Aleksandr Rodchenko

Aleksandr Rodchenko was born in late 1891 in Russia, In 1905 his family moved to moved to kazan. At that time rodchenko made the decision to study art. He became an artist and designer of many mediums including painting, photography, sculpture, advertising and packaging. He was influenced by surroundings of the Russian revolution of 191, he is known as one of the prolific constructivist artists of the period. Aleksandr was also a member of the Productivists, which started the art into every day life, a concept that in many ways describes modern day graphic design.

In the beginning he focused on paintings before started his career as a graphic designer, later he would experiment with photography and photomontages. He also worked was for the Russian airline company Dobrolet, producing many various packages, advertisements, logos and posters. His design work for other clients ranged from book covers to bookmarks, photomontages and illustrations, and even set and costume design for different Russian theaters.

Rodchenko left painting behind, proclaiming it’s death in 1921 in the June issue of MoMA, and took up different types of art including photomontages, he exhibited three solid monochromatic canvases, one each, in hues of red, yellow and blue. He deemed that he had reduced painting to its logical conclusion and that there was no reason to continue exploring the medium. This opened his doors for the beginning of a new Utopian way of life, and way of approaching art. Rodchenko's work influenced so many other designers of the early 20th century. Rodchenko continued to do commissions for photography and advertising throughout the rest of his life. He was a part of over 50 art exhibitions before his death in 1956 in Moscow.

Reference

Beazley, M., Aynsley, J., eds., 2004. Pioneers of Modern Graphic Design: A Complete History. London: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd.

Infographics

This is my info graphic that I design for task 2. We had to choose 5 different artist from 5 different movement and link one another through there work and influences.

I choose Constructivism, Destijl, Swiss international style, Mid Century era and psychedelia, and the designers were Laszlo moholy nagy, theo van does berg, joseph muller brockman, saul bass and victor moscoso.

It was a bit difficult to find the highlights of society at the era that they were living. the first 2 i linked them with the background that they were coming from. and the last 3 through there works because they were like the starting point of there movement in which they triggered the others to continue evolve with the same style.

Peter Berhens

Behrens is probably known for AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, literally General Electric Company), he started his career as a painter, illustrator and book-binder but would eventually become an artistic consultant for AEG started in 1907 and there he designed a wide range of materials for the company including a logotype, product packaging and various publicity materials. The work he did there is of significant note because it is generally recognized as the first fully developed corporate identity, much preceding the corporate identity heydays of the 1950s and 60s. His work was not limited to printed materials, he also produced the designed a turbine factory for AEG shortly after it entered the field of aircraft production.

 

Behrens turned to architecture after designing and building his own home. He even visualized the items in the interior, towels, shelves, furniture and everything in between. Behrens the pioneers of architectural reform, and his factory buildings designed of brick, glass and steel gained popularity during the early 20th century. During the years between 1907 and 1912 Behrens had many assistants and students including architecture big names like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Adolph Meyer.

Constructivisim

A movement that originated in Russia, Constructivism in the beginning was an art and architectural movement. They rejected the idea of art for arts' sake and the traditional class of society to which previous art had been catered. Instead it severed art for the social change or for social purpose. Developing after World War I, the movement sought to push people to rebuild society in an unrealistic model rather than the one that had led to the war.

The term construction art was first mentioned 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 in that era. Rodchenko's graphic design works became as 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 many of us in graphic design today.

Various inspirations from nowadays

El (Lazar) Lissitzky

El (Lazar) Lissitzky in the early soviet days he was the most innovative amongst the other avant- garde. His approach came from architectural background, and, whether in graphic design and photography, furniture and exhibition design or architecture, most of his designs reflected space and abstract. Lissitzky was born near Smolensk, he studied architectural engineering in Darmstadt from 1911 and returned to Russia on the outbreak of the war in 1914.

His first works, experimentations were related to the jewish origins and took the form of secular illustrated scrolls, with a loose, figurative style of painting. In 1919, on the invitation of Marc Chagall, he started to teach architecture and graphic art at the Vitebsk People's Art School. Here he met Kasimir Malevich, then developing Suprematism and abstract paintings of flat colour that was intented to give a spiritual meaning. Lissitzky responded with his own abstract paintings, sculptures and room installations, which called it Project for the Affirmation of the New "Proun"

After the Revolution of 1917, Lissitzky, along with other Constructivist artists and designers, they tried to find another artistic language, developed from Cubism and Russian Futurism. In a time of high illiteracy, designers believed that graphic design based on geometry and simplified Cyrillic script would prove more simple message to its consumers. Aiming to take art into life, Lissitzky used abstract forms floating in space for a series of posters and book designs in a style often called Elementarism. He believed that this would be a universally understood visual language by using primary colours and pure geometry.

 

Beat the Whites with the red wedge - 1920

This famous piece by El Lissitzky shows the influence of the new avant garde modernist art movements on beginnings of the Soviet propaganda. In fact there is a clear political message behind this design. He used the dynamism of geometric forms and spatial illusion to suggest its narrative political content; a large red triangle pierces a white circle, while splinters of geometric shapes are thrown off into space.

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was one of the most important typographic and graphic designers of the 20^th century. His lived throught the most crucial years of early modernism and he contributed to the debate about its application to graphic design.

He was one of the few designers to receive a full formal education in calligraphy and typography, Tschichold studied from 1919 to 1923 at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trades under Walter Tiemann, that had introduced him to the principles of classical typography. However, with the visit to the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, he was impressed and continued to grow familiarity with Soviet Constructivism, he began to apply radical principles associated with these movements. These included asymmetric composition, a reduction of form to its basic geometry, preference for single-case, sans-serif typfaces and the use of photographs as illustrations.

 

 Tschichold's most famous example of these principles in large graphic form is the series of posters he made for the Munich cinema Phoebus Palast, a job he took while teaching at the German Master Printers' School in the city. Following the ideas of Constructivism, the posters does not only strike visual summaries of each film but also comment on the character of film-making, employing the Constructivist device of self-reflexiveness.

In 1925 Tschichold published his ideas on typographic design in a special issue of the journal Typographische Mitteilungen. The publication of Die Neue Typographie in 1928 established his long-term significance for international design. It summarized the ideas of modern typography in a short art-historical essay and explaining the elements of typographic design, from letterheads to the design of the entire book. The book had a significant impact on the future of design, And in 1985 it was translated into English.

                              

In 1933 they were errested by the nazis, Tschichold and his wife Edith were forced to emigrate to Basle, Switzerland, where he taught at the Arts and Crafts School and worked for the publisher Benno Schwabe. With his stubbornness his design grew less. He regarded standardization and a house style for typography as necessary in modern publishing.

Later in his life Tschichold served as typographic adviser to the publishers Birkhauser in Basle and Penguin Books in London, applying his inovative high standards to systematize book design and corporate identity.

                                  

                 

                              

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was one of the first abstract artists to switch from painting to design for communication, his famous step was in 1923 of ordering a painting by telephone, using a colour chart and geometric grid to signal the "death of painting".

He was also part of an avant-garde in Budapest and after World War I he was strongly inspired by Soviet Constructivism. He moved to Berlin in 1921 and in 1923 was invited by Walter Gropius to join the Bauhaus in Weimar as a professor in the metal workshop. His soon showed interest in design for print, when he took charge of the typographic design of many of the school's publications, from 1925, the Bauhaus Books series.

With many of his contemporaries, including El Lissitzky, Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and Kurt Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy advocated a modernist approach to graphic design, known as die neue typographie (the new typography). This recommended using lower-case alphabets with inks of primary colours and photographic illustrations, the aim was to creating a universal and democratic medium. His design philosophy was a curious combination of technological determinism, a belief in the social role of design and a mystical preoccupation with the properties of light.

                      

Moholy-Nagy wrote his first book, Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film), published in 1925, he predicted the route that communication would take from a single image to a narrative form of film montage. He was also interested in extending the possibilities to combine typography with photography in what he called "Typophoto". As well as investigating the possibilities of rendering the familiar strange, through negative and positive photography, he experimented with photomontage and photograms (cameraless photography), which were used in various designs for posters, book covers and exhibitions. Something common in his work was to expose the elements of design such as structure, as he did in the advertisement for the Bauhaus Books list in 1925, in which he used the ingredients of typography for the design.

In 1928, Moholy-Nagy was an established designer in Berlin. He exposed his work at the German Werkbund contribution to the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs in Paris in 1930, an exhibition he co-designed with the Bauhaus associates, Gropius and Bayer. he emigrated to the Netherlands in 1934 and then England and the USA where he settled more permanently, he worked on publication design and exhibitions as well as industrial design.

                

In 1937 Moholy-Nagy became director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which has failed in 1938 and the following year he founded the School of Design

in the city. Despite confronting social and political upheaval throughout his life, Moholy-Nagy was one of the seminal figures in the transmission of modern design of his time.

Referance 

Livingston, A. I., 2003. Graphic Design and Designers. London: The Thames & Hudson.