New Visual Language Magazine

nvl.

Cover Artwork - Less Acid More House - 03 (Hacienda Inspired)

issue issue 01.

01. May May 2015 2015

form follows function.

An exploration of Modernist and Postmodernist design ideology.

• Modernism • Postmodernism • City in Flux • Earth Artifact • Type Transcription • New Visual Language

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Contents

one Theorem (6-9)

two City in Flux (12-17)

three Earth Artifact (20-23)

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Type Transcription (26-27)

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Mod -ern ism TH

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Modernism

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odernism in graphic design terms, loosely defines the period of time between the ending of the First World War and the start of the post modernist era beginning around the start of the 1970s. Since then, of course, modernist graphic design has continued to be very much a mainstay style for contemporary practising designers.

It was born out of the ending of the First World War, the design world felt that after the chaos of the conflict, that design and technology needed reshaping. They adopted a ‘less is more’ approach to designing which simplified everything and everything became far more unified. This style of working was heavily used by the designers working in the German design house - Bauhaus.

A consistent feature of modernist graphic design is the grid structure, used in page layouts.Modernist designers such as Wim Crouwel and Josef Muller-Brockmann have used the grid structure throughout their practising career. Not only in editorial work such as magazines and the like, but also in poster design work.

The grid system came about due to a longing for simplifying the way design worked. The ‘less is more’ attitude towards design goes hand in hand with the modernist motto and theory that ‘form follows function’.

Another mainstay feature of modernist graphic design are the fonts. Typefaces such as Helvetica and Futura and other sans serif fonts have been the number one choice for designers favouring the modernist approach.

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Neue Haas Grotesk, the font now known worldwide as Helvetica, was designed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas Typefoundry in Switzerland in the late 1950s/early 1960s. It essentially set the benchmark for type designers to follow. Despite it being in existence for best part of fifty years, Helvetica remains the world’s most used font.

Often described as being anonymous and invisible, this is perhaps Helvetica’s greatest quality - to be effective, yet blend into the background. This is essentially the modernist ideology in its most basic form, and perfectly compliments the ‘form follows function’ motto.

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http://www.davidcarsondesign.com/t/work/magazine/

“Don’t mistake legibility for communication” - David Carson

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Post Modernism

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here is no specific date as such for when the post modernist period began in terms of graphic design.

It became more commonly used in the 1970s, coinciding with a generation of rebellion and change. A generation that wanted to question the world and all that it stood for. Scepticism of how the world viewed art, design, culture, music and literature was a driving force behind the post modern movement.

For post modernist designers, this lead to the beginning of deconstructive and ‘grunge’ graphic design. Designers such as David Carson and Neville Brody used this style in 80/90 percent of their work.

The image on the left page, for example, is a magazine cover for Huck Magazine that David Carson designed in 2011. The illegibility of the cover is the style which

Carson deliberately developed. He once famously stated “Don’t mistake legibility for communication”. By this he meant that sometimes the layout and design of a page itself gets across a stronger message than what the body text on the page is saying.

Further post modernist design traits include: fragmentation, intertextuaility, pluralism, irony, noise, and escaping the grid. There was also much more of an emphasis on politics and political movements. Many post modernist publications focused their articles at such issues in the media.

Publications such as Raygun Magazine and The Face Magazine, which Carson and Brody worked on respectively, demonstrated a lot of the styles stated in the previous paragraph.

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The desire to break away from the grid systems that were a major feature of the modernist period means that post modernist design is easy to recognise, and easy to differentiate from modernist work. There was much less of an emphasis on legibility and intricacy, but much more so on noise and fragmentation.

Glitch graphic design was another style and process to emerge out of the post modernist period. As the era coincided with the development of computers and the internet as well as other new technologies, ‘glitches’ were common place. Designers picked up on this flaw and used its disjointed style and appearance to create a new style, glitch graphics.

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City in Flux

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ne of my starting points for this project was with The Hacienda nightclub which was active in Manchester between the years of 1982 and 1997. My reason for delving into this particular subculture was the strong recent musical history that Manchester possesses. During the late 80s and earlymid 90s, Manchester was the leading city in terms of musical talent emerging (Oasis, The Smiths, Happy Mondays and Stone Roses to name a few). The Hacienda’s existence coincided with this period (which later became known as ‘Madchester’).

It is the legacy which The Hacienda left behind when its doors closed in 1997, that I wanted to portray in this project. I took inspiration from the graphic identity that Peter Saville and Ben Kelly gave the club, and used this to produce a series of

posters advertising the opening of a new nightclub which would try to replicate the level of success and recognition which The Hacienda had in its heyday.

The introduction of the slogan ‘less acid more house’ was a satirical play on words. The ‘acid house’ era of the 1990s in which The Hacienda club really thrived, is something I wanted to refer to, but not advertise. For example, the hard drug scene which existed back then has long since vanished, therefore ‘less acid’. The contemporary nightclub music scene is now dominated by the ‘house’ genre, therefore ‘more house’ and so the slogan was born.

I then decided to develop them further and bring the posters into the digital era of the contemporary, by adding QR codes which the viewer could interact with, and the

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hashtag ‘#LAMH’ which they could track on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The eventual outcome was that I got the series of four posters printed off in A1 format onto a semi-gloss finish and took them to Manchester’s Northern Quarter and placed them in various places to act as if they were a real guerilla advertisement campaign. I was pleased with the overall outcome of the project, however I feel that I could have chosen the colours with more care and deliberation. I could have put more thought into the process and chosen colours with more relevance, i.e. a sky blue instead of orange to represent the blue side of Manchester, with Manchester City FC and red to represent the red side with Manchester United FC.

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Less Acid More House - 02 Hacienda Inspired

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FAC14 mcr. Development Poster.

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Development

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s with any project, development is a key part of the process. This project was no different, and I produced numerous design ideas from which I produced my final designs.

The starting point for me was to begin by making collages and crops of collected items and paraphernalia from a trip to Manchester’s northern quarter. From this, I ended up with a few different, interesting compositions that I wanted to take forward an develop digitally. After a few attempts, I ended up with some designs that I could work with. From these I began the developing process.

The image on the left is an example of an initial idea for the posters. This particular one is heavily influenced by Peter Saville’s brand identity for the Hacienda. The yellow working alongside the bold, black

stripes, appears almost as a warning sign, this is part of the attraction to the youthful audience at which the posters are aimed. This was also the first time in which the large central font/message was used alongside a small sub message or information details at the bottom of the piece. ‘MCR.’ was also the name I made up for my nightclub, being short and contemporary,yet also representing the city of Manchester. Initially I thought of producing posters in an homage style to the Hacienda, however I decided that I wanted the work to be my own and of my own initiative.

From this point I developed the ‘less acid, more house’ slogan and my work really started to become my own style Using high threshold contrasts behind an overlayed colour, I began to develop my

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final compositions. Another part of the development process was that I had to figure out the best balance of legibility and design. Part of this entailed changing the opacity and colour of the posters as well as the point size of some of the type I had on the piece.

Overall I was happy with the amount of development I had produced as it meant that I could come to a final series of four well thought through and thorough posters. The final grade I recieved for the project also reflected the level and depth of my work as I came out of my formative assessment with 83 percent and an A grade, which I was very proud of.

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Less Acid More House - 03 Hacienda Inspired

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Less Acid More House - 04 Hacienda Inspired

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Earth Artifact

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he second project of the year was entitled Earth Artifact. The brief prompted us to create our own version, as such, of the Golden Voyager record which was sent into space in the 1970s. The original record contained coded information on the human race and life on earth. Pictures, music and other similar information were burned onto the record, this was in an attempt to contact with extra terrestrial life (if there is any out there).

To start with I found the brief difficult to get stuck into as it was not an area in which my interests lie, however, after a week of thought and procrastination I managed to think up a few ideas which I could take forward and develop. The idea I chose and stuck with, was to produce a mini language guide for potential extra terrestrial life.

It would contain information about the earth’s largest and perhaps most influential nations. Information such as population, language spoken, land mass and so on.

However, after drawing up some initial composition ideas, I realised that I would not be able to display all the information I wanted to and still have a nice, simple design layout. Therefore I decided to go with less information and just a simple vector map of the country showing its capital city’s location, and six useful phrases in the respective languages.

This worked far better from a design perspective and so I stuck with it.

The next step was to put my ideas into practice. The image on the right hand side is of the final cover design. The simple layout and colour scheme presents a very clean appearance.

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Again I was fairly pleased with the final outcome (images of some of the internal pages are on the following pages), however, I think that there are quite a few changes I would make given the opportunity to do the project again. For example, I would change the size of the page numbers, as in reflection they are too large and command more attention and importance then they need and perhaps draw away from the main messages and information on the page. I am pleased with the appearance of the pages, if not the layout. The font and sizing of the writing is perfect and the weight of the lines of the vector maps also work well with the simple background and layout of the page. I also think I managed to achieve a wide scope of countries within the booklet too, meaning that it would have a fair chance of success if produced.

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Language Guide for ET Life - (Cover)

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Language Guide for ET Life - (Russia/Japan)

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Type Transcription

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s a feature of the process and production section of the course, I had to create and develop a font of my own, from scratch. I began by looking at images and artwork for inspiration and to take shapes from in order to form some rudimentary letter forms. I then sketched rough ideas for an alphabet from these ideas and taken shapes. These handdrawn ideas then became developed into a more legible and sophisticated typeface, before transferring one of three typeface designs into Adobe Illustrator to create a digital version - which is presented on the right hand page.

The image I used for inspiration for my final font was a piece of geometric artwork by artist Robert H Hudson. The curvatures at the top of the letters follow the same curve featured in the artwork. I decided I wanted

my font to feature the curve is as many letters as possible. Some of the letters were a challenge to make work with the curve and still resemble the letter needed.

For example the letter ‘v’ was particularly difficult as when made it looked far too much like the letter ‘u’. So in order to combat this and make it work in its own right I angled off the top two corners, making the shape appear more like a traditional ‘v’. Other letters such s ‘I’, ‘T’ and ‘z’ were impossible to use in the same format so I had to keep them simple and just keep the dimensions the same.

The font itself, entitled ‘Hudson’ after the artist who’s work inspired it, is a modern, sans-serif font which, at the moment is a capitals only font, however I may yet develop a lower case version.

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The other hand drawn fonts I created, were not as successful as this one despite using the same method. One of the fonts was far too illegible and cartoon-like for me to use as I wanted a clean, sophisticated looking font rather than a playful one. The second of the hand drawn typefaces was again upper case, but I felt resembled a lot of already established fonts such as Helvetica, the only difference being a large abstraction to the foot of the letter, although the font looked okay to the eye, as a working typeface it would have been flawed due to the abstraction, giving way to large tracking sizes.

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Hudson (Font Designed by Jon Lawrence)

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new visual language magazine issue 01. May 2015 ÂŁ6.99