After the first world war, artists were wanting to try and forget their history and wanted to embrace a new style and culture, which was modernism. This was a global movement and it had an influence on art, architecture, literature, film, and music. So it was a very large movement that covered lots of areas. It promoted sleekness and simplicity, while also promoting abstractness and creativity. The Modernism era lasted right up until the early 20th century.
We looked at Jan Tschichold, the man known as the ‘father of typography’. He was most famous for his influence on asymmetrical typography and using san-serif type faces. One of his most well-known designs was his ‘Penguin’ books. His work was seen as a threat to the Nazi party, as Germany traditionally used blackletter type. He fled to Switzerland and was his work was seen as ‘un-German’, or ‘degenerate art’. This was how badly artists were treated if they went against the culture of Germany at the time.
The Olympics each year have a different design system. This features a colour scheme, iconography, typeface, and logo. Each year has a different design system to match the country/city that it is being held in, to fit the cultures of the country/city. One of the key elements are the pictograms representing each sport. Since they all have to be universal, that is, recognisable for people of all nationalities to understand, they can’t feature text. Here are some of my favourites from different years.
Tokyo 2020
Rio 2016
Saul Bass is an American graphic designer who is famous for his designs for movie posters. He was born in 1916, and died in 1996. His designs feature minimal amount of text and focus on the other elements in the design. When he does use text he uses cool sans-serif decorative typefaces and normally uses it in bold. He also uses a very limited colour palette in his designs, often only using 2-3 colours, but they are usually very vibrant and always pop out. His designs are super simple, yet represent each movie really well and makes you want to watch them, so he definitely does a good job at selling movies with his movie posters. Here are some of his designs:
I enjoyed learning about modernism in todays class, and how it was such a large movement after such a tragic time in human history. It is cool to see how this era of design produced so many great designers, and especially the two I have looked at, Jan Tschichold and Saul Bass, both who’s work I find really interesting.