After Class 04/12/10

New York School

Chuck gave his presentation about the New York School and highlighted the many designers and innovators who changed this modern movement in the 1940's. Paul Rand was an editorial designer who "reduced visual forms to their symbolic essence." He used universal signs that everyone could understand to rely messages. This movement like many others we studied were apart of a series of movements that reduced and simplified the message. Alvin Lustig designed several book covers and used symbols to "capture the essence of the content." He believed form and content were "as one." Bradbury Lustig used recycled resources and typographic expression changing scale and color to rely a message. Saul Bass brought the movement from New York out west to L.A. He reduced images even more to a "singular, all-encompasing image." He was the first to unify print and media for film. Alvin Ersenmann was the first designer to begin a program for graphic design at a major university.
The New York School also experimented with large-format publications, but it was quickly dismissed due to publishing and material costs. The greatest impact we can see this movement had is on magazine covers. New editorial design used one large headline and creative writng in the body of the text. On magazine covers we can see this in "The New Yorker" and "TIME" magazine. They have one headline, or a few at most.
The most interesting thing I learned from the movement was about it's influences on film openings. The combination of text and music can be very powerful and set the mood for the entire film. Sometimes its boring seeing all these people's names pop up on screen who you have no idea who they are, nor care. BUT, when the film has interesting typography and music it makes it much more enjoyable.