Case study on the performance in editorial work Supervized by Catherine Schwartz Introduction « Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.» — Piet Mondrian Don’t be fooled by the dry and cold aspect of art history. We are often fooled to think that designers evolve in a cold world where tough rules and commercial thinking are always lurking under. Though it might be true, it is also filled with creatives willing to share a feeling or a thought. It is not mouvements that shaped thoughts and artists, but the creatives and rebels who fought their way to create and share their views and opinion of their world. Design evolved a lot in the last 150 years, more than could be expected from a society leading more and more towards a digital and calculated world. Arts became a part of everyday life as functionning tools and display to better understand, hear, or discover the complex world we share. Designers all over the world tried to break free and rebuilt over and over again a way of seeing our relationships to another through everyday life. Where we live, how we live, where we go, how we are going to go there, whith whom, with what, how. Design comes from a place mixing utility and aesthetics, bringing back spirituality or bringing order to an already existing chaos. Designer perform and capture performance, and that is the essence of their work. What led to today’s graphic design Printing process and typefaces. From the mid 15th century This mass printing habit to the early 18th century, doesn’t come cheap. The typography began gaining newly developped printing public relevance: printing process are farther and press quickly developed farther away from the art different techniques and fully forms they were, where produced typefaces emerged. perfection and technique are From woodblock to digital keys to accomplish the goal printing, through many expected. While old technics techniques like movable like engraving or silkpress type, offset, engraving, printing are still seen as an thermography, photosetting, art form; largely a lot of the silkscreen, inkjetor, different, often local, ways flexography and letterpress of printing are starting to everyone was starting to want diseappear. Though it is to use print. important to note that some With new printing press designers defend their local technologies, new typefaces printing process. In Lyon, a emerged. First calligraphic lot of artists and designers typefaces, than blackletter, use a silkscreen printing serif, and sans serif as labor method to print, for exclusive and titling. Onto more modern art or even for some typefaces like script, pixel, simple tracts for political or and decorative; exclusively entertaining agendas. for titling. And in our world, five century later, print is everywhere and is used on a global scale. 6 7 Graphic Design from 1850 to 1920. Industrial and craftsmanship From Arts & Crafts to always operated in different Dadaism, it is really circles. Between 1850 and interesting to see how arts 1920 their relation to the became so much invested social and economical world in society. As it started from drastically changed. This an aesthetic will to please changement was led by a and admire, through the handful of movements in craftsmen and artists it design. Beginning with Arts became something involved, & Crafts, to Art Deco and going so far as being an anti- Art Nouveau these worlds war outcry. With Dadaism, started to get away from applied arts overstepped the their intended meaning: to marks, the abstract sense of bring beauty and pleasure humor they displayed and to the world. With Bauhaus, this mouvement broke every this idea culminated. The rules and allowed the public mouvement sought to to consider art fully outside create a new world through of an only aesthetic form. design. From architecture, Nowadays, it is considered to furniture, a whole way normal to see art and design of life was breathed out in everyday life and most of the school. From there, particularly in commentary movements like Futurism about the society we live in. and Dadaism continued to We can only thank the 170 provoke the status quo in arts years of art history behind and started to break ground us that allowed protest to not rules set by fine arts. only be written or spoken but It was the beginning of visually seen and felt. applied arts. 8 9 The Bauhaus mouvement. The Bauhaus school was But, Mayer was a convinced founded after the first world Marxist and let too much politics war by Walter Gropius, and lead the school. He was asked lasted for 14 years. Gropius was to resign the school in 1930. the first director of the school, Mies van Der Rohe took the marked by the horrors of the leadership of the school, and war, he recruted as teachers the led it towards more architecture. most avant-garde and radical In 1932, the opression from the thinking artists in Europe, in the nazis was too much to handle shining hope of changing the and Mies moved the school to world’s future through design. Berlin to try and save what was The first school was set in left of its students. The efforts Weimar and focused on the came to an halt in 1933, where geometric figures, the shapes. the nazis shut down the entire The war shaped people to see school. Most of the teachers and technology a progessive and students left Germany exporting not destructive. From that idea, the idea of Bauhaus with them Gropius followed William Morris to Chicago and New York. steps and decided to mix fine They wanted to expand the arts and applied arts. In 1926, idealistic message of Bauhaus, faced with a lot of backlash for to handcraft things with enough their libertarian way of life, the perfection that it seemed Bauhaus’s influence mouvements absolutly to better design. school was forced to moved to industrial. But the message got is so huge and so fondemental. It is Their way of pushing Dessau. Gropius then left the lost in the design, notably in the important that no one almost inconceivable craftmenship and art directorship to Hannes Mayer. United States where design took can dislike it. There is to not associate together paid off. The Mayer brought the idea that form root but completely left out the a basic understanding the idea of colors school of Bauhaus followed function, and brought ideaslism of Bauhaus (IKEA or of color and shape, with meaning, and made possible their the prototypes made by the Apple demonstrate that idea). brought down by shapes together to challenge: to think the students to the industry. A step mouvements before, form other shapes. future through design. very important for the school that makes the Stripping down basis that had now a clear objective for their never ending creativity. 10 11 Swiss Design. Swiss Design, or international mass consuming without the Typographic Style, is idea of a grid or a working characterized by a special analytic system to convey attention to details, the use of the information better. grids and sans serif typeface International Typographic in a technical approach to Design’s most famous design. works are still used today, Following the Bauhaus idea like Helvetica or the subway of « Form follows function » it identities created by Vignelli. approaches design critically Even in motion design the to developp something influence of Swiss Design specific to the message it can be felt. Through the wants to convey. simplest shapes and limited The shapes, colors and use of color, motion designer typography used in Swiss convey their information Design, all borrowed from the effectively and with great Bauhaus era, are seemingly simplicity. simple but they are the result of a thoughtful and complex reflexion of balance. Swiss design had an important impact on the designing world. Introducing infographics and a new way to convey infromations, it led to a revolution in communication. Today it is almost unthinkable to not design a poster for Post-modernism. After the Swiss Design and is also a place of life. A modernism, many artists tried building, mosoleum or public to find another mouvement, school, represents and says to find creativity. Naturally, something by its design and many artists rejected the idea while the modernist kept of cleaness and conformism it simple with the «less is that came with the preceding more» mantra, it is refreshing mouvements. The designers to see more life coming from kept the grids but made the urban landscape. them more complex to keep It also important to note that their liberty and design the Post-modern mouvement new visual worlds. From witnessed the arrival of the this, a huge revival of old personal computer giving a style like Arts & Crafts creative tool to a lot more and Art Nouveau started. people, thus pushing even Though the mouvement is further the destructive aspect seeable in graphic design, of the mouvement. it was mostly important in architecture. The lack of variety and the blandness of the architecture left by the modernist saw decoration, asymetry and curves make their way back to life. Though the utopian aspect of the modernist is always pleasing with its symetry and cleaness, a house or any other architecture building 14 15 Corporate ID. After the industrial revolution And though it is vastly began, a new type of known that a corporation corporation made their doesn’t have a soul or values appearance; focused on beyond what the market consumerism.