OUGD403 Studio Brief 4 - Research

OUGD403 Studio Brief 4 - Research 

Poster design, research and influences 

The evolution and development of poster art has always been closely linked to technical advances in printmaking, notably lithography. Thus although the lithographic process was invented by Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) as far back as 1798, it had little impact on posters until the advent of chromolithography later in the 19th century. Even then, it wasn't until Jules Cheret (1836-1932) invented his convenient "three stone lithographic process" in the 1860s - allowing lithographers to produce a wide spectrum of colours from just three stones - that low-cost colour posters at last became a reality.

Interest in the poster was further enhanced in the 1890s by the emergence of Art Nouveau, Art Nouveau proved the ideal poster design, and dominated the Parisian poster scene up until the late 1900s. After World War I, Art Nouveau was seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant when compared to the new modernist God of Science and the dynamism of the Machine. This new technological reality was better represented by modern art movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and others. More important than Constructivism, Futurism or Novecento was a new international style known as Art Deco. Showcased at the "Decorative Arts" Exposition of 1925 in Paris, and exactly in tune with the technological criteria of power and speed, Art Deco was marked by sleek geometrical forms, and strong, even garish, colours.

After World War II, advertising-posters everywhere declined in importance as the market was effectively taken over by photography, radio and later television. In addition, labour-intensive lithography was also becoming prohibitively expensive, causing advertisers to switch to cheaper but less colourful methods like offset printing and screen printing. As a result, by the 1960s - despite exceptional campaigns by post artists Bernard Villemot and Raymond Savignac - the poster was no more than a minor genre. Designers who might previously have been attracted to posters were now moving into illustration and other graphic designwork.

- David Carson 

An American Graphic Designer, David Carson has worldwide fame and is probably the most influential Graphic Designer of the nineties. His introduction of imaginative ideas in magazine design together with his use of experimental typography has gained him fame globally. Carson was the art director for the magazine Ray Gun in the early nineties.

- Paula Scher 

For more than three decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular. She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early '80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential.

- Toulouse Lautrec

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Lautrec eventually established himself as the premier poster artist of Paris and was often commissioned to advertise famous performers in his prints.

- Shepard Fairey 

Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer activist and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene  He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (OBEY) sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid - Weekly World News. He became widely known during the 2008 U.S. presidential election for his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and most influential street artists.

- Alphonse Mucha

Alfons Maria Mucha, often known in English and French as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist, known best for his distinct style. He produced many paintings, illustrations, advertisements, postcards, and designs.

- Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser is an American graphic designer, best known for the I ♥ NY logo, his Bob Dylan poster, the DC bullet logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the Brooklyn Brewery logo. 

- Saul Bass

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Academy Award winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. Legendary graphic designer Saul Bass is rightly remembered for his incredible skill and seemingly unending creativity, a man who cared deeply about making things beautiful, even if no one else did. His work exists as a testament to the idea that good design can exist even in the most monetarily concerned places. From the late 1940’s until the early 1990’s, he created more than a dozen campaigns for films, with an even higher number dedicated to title sequences. Bass' work was risky, his posters were largely stripped down affairs that focused and strengthened attention rather than overwhelmed and scattered it into a million pieces. Colors were few, but bold in their application. The text and imagery itself was often treated similarly to a logo or a symbol: strong, simple, memorable, metaphorical, and easily applied to any number of other graphic applications.

Primary Research 

While on a trip to Paris for the weekend, I documented different posters that I saw on the street stalls. These photographs I took show the designs and style of Toulouse Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha. I really love this continental European design of art noveeau and art deco, I think although it is quite an outdated style, I still think it is still effective and very atheistically pleasing. 

Volunteer Poster Research

These are volunteer posters promoting volunteering. There main point of image is friendly photographs, depicting a volunteer looking after children, while the second image focuses more on the environment giving us a sense of culture. This would be interesting as a possibility could be playing off this idea in a controversial way, suggesting that the volunteers are harming the children rather than helping them.

This poster I find really useful and really depicts the message I want to portray. This will be an idea for one of the three posters, than 'Children are not tourist attractions.' The image is has a lot of impact on the viewer and is quite controversial, this is the same level of impact I would like my posters to have, but perhaps in a subtler way. This poster was taken from www.thinkchildsafe.org and is such a powerful image. It takes the belief of tourists that volunteering in an orphanages is fashionable and more about self fulfilment, and taking this literally to the children being in a glass box and us just taking picture of them, rather than our soul purpose to actually help them.

These are really effective posters campaigning about the harm done to children by placing them in orphanages. The image below is particularly striking to me as it is high impact like the images above. This idea is also something I could touch upon in my posters, the idea of the dissolution of bonds with volunteers and children in orphanages. I definitely would like to make one of my posters based around the harming effects of orphanages, and therefore these different posters are giving me a really interesting insight into what theme I could base it around. 

Social Awareness Posters

In addition to looking at volunteer advertisements and campaigns, I also found looking at social awareness posters useful as well. As the purpose of these is to inform and to be challenging or controversial, a tactic in which I would like to use within my designs, therefore looking into the ways in which certain campaigns, such as mental health, smoking etc can inform its viewers in a simple, minimal way. Although I think shock tactics do work, I really like the way in which this mental health poster has used such a simple illustration and use of text to create such an impact and really deliver its message. I think this is the route I would also like to take of creating something simplistic but high impact, I believe that its the minimal approach sometimes that can be most powerful. Also with shock tactics, I feel there is sometimes a danger of being insensitive, yet I do believe it has the most powerful effect out of all, but with my time restriction and the resources I have, I feel the simplistic approach will be best at this moment in time.