Chapters 20&21

I actually enjoyed reading chapter 20. I liked it because it was all about corporate identity and visual systems as the title states. The chapter discussed how the CBS, ABC, and MTV logos came about. It was really cool to hear about the backgrounds of the logos. William Golden designed the 1st CBS logo, it was two circles and two arcs that form an eye. "It symbolized the awesome power of project video images". This image is still used to this day. Another person who had an influence on the CBS image was Georg Olden. Olden was the 1st African American known graphic designer. He claimed his status even before the civil-rights movement which was huge back then. Not many African Americans had any status but being a slave. The ABC logo was designed during this time as well. Paul Rand, discussed in the last chapter with The New York school created the image still used today as well. "The continuing legacy of the Bauhaus and Herbert Bayer's universal alphabet informs this trademark, in which each letter-form reduced to its most elemental configuration". The logo is probably the simplest logo you can find. It is about four circles with two straight lines for two of the letters. This logo is still used today, with a few changes. When it's on screen, the logo is now transparent, but still visible. This chapter also covered the Mexican Olympics. When the symbol signs first were used. They needed images for every cultural because writing would take up way to much space. They used simple pictographs to represent the different sports, lodging, food, airports, etc.
I liked this chapter because I liked to read about the different logos and how they became of. It is cool to see how they are still used today and they have barely changed.
Are the pictographs for the Olympics still used today?
In chapter 21 images were starting to become less narrative and telling stories, but now they are becoming more about ideas and concepts. The Polish poster was created around now. When Poland was just about completely destroyed from the war, the communists took over, and they took over printing and graphic design. The artists and designers had set fees and they had standards they had to follow. Artist Tadeusz Trepkowski was the first polish poster artist to come out after the war. His posters were simple, and liked to show devastation. There was also another side of the Polish poster to be created. This poster showed more surrealism, and the posters tended to be more dark and depressing. The American conceptual images were very colorful images. I feel like they were also busy images as well. I really liked how they used color in these images. They are brighter than what we've studied before and it makes me want to look at the images more. The last topic covered in this chapter is the third world posters. The third world countries include Latin America, Asian, and Africa. They would usually used weapons in their posters as images to get people to look at them. Cuba was a major center for poster design. Many third world countries such as Cuba, lacked artistic traditions.
What I found interesting about this chapter was that the third world countries actually had posters designed. You would think that posters would be the last thing to spend money on since they didn't have much to spend on food, clothing and housing.
My question from this chapter is what was the first poster created in some of the third world countries.