Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Graphic design: Twentieth century design

Who originally coin the term "graphic design" appears to be in dispute. It has been credited to Richard Guyatt, the British fashionable and academic, but one more source suggests William Addison Dwiggins, an American book fashionable in the early 20th century

The signage in the London Underground is a classic of the current era and used a font intended by Edward Johnston in 1916.

In the 1920s, Soviet constructivism applied 'intellectual manufacture in different spheres of manufacture. The movement saw individualistic art as useless in radical Russia and thus moved towards creating substance for utilitarian purposes. They intended buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, menus, etc.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Emergence of the design industry

In late 19th century Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, the movement began to divide graphic design from fine art. Piet Mondrian is recognized as the father of graphic design. He was a fine artist, but his use of grids enthused the modern grid system used today in publicity, print and web layout.

In 1849, Henry Cole became one of the main forces in design teaching in Great Britain, informing the government of the significance of design in his Journal of Design and Manufactures. He prearranged the Great Exhibition as a festivity of modern industrial skill and Victorian design.

From 1892 to 1896 William Morris' Kelmscott Press in print books that are some of the most significant of the graphic design products of the Arts and Crafts group, and made a very lucrative business of creating books of great stylistic modification and selling them to the wealthy for a premium. Morris proved that a market existed for works of explicit design in their own right and helped pioneer the separation of design from manufacture and from fine art. The work of the Kelmscott Press is characterized by its obsession with past styles. This historicism was, however, significant as it amounted to the first important response to the stale state of nineteenth-century graphic design. Morris' work, along with the rest of the Private Press group, directly influenced Art Nouveau and is not directly responsible for development in early twentieth century graphic design in universal.