Form Follows Function. An exploration of Modernism & Post-Modernism.
Issue 01
Spring 2013
Contents
3 “Trek” By David Carson Book Review 4 The Swiss Legacy 7 “Less is More” images 2
Review
Trek
Author: David Carson
Trek is David Carsons first graphic design book in 5 years. It is the most comprehensive collection of his work since The End of Print published in the mid 90s and documents his travels to address young people in lectures and workshops around the world. Due to the huge success of his first book and the magazines he has directed hehas become the most sought after speaker in the field. His graphic talent evolves permanently and in his other vocation,teaching, his skill is legend. Carson has inspired an entire generation of design and art school students across the globe. Trek features excerpts from the highly successful Marshall McLuhan Project, plus work created for high-profile clients such as Nine Inch Nails and Quicksilver. David is based in South Carolina and Malibu. He works as author, music video and commercial director, advertising and magazine designer, consultant, lecturer and teacher.
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The Swiss Legacy
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wiss graphic design and the “Swiss Style” are crucial elements in the history of modernism. During the 1920s and ’30s, skills traditionally associated with Swiss industry, were matched by those of the country’s graphic designers, who produced their advertising and technical literature. These pioneering graphic artists saw design as part of industrial production and searched for anonymous, objective visual communication. Attention to detail, precision, system of education and technical training, a high standard of printing as well as a clear refined and inventive lettering and typography laid out a foundation for a new movement that has been exported worldwide in 1960s to become an “International Style”. Led by designers Josef Müller-Brockmann at the Zurich School of Arts and Krafts and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of Design, the style favored simplicity, legibility and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces, and flush left, ragged right text. The style is also associated with a preference for photography in place of illustrations or drawings.
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Typography One of the main characteristics of the swiss style typography is the use of sans-serif typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk and Neue Haas Grotesk (Helvetica). Graphic designers were aiming at clarity, simplicity and universality. Font-size contrast is very common in the Swiss Style works. Different font-sizes defines hierarchy of the presented data and generate
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Photography in Place of Drawing & Illustration Photography is a much better tool to portray reality than drawings and illustrations. Swiss designer Herbert Matter was a master of using photomontage, color and typography in an expressive manner, transcending the boundaries between art and design. The primary influential works were developed as posters, which were seen to be the most effective means of communication..
The Grid A typographic grid is a twodimensional structure made up of a series of intersecting vertical and horizontal axes used to structure content. The grid serves as an armature on which a designer can organize text and images in a rational, easy to absorb manner. The core of these ideas were first presented in the book “Grid Systems in Graphic Design” by Josef Müller Brockmann which helped to spread the knowledge about the grids thorough the world.
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Less is More. 7