Woohoo last and final blog!

Well it's the end. And we had two final presentations on Friday. One about Kyle Cooper and another on Shepard Fairely. Kyle Cooper was a rather interesting designer. Saul Bass was a huge influence on him and his style. His work was highly stylized and liked to experiment with typography. His typography ranged a lot; from playful to unique type. He worked on a lot of movies, and I really enjoyed watching all those movie clips in class. Lastly, was Shepard Fairely. The guy known for getting sued over making an Obama poster. He started to design when he was a teenager. He had the skate and punk influence on him as well. Fairely is really well known for the Andre the Gian stickers as well. He would post them everywhere around town. His style is unique in his own way. It has that Art Deco look with the sunbursts, but he also liked to keep it dark with uses of black and red. He had hidden messages in his designs as well. Bold colors and San-serif fonts were another characteristic to define him. I guess he just has his own unique style along with every other designer we studied in the past month.

presentations day 4? i've lost count.

We were presented with 3 more designers 2 days ago, Stefan Sagmeister, Clement Mok, and Leo Burnett. Stefan Sagmeigster was known as a designer "with guts". His biggest influence was Tibor Kalman. His style was very handwritten, not very digital, he used a lot of photography and inventive typography. He thought the human body/face was the most important thing in life and he used it often. He even carved out his words and phrases in his own body. Um ouch. He won a Grammy for his talking head boxed set as well. Moving on to Clement Mok. He had a big influence on apple, or at least worked there. He had a very artistic nature. He liked to use geometric lines and bold colors. He also loved to work with symbolism and abstraction. He established identity systems, which led to creating logos. He had a wide variety of clients. Lastly was Leo Burnett. Man, his website was so much fun! He had three main symbols that described him; apples, hand reaching for the stars, and a black pencil. He also created a lot of different logos for company's such as Tony the Tiger, the Pillsbury dough boy, and Tucan Sam to name a few.

Presentations day 3

On Monday we had three more presentations on Tibor Kalman, David Carson, and Matthew Carter. Tibor Kalmas is a social activist from Hungry. He is known for M&Co, which is his design firm with his wife. They design magazines, film titles and books. He likes to incorporate social issues into his work. He also believed in doing something different, something you don't see everyday. He was also known for his colors magazine, which took famous people such as Queen Elizabeth and Arnold Schwarzenegger and colored them black. Which I'm sure created a lot of uproar over. The next presentation was on David Carson. He had very innovative designs. His designs were very emotional. He didn't go to school, he was a self taught designers. He played off of the Swiss style with asymmetrical layouts. Surfing had a big influence on him. His style was known for big ideas, custom fonts, and cluttered pages. His era was before and after the computer as well. He had many different tittles such as a graphic designer, typographer, author, surfer, and many more. Lastly was Matthew Carter. Matthew Carter is a typography designers who produced a large variety of type. He was largely influenced by his father. He was also influenced by some Reinecassce painters. Technology was a big influence as well. He believed that technology changes faster than design does.

Day 2 of presentations

Friday we were presented with Neville Brody, Art Chantry, and Storm Thorgerson. Neville Brody is native of the United Kingdom. He was really into the whole punk music scenes and that really had an effect on him. It let him to rebellion. Face Magazine was what really made Neville become an influential designer. He worked up his status quickly. It only took him two years to become art director of the magazine. He worked with another magazine called fuse. In this magazine Neville really liked to work with graphic and type face design more than anything. "Brody" is the best graphic design book that has been sold, and this book talks all about him and his designs. Art Chantry was the second presentation we heard about. Art Chantry, or Arthur Samuel Chantry, had a rough childhood. He was born in a predominant family with his father being a high end government official, but his father wasn't a very nice one. He would be his mother a lot to the point where she left them. They moved to a lower end neighborhood, and in high school he "discovered friends, psychedelic posters, rock and roll, french symbolism poetry, and existentialism". Chantry was big on the punk and rock and roll. He had a dadaist philosophy and he used various typefaces in his designs. Lastly, Storm Thorgerson. He was by far the most interesting designer we have learned about so far. He really liked to design album covers for bands, and his biggest band that he designed for was Pink Floyd. He loved to use photography and layer them for his images. A lot of his images consisted of a big image next to a small image. He liked to show big/small comparisons. He was apart of the Hipgnosis design firm specializing in creative photography. The company didn't believe in a set price, and that turned out to bite them in the butt later on, and he left the company in 1985. Munch and Dali were some of his biggest influences and he is now working at Storm Studios as a freelancer.

presentations day 1

Well, the presentations started. We heard presentations on April Greiman, Milton Glaser(my presentation), and Seymour Chwast. April Greiman was born in 1948 in New York. Her mother, father and aunt raised her and taught her to ask a lot of questions when growing up. She has some early inspirations such as you cant fake the cha-cha and determination and hard work. She was educated at the Rhode Island school of design, Kansas City Art Institute, and the Basel School of design in Switzerland. She started a New Wave of Design with Wolfgang Weinhart and she took a break from normal typography. She changed the weight, spacing, size and angle with working with typography. She is known for "the desert", Cal Arts, "Iris light", and "Inventing flight". To this day she still has a design business and she likes to work with architects. April Greiman had a major impact on Graphic design.
Now onto Seymour Chwast. He was born in New York City in 1931. He attended Cooper Union along with Milton Glaser. The both of them along with two others created Push Pin Studios. He preferred working with the speed ball pen and ink than anything else. A lot of his images were images with type around it because he felt that the image was a bit more important than the type and didn't want the type to overpower the image. He has also worked with children's book illustrations and packing products, but he prefers the poster over anything else because it allows him to do pretty much anything he wants.