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Derek Birdsall is a graphic designer that became known as the ‘book designer’. He was born in 1934 in Yorkshire, England. As a young boy he hated school, but his penmanship was noted by teachers, and at 15 he attended Wakefield College for three years before winning a scholarship to the Central School of Art and Design in London in 1952. Through influential teachers like Anthony Froshaug, Herbet Spencer and Edward Wright, Derek learned the importance of Clarity, directness and textual legability of proper typography and the difference between that and simply beautiful lettering. Derek then spent two years in national service in Cyprus.

In 1957,taking the ‘modernist approach’, Birdsall landed his first design job for printer ‘Balding and Mansell’, doing a series of leaflets for an LP Album. He continued to freelance for another two years before forming the company BDMW, with George Daulby, James Mortimer and George Mayhew. During the eight years with this company, Derek became known as the ‘emergency art director’, doing multi-tasking on several layouts for different magazines at the same time. This task included commissioning and art directing photography and illustration, as well as designing typography and layouts.

In 1967 he started his own studio “Omnific”. He had been designing Penguin book covers for the last seven years; in 1970 Derek completely redesigned the Education series for Penguin. Birdsall did layouts for Town, Nova, and Twen magazines, as well as advertising layouts for Mobil Oils’ Magazine ‘Pegasus’ and produced a calendar series for Pirelli that did not contain tyres. Lotus Cars and Monty Python were also clients of his during the 1970s.

During this decade Derek was appointed a lectureship at the London College of Printing and also taught at the Maidstone College of Art. Derek’s book design using typography, transformed words into art and it became a mark of his work.
Many beautiful works have been created by Birdsall since, including several major art catalogues for Yale University Press, National Gallery in Washington DC, and design catalogues for clients like George Stubbs of the Tate Gallery. In 1983 Derek was made Royal Designer for Industry and in 2005 he received the Prince Philip Designers Prize. Derek still designs books today.

Bibliography: www.designmuseum.org/design/derekbirdsall

post6: you guessed it 1980 and 1990s

1980's the time of space shuttle flights begin, high temp super conductors developed, glasnot policy implemented by gorbachev, sportswear, contemporary japanese design, androgyny, madonna, slogan t shirts, printed fabrics, wolfgang weingart, katherine mccoy, cranbrook school of art poster, 'emigre' magazine,zuzana licko, rudy vanderLans, 'the face'- neville brody, bartle bogle hegarty, canon cb10, classic apple computer, 'hommes', ikko tanaka 'noh', grapus- design collective, miehe, nigel rose, gert dumbar, gunter rambow, peret, pere torrent, toscani, united colors of benetton, nathalie du pasquier memphis textiles, susan collier and sarah campbell textiles, mickey mouse phone, Frutiger, Alexander Jordan, Garald Paris Clavel, Pierre Bernard, Alain Le Quernec, Tibor Kalman, new functionalism, octavo,

jerik spiekermann- meta desgn, rick valicenti, designers republic sheffield england, malcom garrett, ray gun magazine, david carson, fuse magazine, peter saville, jonathon barnbrook, world wide web, tomato, tetra pak, mobile phones, sony playstation, jim nature tv phillippe starck, canon ixus, apple imac and ibook, multi media kiosk, 'raygun', terry jones, 'i-D', 'vibrations', 'blue lines massive attack, michael nash, 'screamadelica' primal scream, paul connell, 'post' by bjork, sonia greteman, swatch twin phone, video phone,

 

christain 70's exploitation

The 1970s was the time of the exploitation movie in all its glory. Exploitation or Trash movies have since gained a cult following for all the wrong reasons probably but were movies made at a time when political correctness wasnt heard off.

Exploitation and Trash movies came in a number of forms, across a number of movie genres and presented people with sex, violence and gore, all taboo subjects until this time in cinema. They and the posters that came along with them have been described as the underbelly of both the cinematic and poster arts and are widely defined by words like, sleazy, cheap, racist, violent, grose, tasteless, sick and sexist but they are a great example of the liberation in the 1970's of freedom of expression and bending the rules in creativity, cinema and design.

The movie posters that came along with Trash and Exploitation have also been described as a low point in advertising and cinema promotions and poster design but again they reflect the times and are highly sought after by collectors. The posters are instantly recognisable as the 1970's. the typography alone help define the 70's and the images borrowed from a range of art movements including pop and physchedelic to create some distinctive images. The posters also bent the rules as far as what was seen on a movie poster until this time and for all their crassness they stand alone as unique peices of work and many of the styles used have been copied time and time again to recapture the feel of the 1970's.

The movies and posters were meant to shock and never pretended to be anything that they werent.

Amongst the most successful of the movies were those in the Blaxploitation genre which put African Americans to the forefront in cinema for the first time. Movies such as Superfly, Shaft, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones and Slaughter and their posters have become cult classics.

paula - hard werken in the 70s

'I don't think anything designed should be considered as art. It's not only about the experimentation with form. There is always a client'.

This dutch graphic design company and its designers where way ahead of there time in the 70s.

Rick Vermeulen was born in Schiedam, the Netherlands in 1950. He studied graphic design at the Rotterdam Academy, graduating in 1972. From 1975, he worked regularly for the publisher Bert Bakker and was a participant in Rotterdam's Graphic Workshop, where designers and artists produced material for cultural organisations in the city and events such as the Rotterdam Film Festival. From 1978-82, Vermeulen was an editor of Hard Werken magazine, along with Willem Kars, Henk Elenga, Gerard Hadders and Tom van den Haspel. The cultural tabloid made a considerable national impact and the group became a design studio operating under the name Hard Werken, with each designer supervising his own projects.

In Holland, Hard Werken is viewed as one of the more influential design companies. It showed a different attitude towards the existing design world, and it has definitely left its mark here.





What is particularly striking is the continuous urge to innovate, the repeated search for another way and the refusal to be satisfied with a fixed style or individual character.This is apparent from their innumerable dust jackets, posters postage stamps, but also from their designs for interiors, stage sets and exhibitions.

ELLICE: PuNk pOsTeR ArT... 1970's

In almost every large city (Esp. America), there are vestiges of flyer art on traffic and light poles, the sides of buildings, cramped record store spaces, and just about anywhere that one can use glue, wheat paste, tacks, thumbnails, tape, and staples. These works, whether intact or ripped, shredded or faded, embody a living, not-so-secret visual history of a generation, and sometimes reflecting months, even years of ongoing work on the part of artists and bands. One could spend a day peeling back the past like a sequence of skins.

The works, whether punk, rave, or heavy metal, often have a short life span in popular culture. They are ever changing whilst recording technological and cultural difficulties in historic reality. As a means to an end, they represent different graphic forms, and as social texts, they pay witnesses to punk's continuous trademark of the Do-It-Yourself method.

Graffiti was often disliked by the authorities, and even neighborhood residents, as the reckless and unruly habits of the natives, but in the eyes of some artists and critics, it was a functioning code and custom that ran counter to the direction of conquest. In punk rock terms, it was a way of defending a vulnerable sense of one's self from the mummifying trends of consumer society.

Punk was much more about tatters, appendages, splotches, and cut-ups. In many ways, the rise of photocopy machines was a watershed for punk artists, simply because it provided a cost effective and efficient means to mass produce their product with consistent punk qualities, such as untidiness and coarseness. Rub-on letters were expensive and out of reach for most poster artists so most posters were made by imitating Jamie Reid's (Sex Pistol) cut-out art.

There was a feeling that you didn't need any special training to create a project if you had a good idea to express. A band member or a friend was usually chosen to create a different poster for each performance. Without knowing it, punks learned that putting any picture or collage on a punk flyer could make that image more ridiculous- or sinister- than ever. It didn't matter whether a punker had art training or not- DIY was in the air...

http://newwave.50megs.com/artic_postershow.html

ELLICE: 1960's Pop Art

Pop art was one of the major art movements of the twentieth century. It was characterized by themes and techniques drawn from popular mass culture, such as advertising and comic books. Pop art is widely interpreted as either a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism or an expansion upon them. Pop art, like pop music, aimed to employ images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the clichéd and tasteless elements of any given culture. Pop art at times targeted a broad audience, and often claimed to do so.

Andy Warhol was one of the most important artists in the Pop art movement in America. Warhol became as famous as many of the celebrities he portrayed in his popular screen prints. Among his many popular quotes and comments he stated famously that "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

He painted iconic images like dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings. It was during the 1960s that he produced paintings of famous American products from the Campbell's Soup Cans (from the Campbell Soup Company) to Coca-Cola replicas. His work also included paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue, and Elizabeth Taylor. The aim of Andy Warhol art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns.

Warhol founded "The Factory", his own studio where he produced such work, and during these years he gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and very popular.

Jaymi: Sniffin' Glue

The Punk subculture in the 1970’s had a distinctive attitude and style. Such elements as fetish clothing, ripped and torn items a radical rejection of conformity, DIY ethic, not selling out and were against mainstream culture. The punk aesthetic was influenced by the music and graphic design was found on record sleeves, publicity, posters and in ‘zines’.
One of the first and most famous music fan zines was Sniffin’ Glue, started in 1976 by Mark Perry after hearing and seeing US punk band, the Ramones. In fact the name is derived from their song "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." NME acclaimed Sniffin' Glue as "the nastiest, healthiest and funniest piece of press in the history of rock'n'roll habits" a true account of the early days of Brit punk rock.

Sniffin’ Glue pioneered the DIY punk ethic. The publication was roughly put together with found material, collage, photocopies, hand written and drawn graphics. Sniffin’ Glue contributed to the distinctive punk graphic design style in the UK. Initially issues only sold 50 copies but circulation soon increased up to 15000 but fearing absorption into the mainstream music press, Perry ceased publication after one year.

One issue in 1977 famously included drawings of three chord shapes, captioned, "this is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band".

http://www.markperry.freeuk.com/index.htm