Graphic Design History: Chapters 14, 15, & 16

Ludwig Hohlwein

A leading Plakstil designer, Ludwig Hohlwein (1874-1949) of Munich and later Berlin, began his career as a graphic illustrator with work commissioned by Jugend magazine as early as 1904. The Beggarstaffs were his initial inspiration, but Hohlwein applied a rich range of texture and decorative patterns to his images. In the posters that he designed during WWI, Hohlwein began to combine his simple, powerful shapes with more naturalistic imagery. After the war, Hohlwein received numerous advertising poster commissions. His work became more fluid and painterly, with figures frequently arranged on a flat white or colour ground and surrounded by colourful lettering. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that the Nazi party would commission posters from Hohlwein, for the evolution of his work coincided closely with Hitler's concept of effective propaganda. Hohlwein's oeuvre evolved with changing political and social currents, and his reputation as a designer was seriously tarnished by his collaboration with the Nazis.

Lazslo Moholy-Nagy

A restless experimenter who studied law before turning to art, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) explored painting, photography, film, sculpture, and graphic design. New materials such as acrylic resin and plastic, new techniques such as photomontage and the photogram, and visual means including kinetic motion, light, and transparency were encompassed in his wide-ranging investigations. Young and articulate, Moholy-Nagy had a marked influence on the evolution of Bauhaus instruction and philosophy, and he became Gropius' "prime minister" at the Bauhaus as the director pushed for a new unity of art and technology. He described typography as "a tool of communication. It must be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity."

Edward McKnight Kauffer

Among the graphic designers who incorporated cubism directly into their work, an American working in London, Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954), played a major role in defining this new approach. Kauffer's 1918 Daily Herald poster, although somewhat flawed by the type choice and placement, showed how the formal idiom of cubism and futurism could make the impact of strong communication in graphic design. Kauffer achieved visual impact with landscape subjects on posters by reductive design, editing complex environments into interlocking shapes. Later his posters tended to display art deco attributes.

Eric Gill

An architectural apprentice dropout, Eric Gill (1882-1940) was a complex and colourful figure who defies categorisation in the history of graphic design. His activities encompassed stone masonry, inscription carving for monuments, sculpture, wood engraving, typeface design, lettering, book design, and extensive writing. Gill's embrace of historical influences—including the Trajan capitals, letters used in medieval manuscripts, and the incunabula Baskerville, and Caslon—threatened to make him a historicist, but his highly original vision and opinions enabled him to transcend these influences in much of his work. His woodcut illustrations have an archaic, almost medieval quality. However, his total design integration of illustration, capitals, headings, and text into a dynamic whole is strikingly modern. He argued that the uneven word spacing of justified lines posed greater legibility and design problems than the use of equal word spacing and a ragged right margin.

De Stijl & Bauhaus (crossover episode)

As early as the spring of 1919, Bauhaus teacher Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) learned about De Stijl and introduced it to the Bauhaus community. The Bauhaus and De Stijl had similar aims. In late 1920 Van Doesburg established contacts with the Bauhaus, and he moved to Weimar the following year. He desired a teaching position, but Gropius believed Van Doesburg was too dogmatic in his insistence on strict geometry and an impersonal style. Nevertheless, even as an outsider, Van Doesburg exerted a strong influence by allowing his home to become a meeting place for Bauhaus students and faculty. He lived in Weimar until 1923, teaching courses in De Stijl philosophy primarily attended by Bauhaus students.

geometric sans-serifs

Beginning with Bayer's universal alphabet, many geometrically constructed sans-serif typefaces were designed during the 1920s including Futura and Kabel. Futura had fifteen alphabets, including four italics and two unusual display fonts, and became the most widely used geometric sans-serif family. Kabel, unlike Futura, was enlivened by unexpected design subtleties.

Gerrit Rietveld

De Stijl architectural theory was realised in 1924 when Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) designed the celebrated Schroeder House in Utrecht. The house was so radical that neighbours threw rocks, and the Schroeder children were taunted by their classmates in school.

H.N. Werkman

Dutch artist H.N. Werkman (1882-1945) is noted for his experimentation with type, ink, and ink rollers for purely artistic expression. Beginning in 1923 he used type, rules, printing ink, bayer's, and a small press to produce monoprints, which he referred to as druskels (prints). In September 1923 he began publication of the Next Call, a small magazine of typographic experiments and enigmatic texts that appeared in nine issues until 1926. The printing press became in effect a palette, as Werkman composed wood type, woodblocks, and even a lock plate from the frame of a door directly on the letterpress bed. Enamoured by the letterpress printing process, he took joy in beautiful paper, wood textures, and the unique qualities of each nicked and dented piece of wood type. A few days before the city of Groningen was liberated by the Canadian army in April 1945, Werkman was executed by the Nazis. After his arrest, much of his work was confiscated and taken to the headquarters of the security police, and it was destroyed when the building burned during the fighting.

PROUNS

El Lissitzky developed a painting style that he called PROUNS (an acronym for "projects for the establishment [affirmation] of a new art"). In contrast to the flatness of Malevich's picture plane, PROUNS introduced three-dimensional illusions that both receded (negative depth) behind the picture plane (naught depth) and projected forward (positive depth) from the picture plane. Lissitzky called PROUNS "an interchange station between painting and architecture." This indicates his synthesis of architectural concepts with painting; it also describes how PROUNS pointed the way to the application of modern painting concepts of form and space to applied design.

A.M. Cassandre

From 1923 until 1936 A.M. Cassandre (born Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, 1901-1968) revitalised French advertising art through a dramatic series of more than two hundred posters. Cassandre's bold, simple designs emphasise two-dimensionality and are composed of broad, simplified planes of colour. Cassandre achieved concise statements by combining telegraphic copy, powerful geometric forms, and symbolic imagery created by simplifying natural forms into almost pictographic silhouettes. Tragically, his career ended by suicide.

Paul Renner

Futura was designed by Paul Renner (1878-1956) for the Bauer type foundry in Germany. Futura had fifteen alphabets, including four italics and two unusual display fonts, and became the most widely used geometric sans-serif family. As a teacher and designer, Renner fought tirelessly for the notion that designers should not merely preserve their inheritance and pass it on to the next generation unchanged; rather, each generation should try to solve inherited problems and attempt to create a contemporary form true to its own time.

Hans Rudi Erdt

Hans Rudi Erdt (1883-1918) was a young artist who signed an exclusive contract with the Berlin lithography firm Hollerbaum and Schmidt. Erdt's posters demonstrate how well he was able to apply the Bernhard formula: flat background colour; large simple image; and product name. When it became evident after 1916 that submarine warfare was the only possible way Germany could break the English blockade, Erdt celebrated underwater heroes and rallied the public behind them. Showing the destruction of enemy symbols or flags was a frequent propaganda device.

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was a former student-appointed professor of the newly added Bauhaus typography and graphic design workshop. Gropius had observed Bayer's interest in graphics and encouraged it with periodic assignments. Bayer's teaching method was informal, and he mainly supervised students' work on actual design assignments arranged by the school. Bayer's workshop made striking typographic design innovations along functional and constructivist lines. Sans-serif fonts were used almost exclusively, and Bayer designed a universal type that reduced the alphabet to clear, simple, and rationally constructed forms.

photoplastics

In 1922 Moholy-Nagy began to experiment with photograms; the following year he began to make photomontages, which he called photoplastics. He saw his photoplastics not just as the results of a collage technique but as manifestations of a process for arriving at a new expression that could become both more creative and more functional than straightforward imitative photography. Photoplastics could be humorous, visionary, moving, or insightful, and usually had drawn addition, complex associations, and unexpected juxtapositions.

Bauhaus publications

In 1926 the influential Bauhaus magazine began publication. The magazine and a series of fourteen Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus books) became important vehicles for disseminating advanced ideas about art theory and its application to architecture and design. Kandinsky, Klee, Gropius, Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, and Van Doesburg were authors or editors of volumes in the series.

Ladislav Sutnar

In Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Sutnar (1897-1976) became the leading supporter and practitioner of functional design. He advocated the constructivist ideal and the application of design principles to every aspect of contemporary life. In addition to graphics, the prolific Prague designer created toys, furniture, silverware, dishes, and fabrics. The publishing house Druzstevni Prace retained Sutnar as a design director. His book jackets and editorial designs evinced an organisational simplicity and typographic clarity, giving graphic impact to the communication.

Elementare Typographie

In the October 1925 issue of Typographische Mitteilungen (Typographic Impartations), Tschichold designed a twenty-four-page insert titled "Elementare Typographie," which explained and demonstrated asymmetrical typography to printers, typesetters, and designers. It was printed in red and black and featured avant-grade work along with Tschichold's lucid commentary. Much German printing at this point still used medieval textura and symmetrical layout. Tschichold's insert was a revelation and generated much enthusiasm for the new approach.

Kazimir Malevich & suprematism

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) founded a painting style of basic forms and pure colour that he called suprematism. After working in the manner of futurism and cubism, Malevich created an elemental geometric abstraction that was new and totally nonobjective. He rejected both utilitarian function and pictorial representation, instead seeking the supreme "expression of feeling, seeking no practical values, no ideas, no promised land." Malevich believed the essence of the art experience was the perceptual effect of colour and form.

Alexander Rodchenko

Like Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was an ardent communist who brought an inventive spirit and willingness to experiment to typography, montage, and photography. Rodchenko produced page designs with strong geometric construction, large areas of pure colour, and concise, legible lettering. His heavy sans-serif hand lettering engendered the bold sans-serif types that were widely used in the Soviet Union. Common techniques included showing simultaneous action; superimposing images; using extreme closeups and perspective images, often together; and rhythmically repeating an image. The concept of serial painting—a series or sequence of independent works unified by common elements or an underlying structure—was applied to graphic design by Rodchenko.

Lucian Bernhard

Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972), who had excelled at art in school, decided to enter a poster contest sponsored by Priester matches. Later Bernhard learned that the jury's immediate reaction to his poster was total rejection. But a tardy juror rescued it from the trash can and proclaimed, "This is my first prize. Here is a genius." A benchmark in the history of graphic design, it influenced generations in poster advertising. The self-taught young artist probably did not realise it at the time, but he had moved graphic communications one step further into the simplification and reduction of naturalism into a visual language of shape and sign. His work might be considered the logical conclusion of the turn-of-the-century poster movement. At the same time, his emphasis on reduction, minimalist form, and simplification anticipated the constructivist movement.

typophoto

Moholy-Nagy saw graphic design, particularly the poster, as evolving toward the typophoto. He called this objective integration of word and image to communicate a message with immediacy "the new visual literature." He saw photography influencing poster design—which demands instantaneous communication—by techniques of enlargement, distortion, dropouts, double exposures, and montage. In typography, he advocated emphatic contrasts and bold use of colour. Absolute clarity of communication without preconceived aesthetic notions was stressed.

James Montgomery Flagg

Persuasive propaganda replaced. narrative design, and suddenly the illustrators had to integrate lettering with images. James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) whose sketchy painting style was widely known, produced forty-six war posters during the year and a half of American involvement in the war, including his American version of the Kitchener poster, a self-portrait of Flagg himself.

Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian's (1872-1944) paintings are the wellspring from which De Stijl's philosophy and visual forms developed. By 1911 Mondrian had moved from traditional landscape painting to a symbolic style influenced by Van Gogh that expressed the forces of nature. It was then that he first saw cubist paintings. In early 1912 he relocated to Paris and began to introduce the vocabulary of cubism into his work. Over the next few years, Mondrian purged his art of all representative elements and moved cubism toward pure, geometric abstraction. Mondrian began to paint purely abstract paintings composed of horizontal and vertical lines.

Bauhaus Course Structure

Students entered the preliminary course, covering "elementary form" and basic "studies of materials". Over the next three years, students were encouraged to experiment in many media, and only after this formation in the fundamentals were the best students allowed to enter the core architecture course. Whereas a conventional education for an artist might focus on brush technique and paint mixing, a Bauhaus teacher would direct the student to study the fundamentals of colour and form, and encourage experimentation across a whole range of materials and disciplines.

Allied Powers posters vs Central Powers posters

The Allied Powers' (led by France, Russia, and Great Britain, and joined by the United States in 1917) approach to graphic propaganda was more illustrative, using literal rather than symbolic imagery to address propaganda objectives. British posters stressed the need to protect traditional values, the home, and the family. The posters produced by the Central Powers (led by Germany and Austria-Hungary) were radically different and displayed the simplicity of the Plakatstil pioneered by Bernhard. Words and images were integrated, and the essence of the communication was conveyed by simplifying images into powerful shapes and patterns.

Bauhaus Manifesto

The Bauhaus Manifesto by Walter Gropius, published in German newspaper in 1919, established the philosophy of the new school: "The complete building is the final aim of the visual arts. Their noblest function was once the decoration of buildings. Today they exist in isolation... Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognise anew the composite character of the building as an entity... The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond all control of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. The proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies a source of creative imagination."

De Stijl

The De Stijl movement was launched in the Netherlands in the late summer of 1917. It's founder and guiding spirit, Théo van Doesburg, was joined by painters Piet Mondrian, Bart Anthony van der Leck, and Vilma Huszár, the architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, and others. Working in an abstract geometric style, De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and harmony for art, which could then be a prototype for a new social order. De Stijl sought the universal laws that govern visible reality but are hidden by the outward appearance of things. Scientific theory, mechanical production, and the rhythms of the modern city formed these universal laws.

Piet Zwart

The Dutch designer Piet Zwart (1885-1977) created a synthesis from two apparently contradictory influences: the Dada movement's playful vitality and De Stijl's functionalism and formal clarity. As his work evolved, he rejected both the traditional symmetrical layout and De Stijl's insistence on strict horizontals and verticals. After making a rough layout, Zwart ordered words, rules, and symbols from a typesetter and playfully manipulated them on the surface to develop the design. The fluid nature of the collage technique joined with a conscious concern for functional communication. Zwart designed the space as a "field of tension" brought alive by rhythmic composition, vigorous contrasts of size and weight, and a dynamic interplay between typographic form and the background page. Zwart once dubbed himself a typotekt, which expresses his work as both architect and typographic designer and also has a deeper meaning, for it suggests the working process of the new typography.

London Underground map

The London Underground sponsored a major graphic design innovation when it made a trial printing of a new subway system map in 1933. Draftsman Henry (Harry) C. Beck (1903-1974) submitted an unsolicited design proposal that replaced geographic fidelity with a diagrammatic interpretation. The central portion of the map, showing complex interchanges between routes, was enlarged in proportion to outlying areas. Meandering geographic lines were drawn on a grid of horizontals, verticals, and 45° diagonals. Bright colour coding identified and separated the routes. When the public found the new map extremely functional, it was developed and employed throughout the system. Beck's development and revisions to the London Underground maps over twenty-seven years made a significant contribution to the visual presentation of diagrams and networks, for his discoveries inspired many variations around the world.

El Lissitzky

The constructivist ideal was best realised by the painter, architect, architectural engineer, graphic designer, and photographer El (Lazar Markovitch) Lissitzky (1890-1941), an indefatigable visionary who profoundly influenced the course of graphic design. In 1919 Lissitzky joined the faculty of the revolutionary art school in Vitebsk where Kazimir Malevich was also a member. In 1921 he was appointed head of the architectural faculty at the new VKhUTEMAS art school in Moscow. That same year he traveled to Berlin and the Netherlands, where he made contact with De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Dadaists, and other constructivists. Lissitzky's tremendous energy and range of experimentation with photomontage, printmaking, graphic design, and painting enabled him to become the main conduit through which suprematist and constructivist ideas flowed into Western Europe.

Johannes Itten

The heart of Bauhaus educations was the Vorkurs (preliminary course), initially established by Johannes Itten (1888-1967). His goals were to release each student's creative abilities, to develop an understanding of the physical nature of materials, and to teach the fundamental principles of design underlying all visual art. Itten emphasised visual contrasts and the analysis of Old Master paintings. With his methodology of direct experience, he sought to develop perceptual awareness, intellectual abilities, and emotional experience. In 1923 Itten left the Bauhaus because of disagreement about the conduct of this course. Gropius began to consider Itten's mysticism an "otherworldliness" inconsistent with the search for an objective design language capable of overcoming the dangers of past styles and personal taste.

Gustav Klutsis

The master of propaganda photomontage was Gustav Klutsis (1895-1944), who referred to the medium as "the art construction for socialism." Employing monumental and heroic images, Klutsis used the poster as a means for extolling Soviet accomplishments. Klutsis was convinced that photomontage was the medium of the future and that it had rendered all other forms of artistic realism obsolete. Although most of his posters celebrated the achievements of Stalin, Klutsis' uncompromising avant-grade approach eventually caused him to be arrested in 1938 during the Stalinist purges. He perished in the labour camps in 1944.

Rudolph Koch

The most important German type designer in the Arts and Crafts movement was Rudolph Koch (1876-1934), a powerful figure who was deeply mystical and medieval in his viewpoints. A devout Catholic, Koch taught at the Arts and Crafts School in Offenbach am Main, where he led a creative community of writers, printers, stonemasons, and metal and tapestry workers. He regarded the alphabet as a supreme spiritual achievement of humanity. He designed a very popular geometric sans-serif typeface, Kabel, which, unlike Futura, was enlivened by unexpected design subtleties.

Jan Tschichold

The person who applied these new approaches to everyday design problems and explained them to a wide audience of printers, typesetters, and designers was Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). In August 1923, Tschichold attended the first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar and was deeply impressed. He rapidly assimilated the new design concepts of the Bauhaus and the Russian constructivists into his work and became a practitioner of die neue typographie (the new typography).

WWI posters

The poster reached the zenith of its importance as a communications medium during World War I (1914-1918) During the war, governments turned to the poster as a significant medium of propaganda and visual persuasion. Governments needed to recruit armies and boost public morale to maintain popular support for the war effort.

Plakastil

The reductive, flat-colour design school that emerged in Germany early in the twentieth century is called Plakastil ("Poster Style").

Herbert Matter

The role of photography as a graphic communications tool was expanded by Swiss designer/photographer Herbert Matter (1907-1984). In 1932 Matter began to design posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office. Matter thoroughly understood modernism's new approaches to visual organisation and its techniques, such as collage and montage. His posters of the 1930s use montage, dynamic scale changes, and effective integration of typography and illustration. Photographic images become pictorial symbols removed from their naturalistic environments and linked together in unexpected ways. Matter pioneered extreme contrasts of scale and the integration of black-and-white photography, signs, and colour areas.

art deco

The term art deco is used to identify popular geometric works of the 1920s and 1930s. To some extent an extension of art nouveau, it signifies a major aesthetic sensibility in graphics, architecture, and product design during the decades between the two world wars. Streamlining, zig-zag, moderne, and decorative geometry—these attributes were used to express the modern era of the machine while still satisfying a passion for decoration.

Théo van Doesburg

Théo van Doesburg (born C.E.M. Küpper, 1883-1931) applied De Stijl principles to architecture, sculpture, and typography. He edited and published the journal De Stijl from 1917 until his death in 1931. Primarily funded with his own limited resources, this publication spread the movement's theory and philosophy to a larger audience. De Stijl advocated the absorption of pure art by applied art. In designs of alphabets and posters, Van Doesburg applied horizontal and vertical structure to letterforms and the overall layout. Because Van Doesburg, with his phenomenal energy and wide-ranging creativity, was De Stijl, it is understandable that De Stijl as an organised movement did not survive his death.

Die neue Typographie

Tschichold's 1928 book, Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für Zeitgemäss Schaffende (The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers), vigorously advocated his new ideas. Disgusted with "degenerate typefaces and arrangements," he sought to wipe the slate clean and find a new asymmetrical typography to express the spirit, life, and visual sensibility of the day. His objective was functional design by the most straightforward means. Tschichold declared the aim of every typographic work to be the delivery of a message in the shortest, most efficient manner. He emphasised the nature of machine composition and its impact on the design process and product.

constructivism

Twenty-five Russian artists renounced "art for art's sake" to devote themselves to industrial design, visual communications, and applied arts serving the new communist society. These constructivists called on the artist to stop producing useless things such as paintings and turn to the poster, for "Such work now belongs to the duty of the artist as a citizen of the community who is clearing the field of the old rubbish in preparation for the new life." Tectonics, texture, and construction are the three principles of constructivism. Tectonics represented the unification of communist ideology with visual form; texture meant the nature of materials and how they are used in industrial production, and construction symbolised the creative process and the search for laws of visual organisation.

The Beggarstaffs

Two respected academic painters opened an advertising design studio in 1894 under a pseudonym to protect their reputation as artists (one of them found a sack of corn in a stable labeled "the Beggarstaff Brothers," and they adopted the name). During their collaboration, they developed a new technique, later named collage. The Beggarstaffs ignored the prevalent trend toward floral art nouveau as they forged this new working method into posters of powerful coloured shapes and silhouettes. Unfortunately, their work was an artistic success but a financial disaster. They attracted few clients, and only a dozen of their designs were printed.

Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) was the director of Das Staatliche Bauhaus (literally, the State Home for Building) which opened on April 12, 1919. Gropius sought a new unity of art and technology as he enlisted a generation of artists in a struggle to solve problems of visual design created by industrialism. Gropius was deeply interested in architecture's symbolic potential and the possibility of a universal design style as an integrated aspect of society. He opposed creating a Bauhaus style or imposing a style on students. In 1928 Walter Gropius resigned his post to resume private architectural practice.

Sachplakat

With his 1908 poster of Zermatt, Emil Cardineaux (1877-1936) created the first Sachplakat Swiss poster, sharing many characteristics with the Plakatstil in Germany.