long been recognized as one of the finest achievements of Russian avant-garde bookmaking, a tradition in which poets and artists collaborated to create books that attained the status of art objects. By any reckoning, For the Voice is a landmark event in the history of modern graphic design. The book was inspired by the "new optics," where ideas are given form through printed letters, turning them into pictorial signs, and by "words that are seen and not heard," as Lissitzky wrote."

El Lissitzky's book used a collection of 13 of the most often quoted poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky. As part of his design he placed an icon on the right-bottom side of the page, helping the viewer to navigate forward and back. Left hand pages were notched to allow the icons to be viewed.

His work foreshadowed the functional graphics of designers that followed, including Latislav Sutnar.

Footnotes

1
Fry, Tony, A New Design Philosophy, p. 161, UNSW PRess, 1999.

2
Getty

3
On-line Archive of California

4
Image from World Socialist Web Site, David Walsh, Bolshevism and the Avant Garde Artists

5
Varvara Stepanova The Complete Work Alexander Lavrentiev

6
Image Source
Photo Forager

7
Wikipedia,

8
The Getty Finding Aid
link

9
There are dozens of sources claiming this quote, I am choosing the MIT Press as the source. Link

10
MIT Press Link

11
El Lissitzky, For the Voice (Dlia golosa), 1923. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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