jo 1980' & 90's

Stefan Sagmeister was born in 1962 in Austria and educated at a local engineering school.

In 1981 he moves to Vienna and is accepted after a second attempt to the Vienna University of Applied Arts to study graphic design.

In 1984 he designed posters for Vienna’s Schauspielhaus theatre and the successful campaign to save the Ronacher music hall from demolition.

Stefan graduated in 1985 with a first class degree and a prize from the city of Vienna.
Then in 1987, with a Fulbright scholarship, moved to New York for three years to study at the Pratt Institute. When he returned to Vienna in 1990, to avoid military conscription, he worked in a refugee centre as well as designing posters for Nickelsdorf Jazz Festival.

He lands a job in Hong Kong with ad agency, Leo Burnett in 1991. Stefan upset many with his 1992 controversial 4A’s advertising awards poster depicting four naked buttocks with the wording “Who’s the asshole who designed this poster?” In fact a lot of Stefan’s designs provoked thought and conversation among his viewers. And this is exactly what he wanted; by mixing sexuality with wit and adding a bit of the sinister, his works though often simple, became potent messages for the reader.

Stefan’s goal was to design music album covers, but only for music he liked. He formed Sagmeister Inc, but kept his business small with a team of three. After designing their own business card, their second commission came from Stefan’s brother who owned the jeans company Blue. Stefan’s long time friend and musician HP Zinker commissioned him to design his CD cover for Zinker’s ‘Mountain of Madness’ album. Replicating the optical illusion with the red plastic slipcase he’d used for his business card, Stefan designed the cover and put in in the case. When the album was viewed it showed the close-up of a placid man’s face, but when the red cover is removed the man’s face changes to that of a furious look. This cover won Sagmeister his first of four Grammy nominations.

Lou Reed invited him to design his 1996 CD cover for his “Set the Twilight Reeling” album. Other great covers followed for bands like The Rolling Stones and David Bryne. As well as this form of graphics, Stefan continued to design lecture posters for the AIGA.

Bibliography:
www.designmuseum.org/design/stefan sagmeister

lucy 1970

In the 70’s, recycling art was wide spread and very popular at this point in history and was called the ‘Art Nouveau’. Like many artistic movements, art nouveau was made from many different styles. There were common links but it is this uniqueness that epitomises the movement, its only one character being an aim to try to defy the established order of the fine and applied arts of the time. This "new art" was hated in Britain by the established contemporaries, the critics referring to it as "The Squirm".
During this time the designs and and artworks made were very intouch with nature and reflected some environmental issues. Commic art was also a very big and continuioulsy growing aspect of graphic design in the 1970’s. artists in these times used plane but bright colours and simple single line drawing with sharp and bold lines. The use of dark colurs and light/ bright colours contributed to how they portrayed th “good guys’ and the “ bad guys” hence the good guys being light and the bad guys being dark. As seen in this pic.
http://www.comic-art.com/

Jaymi: RayGun Mag 90's

Ray Gun was an American Alternative rock magazine, first published in California in 1992 led by art director David Carson. Ray Gun pushed the conventions of magazine design to a new level. Changing typography, layout, headlines, columns, and even page numbers. Resulting in a chaotic, abstract not always legible magazine.

Every single type rule you could come up was broken in Ray Gun’s brief history, overlapping blocks of copy; light text against dark backgrounds; dark text against dark backgrounds; running text across pages; articles read horizontally across columns; photos upside-down. The name itself has had many variations such as rAY GUn, RAYGUN, ray gun and so on. In the April ‘95 issue the feature article began on the inside and finished on the front cover, truly unconventional.


The magazine had many critics about breaking the conventions of magazine layout, typography and getting away with it. Also some complained about the legibility of the articles. David Carson stated, “If you think it’s hard to read or too weird, you’re probably not the audience, and that’s fine.” But for the over 150,000 readers of Ray gun, decoding the text was part of the fun.

lucy 1960

Talent was the prerequisite to success in the 1960s. For the first time ever in any fashion era, the young became the leaders of fashion. They led with new and radically innovative fashion styles, with little girl woman androgynous looks for women that swept away the sophisticated sweater girls of the early sixties. The picture of Twiggy in the header defines her as the epitome of a sixties baby doll woman. This influenced the design side of society by encouraging outrageous and "loud" art and design works to be "the in thing" bright loud, graffiti like works were in order as rainbow and florescent coleus as well as diverse individual designs were becoming more and more “in” as the hippie culture of love peace and harmony was growing bigger. Fashion influenced 60's design in a big way making designers want to use big, bright coleus to get their messages across.
Allot of the designs and art during this time reflected love, piece send harmony. So these colours appealed to people of this era and help the messages of artists to be displayed.
My link is; http://www.fashion-era.com/the_1960s_mini.htm

lucy 20's

post 2
In the 1920’s rich and diverse graphic art styles were influenced heavily by expressionism. Expressionism is the tendency of an artist or designer to distort reality for an emotional effect. It is subjective. Expressionism is exhibited in many art forms.
Most the works portrayed the feeling or emotion, as the designer would have wanted the audience to see and feel! In this particular design; I feel the designer has try to portray a complicated and busy emotion with many different aspect and obstacles trying to get out in to the smooth self passed background which is filled with space and simper shaded colour. The colours are all bright and contradicting of each other’s they all are directed to the middle. The sharp simple lines indicate strong feelings of busyness and clutter to portray a complicated busy style! These shapes and colours were used a lot during the 1920’s, as this style was very popular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism

Jess - Tibor Kalman [80-90's]

Tibor Kalman born on July 6, 1949–May 2, 1999 was an influential American graphic designer of Hungarian origin, well-known for his work as editor-in-chief of Colors magazine.

Kalman was best known for the groundbreaking work he created with his New York design firm, M&Co, and his brief yet influential editorship of Colors magazine. Throughout his 30-year career, Kalman brought his restless intellectual curiosity and subversive wit to everything he worked on -- from album covers for the Talking Heads to the redevelopment of Times Square. Kalman incorporated visual elements other designers had never associated with successful design, and used his work to promote his radical politics. The influence of his experiments in typography and images can be seen everywhere, from music videos to the design of magazines such as Wired and Ray Gun.

Kalman combined his desire to break new ground visually with a passionate commitment to social causes. From his days as an undergraduate at New York University, where he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (he left school to support the Communists in Cuba for a period), Kalman's radical politics and his radical designs were inextricably linked. "I use contrary-ism in every part of my life. In design ... I'm always trying to turn things upside down and see if they look any better," he told Charlie Rose in a December 1998 interview.


url:
http://www.salon.com/people/obit/1999/05/19/kalman/

Kim- Swatch Twin Phone

Swatch twin phone

The Swatch brand made a name for itself during the 1980s as an innovator in watch manufacturing, producing a very broad range of limited edition designs at an affordable price.
Building on this success, Swatch went on to produce a range of telephones which, have since become collectors items. The twin phone was a new inventi0on of the 80’s and was highly successful. Features of the phone include
• 2 People can talk on the same phone at the same time
• Tone/Pulse Switchable
• Mute key
• Ringer volume selector
• Name Dial
• 20 # Memory
• Last number redial
These phones came in a range of pastel candy colors as well as bright fluro colors and in a range of styles such as see through casing and a range of square shapes and rounded shapes. The popularity of these phones ended in about the early 90’s but recently have been coming back into fashion and a lot of collectors are trying to get there hands on them. They were recently shown in the show seventh heaven which has educated the younger generation in the phone.


http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-80s-Candy-Swatch-2-in-1-Twin-Phone-Deluxe-NIB_W0QQitemZ270129785629QQihZ017QQcategoryZ41374QQcmdZViewItem

http://www.eurocosm.com/Application/Products/Teleph/swatch-telephones-1GB.asp