You will be reading and annotating a text written by Katherine McCoy and David Frej “Typography as Discourse” 1988 found in our main text Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field by Helen Armstrong.
Before reading, review the graphic design history videos from the Week 11 Agenda, especially those related to New Wave, Punk, and Postmodernism.
Key Themes and Takeaways
Katherine McCoy and David Frej “Typography as Discourse” 1988
In this essay, McCoy and Frej present the evolution of postmodern typography from New Wave / Swiss Punk Typography to the New Academy to focus on the experimental designers who “value expression over style” and where typographic design is positioned to be deconstructed using the theory of the day.
Rejecting the modern constraints of Swiss typographic systems, Katherine McCoy and her contempoaries ushered in a period of complexity, ambiguity, and subjectivity. Going beyond the more formal radical experimentation of Wolfgang Weingart and the New Wave/Swiss Punk Typography, McCoy explored “new relationships between text and image.” The resulting multilayered, personal work consciously provoked interpretation from the audience. Modernism’s emphasis on form gave way to a highly individuated study of expression. Typography became discourse to be evaluated and discussed within the dense cultural context of philosophy, linguistics, and cultural theory.
HELEN ARMSTRONG
Instructions
Following the instructions below, read and annotate the text with your classmates in our Hypothesis group. After reading and annotating the text, create a rough draft of your response in your Research Journal. Your response should be about 200 words and checked for spelling and grammar errors. Lastly, create a new post and publish your response.
The reading links above will automatically open Hypothesis. Login to your account and select our group. (IMPORTANT!) from the dropdown to make sure your annotations and highlights will be recorded in the group. See Using Hypothesis for details.
3. Consider these questions.
Here are the questions to which you should respond in your reading response:
Find 2 examples of the work of postmodern graphic designers from the 1980s.
Deconstruct the work. Explain which visual elements are associated with postmoderism of the 1980s and why.
What does the author mean by “Typography as discourse”?
What does the author mean when she states that “…no longer are there one-way statements from designers. The layering of content, as opposed to New Wave’s formal layering of collage elements, is the key to this exchange. Objective communication is enhanced by deferred meanings, hidden stories, and alternative interpretations”
4. Read & Annotate.
Consider the questions/prompts listed above. Start to formulate the answers to these prompts while you practice close reading with annotations. This will be part of your grade. Share at least 3 annotations in the Hypothesis group, including your questions, definitions, and ideas with your classmates. Add the tags: Postmodernism and Reading Response 10 to your annotations.
When you annotate be sure to define or break down any words or concepts that you do not understand.
5. Draft your Reading Response.
In your Research Journal, write a draft of your 200-word response. Check for grammar and spelling errors. Use the word count tool. Use the Grammarly app or something similar to improve the clarity of your writing. Use visual examples to supplement your reading response. Consider looking back at the Week 11 Agenda, Learning Graphic Design History videos, or the Course Resources to see if there are historical examples that will help support your ideas.
6. Post your Reading Response.
When ready, create a new post titled “Reading Response10– YourInitials.”
At the top of the post copy and paste the following: Katherine McCoy and David Frej “Typography as Discourse” 1988 pgs 81-83 found in our main text Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field by Helen Armstrong.
Copy and paste the questions/prompts listed above. Paste your reading response from your Research Journal. Add links to your annotations in the Hypothesis group at the bottom of your post. Always add links and attribution for any images that you use in your post. Adjust any formatting issues that may have occurred while pasting. Use the Reading Response (Example) as a guide.
Please be sure to add the following title, category, and tags to your posts. For help with adding Categories and Tags, see OpenLab Help.
TITLE: Reading Response 10– Your Initials
CATEGORY: Reading Responses
TAG: Reading Response #10
TAG: Your Name
Due Date(s)
Your reading response is due the day before the next session Monday, May 9, at 6pm to allow time for review.
Congratulations on your accomplishments this semester!
Take a moment to look back at all the work you’ve completed this semester in this course (and others). Even if there were things you wish you could have changed or improved upon, I hope you will feel good about your accomplishments and learn from your disappointments.
In this course, we looked at the formative theories that help us better understand the “how” of visual communication and explored the critical theories that may explain the “why” within historical, cultural, and social contexts. When we look at philosophical, ethical, political, and aesthetic questions in the field of design, our ability to think creatively and critically expands.
Through this critical practice, my goal for you by the end of this course was to start to include the question “why” within your own design practice and begin to see how your own aesthetic influences connect to historical lineages in the field of design. And also to see how important your voice is to the future of the communication design field.
I hope you will be able to apply some of the practices we covered in this course in your design projects here at City Tech and in your future creative career.
Best wishes for a safe, relaxing break, and a productive Spring semester. Please stay in touch!
Activities
Below find the information covered in this session.
1. Knowing Your Design History is Crucial to Aesthetic Innovation
Here is one last optional reading which underscores one of the aims of this course: to be an innovative designer, learn how your own aesthetic influences connect to historical lineages in the field of design.
Cerulean blue pigment is an expensive pure blue pigment. It is opaque and bright due to its highly refractive particles. It was quickly adopted by artists, including the Impressionists, because of its hue, permanence and opaqueness. It was particularly useful for skyscapes and can be found in the sky of Monet’s 1877 La Gare Saint-Lazare, the pointillism of Paul Signac, and in Édouard Manet’s 1878 Corner of a Café-Concert.
The color has earned widespread popularity. In 1999 it was nominated by Pantone as the color of the millennium. According to Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, “Psychologically, gazing at a blue sky brings a sense of peace and tranquillity to the human spirit.
Surrounding yourself with cerulean blue could bring a certain peace because it reminds you of time spent outdoors, on a beach, near the water – associations with restful, peaceful, relaxing times.”
It’s a helpful reminder for designers and design students today: if you borrow from a certain style, it’s important to know where that style came from, as well as the social and cultural contexts that gave that style its rise.
This Week’s Agenda is brief. This week you will be completing your final coursework and reflecting on your learning experience.
Your Research Project & Presentation post is due on Tuesday, Dec. 14th by 11:59pm.
Your Research Journal is due by Sunday, December 19th, at 11:59 pm.
Comments on your your classmates’ presentations are due by Sunday, December 19th, at 11:59 pm.
Any additional work that you’d like to revise or that you’ve missed can be submitted up until the last class, Sunday, December 19th, at 11:59 pm.
Your Grade Survey is due by Dec. 19th, at 11:59 pm. Your learning reflection and the grade you believe you have earned for this course will be factored into your final grade.
If you want to schedule any last-minute meetings about your research project, contact me to meet on Monday or Tuesday or email with any questions or concerns: jspevack@citytech.cuny.edu.
Are you missing any assignments or discussion posts? Take a look all of the agendas for this semester on the Schedule page. Submit any remaining work in before Sunday, December 19th!
Activities
Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities and assignments.
Some students had issues with copyright when uploading their videos to YouTube. If that happens to you, you can upload your video to Google Drive or Dropbox and link to it in your post. See the Research Project & Presentation > Tools & Tips.
By today you should have completed the first four milestones. Your final milestone is May 24.
Submit Presentation to OpenLab site – follow the guideslines
Submit at least one comment on each of your classmates’ presentations
2. Research Journal Due
Your Research Journal is a place for collecting ideas, freewriting, images, links, videos, and other media to help you develop your ideas and formulate your research topic. It can be organized or sloppy or anywhere in between, but it should demonstrate who you are as a creative, curious individual and your research process in this course.
May 17 is the last day to contribute any work other than the Final project. If you have notes and ideas in other places, take photos and/or copy them over to your Research Journal. These could be photos of your sketchbook, other notebooks, etc. Show your work and your creative/research process.
No need to create a new post, simply make sure the link in your Midterm post is still working.
3. Give Research Project Presentation Comments
Begin adding comments to your classmates’ Research Project Presentations posts. View all the posts by navigating to Student Posts > Research Project.
Give at least 1 comment per presentation. Your comment should be supportive AND helpful!
This is NOT a helpful comment:
“Great presentation, I like it”
A helpful comment is one that offers support, a critique of the content, and delivery of the research material, as well as suggestions for improvement:
“Great presentation, NAME. I enjoyed your exploration of XXXX and XXXX. I was especially excited to learn about XXXX and XXXX. I was intrigued by your discussion of XXXX because you presented it by exploring XXXX and contrasted it with XXXX. However, I would have liked to have learned more about XXXXX. Have you considered expanding on XXXX and XXXX? Here are some links about XXXX that I think would be helpful for your future research.”
Do you now look at advertisements, social media, or your favorite video games with a critical eye for connotated or denoted meaning? Do you see the types of signs used in the world around you? Can you pick out the signifiers and signified? Are you able to identify influences from design history like Constructivism, the International Style, and Post-Modernism in subways ads? Do you think more about the photographic, illustrative, color, or typographic choices in your work, and consider how they will be received, what meaning they might convey to your audience, or how they might persuade your audience to think or feel a certain way? Do you feel like your reading and writing skills have improved? Have the skills of close-reading and annotation given you the confidence to read more challenging texts, if you choose to in the future? Will you apply the research and analysis skills used in this course to your creative practice?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, hey, that’s good news!
What grade do you think you have earned in this course?
Use the Grade Survey to submit the grade you believe you have earned in this course. This may not be the final grade you receive but your evaluation of your own learning experience and effort is extremely important and will be considered.
Grades will be awarded using the College’s standard grading scale, but evaluation of your coursework will take into consideration effort applied, participation, and creative use of resources. Your final grade will reflect how well you explored and demonstrated the concepts and practices introduced in this course.
Grades will be posted on the class site using either Blackboard Grade Center and/or OpenLab Gradebook. Your instructor will provide timely feedback via comment or email.
Grades will be based upon:
Reading Responses 25%
Research Papers 20%
Research Journal 10%
Research Project & Presentation 25%
Productivity & Participation 20%
Course Assignments
Weekly readings and written reading responses are central to this course. Completing every reading is necessary for the successful completion of the course. Your weekly written responses, two short papers, and class discussions will be posted to the class website. The course will also require independent research using a Research Journal and will culminate in a Research Project and Presentation.
Weekly Reading Responses (25%)
Each weekly reading will be posted on the class site and will include a set of questions or prompts intended to promote critical engagement and class discussion using Hypothesis and OpenLab. You will be expected to write a 3-4 paragraph comment reflecting on the text presented and provide feedback on your peers’ reflections in Discussions. Responses with links to Hypothesis annotations must be submitted to the class site on the date due.
Research Papers (20%)
Twice during the semester, in lieu of the weekly reading response, you will submit a Research Paper, 2-3 pages (750-1000 words) in length, typed in double-spaced 12 pt Times New Roman, with all references and quotations properly cited according to MLA guidelines. These papers will be formally structured essays concerning assigned readings and your individual research. These readings may relate to your research topic and/or may take the form of an exploratory essay to help guide your research.
Research Journal (10%)
Each week you will add to your online Research Journal, documenting and critically reflecting on your influences, history, culture, likes, and dislikes. This practice of being curious about your own design aesthetic is a way to gain experience engaging with critical design theory. Your Research Journal is a place for collecting ideas, freewriting, images, links, videos, and other media to help you develop your ideas and formulate your research topic. It can also be a place to reflect on the readings and write your rough drafts before they are put into a formal post, comment, or paper.
Your journal may be private or public throughout the semester but it should be submitted at the midterm and end of the semester for review.
Research Project & Presentation (25%)
By Week 7, you will present a well-defined research topic and outline of a final research project to be presented in class and/or posted on the class site for feedback.
In the final three weeks of class, you and your peers will present your independent research. You will be expected to articulate a clearly defined topic concerning contemporary design and theory, by way of a well-designed poster or slide deck with voice or video narration. Your research project should serve as an opportunity to connect your own design practice with professional research methodologies and the design theory presented in this course.
The research project and presentation will:
include a 5-10 minute slideshow and audio/video presentation
demonstrate professional research practices (written, verbal, visual)
connect graphic design history and theory with the contemporary design field
demonstrate a connection between your design practice and theoretical concepts covered in the course
Discussions of assigned readings will play a critical role in this course. Class conversations, whether face to face or asynchronous, should not only provide a better understanding of the readings but should also make the course more engaging for everyone.
Effective participation is demonstrated by:
Posting and commenting on the shared class site by the set deadline, including contributing to discussions, or giving peer feedback.
Actively participating in group annotations, presentations and discussions.
Following best practices for face-to-face and online learning.
Class preparedness; coming prepared for class and checking the class site for instructions, prior to the class meeting.
Timeliness; arriving to class on time and completing assignments on time.
Asking questions, volunteering answers, and helping other students
Paying attention during demonstrations and presentations
Following instructions and taking notes
Make-ups
If you will not be able to present or hand in an assignment on the scheduled due date, it is your responsibility to notify the instructor BEFORE the due date.
Points are deducted from your final grade for late assignments and missed discussions. It’s better to turn in incomplete work than late work and participate in the class. If you turn in your work on time, you will have the opportunity to rework to improve your grade!
If you’d like an overview of all of the topics we’ve covered this semester, take a look at the Schedule page.
Each week is listed with the topic and readings we completed each week. We’ve covered a lot and you’ve produced some great written work!
Reminder
Final Assignment: The design work that you address should be “a project completed in the past 40 years, with a definite form and scope.”
Your research should explore the relationship between
1: specific theories
2: and the contemporary design that puts these theories into practice.
You do not need to limit your research to a singular work, but it is not an examination of a designer’s full career.
Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.
New Paradigms
In this section, let’s look at a few different areas that are have surfaced in recent years and are positioned to (possibly?) alter the future of design.
AI Designed Products
The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning is being felt in all areas of the creative industry. We have robots reporting the news, computers generating songs, and paintings by AI machines. Our creative roles are changing once again.
One designer discusses the potential implications of AI in our design processes and provides an example of a shoe designed with AI tools.
VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) are working their way into a range of disciplines, but these are still emerging technologies. Many people predict VR/AR/XR will be bigger than the internet. We have seen how technology can be a driving force in the changes in society and in the field of design, but it may take time for real adoption to occur.
Recently Facebook announced it is evolving into Meta: “3D spaces in the metaverse will let you socialize, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what we can imagine.”
Check out some examples below and imagine what VR and AR will look like in five to ten years.
Here are just a couple of the product apps that use AR technology:
As we’ve discussed throughout this course, the mainstream history of design is historically narrow ie: white, and male. While change is glacially slow, a current trend in design is the awareness of a need for diversity of voices in the field of communication design. This is and has been one of the primary goals of the COMD Department at City Tech.
This year, Cheryl D. Miller is the 2021 Design Visionary National Design Award winner. I encourage you to watch one of her many talks on diversity in design, such as White Default. In the following video, she talks about her personal history as a designer and also a writer. Graphic authorship is a thread that we’ve touched on in this class and it is critical that we have a variety of voices authoring the history of design and contributing to theoretical discussions in the field.
Presented each year by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the National Design Awards honor innovation and impact and recognize the power of design to change the world. Learn more at CooperHewitt.org/Awards
Last week we looked at the Social Responsibility Movement and prior to that, we explored how the Ethical Design Movement has grown out of the impacts of social media and the internet. This movement which is often connected to technology takes many forms: accessibility, inclusion, open culture, social equity…
Here is an interactive video that takes you through some of these questions of ethics and design. Below are related links.
Every year you see lists of current design trends. These often look at visual trends, such as Vintage Design, Minimalism, Maximalism, Metamodernism, etc. Take a look at an example below of one designer’s observations of current trends. Using your Design Theorist skills, I encourage you to look deeper and ask WHY we are seeing these visual trends.
As you continue your academic career and your career as a designer (in whatever form that takes), keep an eye out for what is happening right now in the broad field(s) of design. Here are a few suggestions. If you have channels that you follow to keep up with what’s happening in the field, add them with this form.
AIGA Eye on Design – Published by AIGA an editorial platform covers the issues important to the global design world + elevates the voices of contemporary designers as a way to build a more engaged design community.
The Observatory– Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand on design, current events, and current enthusiasms.
Design Matters – Debbie Millman features interviews with designers, artists and cultural leaders.
The design work that you address should be “a project completed in the past 40 years, with a definite form and scope.” You do not need to limit your research to a singular work, but it is not an examination of a designer’s full career.
Your research should explore the relationship between
1: specific theories
2: and the contemporary design that puts these theories into practice.
Use Zoom, Vimeo Record, Prezi, Screencast-o-matic, or any screen capture app to record your slide deck presentation with voiceover. Remember to save your recording to your desktop to edit or upload directly to YouTube or Vimeo (depending on the which app you are using.)
Make sure your slide deck is set to FULL SCREEN when your record.
Follow these guidelines to upload your finished Research Presentation video to YouTube. Set your video as Unlisted and copy the Video Link to paste into your OpenLab Post.
If you have questions about putting together your presentation, don’t wait until the last minute.
Readings / Media: Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field. Princeton Architectural Press, 2009 (excerpt)
Week 2
Topic: Laying the Groundwork for Design Theory
Readings / Media: Hall, Sean. This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics, Laurence King Publishing, 2012 (Chapters 1 & 2); Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (excerpt)
Week 3
Topic: Language, Linguistics, Symbols, Signs
Readings / Media: F.T. Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism”; Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group”; El Lissitzky, “Our Book”
Week 4
Topic: Manifestos, Movements and the Avant-Garde
Readings / Media: Walter Gropius, “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus”; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “Typophoto”; Herbert Bayer, “On Typography”
Week 5
Topic: Bauhaus Function and Form; Research Paper 1
Week 6
Topic: Choosing a Research Project Topic
Readings / Media: Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes (exc.); Joseph Muller-Brockman, “Grid and Design Philosophy”; Jan Tschichold, “The Principles of the New Typography”
Week 7
Topic: International Style Evolution; Research Project Proposal due Week 8
Readings / Media: Celebrating the African-American Practitioners Absent From Way Too Many Classroom Lectures by Madeleine Morley; Typography as a Radical Act in an Industry Ever-dominated by White Men by Silas Munro; Design Gets More Diverse by Alice Rawsthorn
Week 8
Topic: Mainstream Modernism + American Corporate Identity; Mid-Term Assessment
Readings / Media: Paul Rand, Good Design is Goodwill; Steven Heller, Underground Mainstream
Week 9
Topic: Media as Message
Readings / Media: Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image”; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (exc.)
Week 10
Topic: Context and Representation; Stereotype in Advertising Media; Visual Rhetoric
Week 11
Topic: Post-Modernism
Readings / Media: Katherine McCoy and David Frej “Typography as Discourse”
Week 12
Topic: The Digital Revolution & Social Responsibility
Readings / Media: Rick Poynor “The Evolving Legacy of Ken Garland’s First Things First Manifesto“
Week 13
Topic: New Paradigms / Final Presentation prep
*Final Project
Week 14
Topic: Research Project Presentations, Peer Feedback, Grade Survey
Create one sentence that summarizes how this reading supports your paper
You can use text from your Reading Responses
Writing an annotated bibliography is excellent preparation for a research project. Just collecting sources for a bibliography is useful, but when you have to write annotations for each source, you’re forced to read each source more carefully. You begin to read more critically instead of just collecting information.
Your Research Project will culminate in a 10-15 slideshow with your voiceover narration. The presentations should be no more than 10 minutes long. You may use any method you prefer to construct your slideshow (Powerpoint, Google Slides, Adobe Presenter, Preview slideshow, Presi, etc.) and any method for recording your voiceover and saving your video file (Zoom Recording, Screencast-o-matic, Yuja, etc). Your finished presentation should be uploaded (unlisted) to YouTube.
Your presentation and corresponding visuals should start with a title slide and an introduction that includes the main points of your presentation. And it should end with a conclusion that ties together all of the ideas presented.
You thesis questions, the main idea you wish to communicate, should weave throughout your presenation.
Visuals should present clear, coherent information, in a logically organized manner.
Viewers should be able to readily identify your research questions, your method of inquiry, the literature employed, and your overarching thesis.
It should be clear that original research has led to a synthesis unique to your subject.
Your visuals should be neat and professional, utilizing design standards consistent with the topic at hand.
Relevant images should be carefully selected and placed within your layout, with considerations made for reproduction quality.
Organization and care in assembly will be taken into consideration.
Presentations should be equally clear, with ideas confidently articulated.
Presentations should be rehearsed, and should adhere to a planned narrative or script
Pace and diction should be stimulating for your peers, offering information in a manner that can be grasped and processed in a thought-provoking manner.
Your presentation slideshow should be designed to reflect the style, designer, movement, or theory you are presenting. Be creative and have fun!
Presentation Tips & Tools
Below find some helpful links for tips and tools you can use to assemble and record your Research Presentation.
Use Zoom, Vimeo Record, Prezi, Screencast-o-matic, or any screencapture app to record your slidedeck presentation with voiceover. Remember to save your recording to your desktop to edit or upload direclty to YouTube or Vimeo (depending on the which app you are using.)
Make sure your slide deck is set to FULL SCREEN when your record.
TITLE: Research Project Presentation – Your Initials
CATEGORY: Research Project
TAG: Your Name
Add the title of your Research Project as a heading.
Write a brief introduction to your Research Project.
Embed your presentation in the post by pasting the YouTube link below the introduction.
Use text to indicate the link to your Annotated Bibliography (ie: Annotated Bibliography), select this text, and make it a link to your Google doc. (Do not paste the entire Google Doc link in the post). Make sure the Google Doc link is set to “Anyone with the link.”
Below find the information covered in this session.
1. The Digital Revolution & Social Responsibility (90+ minutes)
As one millennium ended and another began, digital technology fundamentally transformed graphic design. Old avant-garde issues of authorship, universality, and social responsibility were reborn within society’s newly decentralized networked structure.
HELEN ARMSTRONG
The Digital Revolution – 1980s-1990s Design History (3 min)
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. It would revolutionize the entire industry. I was in art school in the early 1990s and we used the first release of Photoshop 1.0. It was slow, clunky, and honestly painful to use (we would run a filter and go out for coffee!) but the results were nothing like we had ever seen before.
Let’s watch this video from Graphic Design History on LinkedIn Learning to gain an overview of the time period, the advent of the personal computer, and its effects on the design industry. Watch from 1:57:58 – 2:01:49 on LinkedIn Learning via your Library Card or the YouTube video below.
Activity:As you watch, take note of the dates and designers who experimented with these new tools. Also, note how once again changes in technology radically altered the field of design and the role of a designer.
At the turn of the 20th Century, photography and printing revolutionalized communications. At the turn of the 21st Century, the new digital technologies of the computer and the internet change the field of communication design again.
In the early years of the internet, graphics were limited and the design standards that we know and use today were often ignored. It was the wild west. After many years, designers began to see the importance of user experience. A focus on universality, the grid, visual/information hierarchy, and minimalism drove much of the design aesthetic in web design because it allowed designers to put content and the user experience first. Today anyone anywhere can make a website and this has changed the role of the designer once again.
Activity:As you watch this video, note that it’s from 2012. What has happened to mobile/app development in the few short years since this video was produced? And looking back at our exploration of the effects of social media on society, how has the optimistic utopian vision of the internet changed?
The Digital Design Revolution – THE LONG VIEW (44 min)
For a detailed background on the history of the digital age in design take a look at this video that takes you from the early 50s room-size computers to the present day.
Activity:Again, as you watch, take note of the dates and designers mentioned. Consider your own experience as a consumer and a creator. Many of you grew up with the internet. How has your use of the computer and the web changed in your lifetime? Do you have nostalgia for the “old days”?
Authorship & the Social Responsibility Movement of the New Millennium
…Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help…
FIRST THINGS FIRST MANIFESTO 2000
In a 1994 essay in Eye magazine, Andrew Howard reminded designers about the 1964 manifesto entitled ‘First Things First’ signed by British designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues. The manifesto’s aim was to “reject the ‘high pitched scream of consumer selling’ and omnipotent lure of the advertising industry in favour of what was defined as socially useful graphic design work.”
Several years later, thirty-three designers renewed the original call for a change of priorities and published ‘First Things First Manifesto 2000‘ in Adbusters, Emigre, Eye, Blueprint, Items in the Netherlands, and Form in Germany.
In 2014 – on the 50th anniversary of the manifesto – over 1600 designers across the world renewed their commitment to the manifesto.
In 2020 an updated version, FTF 2020, was published online and included a focus on the climate crisis and racial justice. “Our time and energy are increasingly used to manufacture demand, to exploit populations, to extract resources, to fill landfills, to pollute the air, to promote colonization, and to propel our planet’s sixth mass extinction.”
Check out this short 2:30 min video of David Berman, author of Do Good Design. Berman’s main thesis is: “Rather than sharing our cycles of style, consumption, and chemical addictions, designers can use their professional power, persuasive skills, and wisdom to help distribute ideas that the world really needs: health information, conflict resolution, tolerance, technology, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, human rights, democracy …”
David Berman on Design And Social Responsibility – 2 mins 30 secs
2. Evaluating Online Sources
When searching for sources for your Research Project, it’s important not to take all sources at face value. Think critically about the sources your find online, the context in which the sources are created, and the context in which you are using the source.
Use Zoom, Vimeo Record, Prezi, Screencast-o-matic, or any screencapture app to record your slidedeck presentation with voiceover. Remember to save your recording to your desktop to edit or upload direclty to YouTube or Vimeo (depending on the which app you are using.)
Make sure your slide deck is set to FULL SCREEN when your record.
Follow these guidelines to upload your finished Research Presentation video to YouTube. Set your video as Unlisted and copy the Video Link to paste into your OpenLab Post.
5. Reading & Discussion: Week 12 (2 hours)
For this week’s reading and discussion be sure to review the section above on Graphic Authorship & the Social Responsibility Movement of the New Millennium. We will take a look at Rick Poynor’s essay The Evolving Legacy of Ken Garland’s First Things First Manifesto, examine the updated FTF 2020, and consider how technology and graphic authorship have influenced social responsibility in design.
Use Zoom, Vimeo Record, Prezi, Screencast-o-matic, or any screencapture app to record your slidedeck presentation with voiceover. Remember to save your recording to your desktop to edit or upload direclty to YouTube or Vimeo (depending on the which app you are using.)
Make sure your image or slide deck is set to FULL SCREEN when your record.
Follow these guidelines to upload your finished Research Presentation video to YouTube. Set your video as Unlisted and copy the Video Link to paste into your OpenLab Post.
In your Research Journal, create one document with your detailed outline. (see example below)
Make sure that your journal allows edits
Submit a link to your Research Journal to OpenLab
Please be sure to add the following title, category, and tags to your posts. For help with adding Categories and Tags, see OpenLab Help.
TITLE: Research Journal – Your Initials
CATEGORY: Research Journal
TAG: Research Journal
TAG: Your Name
Research Project Outline example
1. Introduction
Explain in detail the topic you are examining and why it is significant.
Diversity (gender, LGBT.etc) in Korean video game design impacts the people who play them without stereotyping the designs.
2. Background/Review of the Literature
Include a summary of the basic background information on the topic gleaned from your literature and sources review (you can include information from the readings and class, but the bulk should be outside sources).
Creating diverse design that is based on past experiences creates a more authentic experience
Using Roland Barthes’ essay “Rhetoric of the Image” to define what an image represents
Using Alice Rawsthorn’s, 2011 NYTimes, Design Gets More Diverse to define how to create diversity
3. Bibliography
Include a list of all your sources
4. Images
Include images and captions
2. Evaluating Online Sources
When searching for sources for your Research Project, it’s important not to take all sources at face value. Think critically about the sources your find online, the context in which the sources are created, and the context in which you are using the source.
When evaluating sources, ask the following questions:
What kind of source is this? Be as specific as possible.
Is it a reliable source? How can you tell?
What is the purpose of the source?
Is the source biased?Do you think the author was paid to write this source? Why or why not?
Do you think you’d have to pay to read the full text of this source? Why or why not?
If a text is free to read, but an author is paid to write, where does the money to pay the author come from?
3. The Digital Revolution – 1980s-1990s Design History (3 min)
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. It would revolutionize the entire industry. I was in art school in the early 1990s and we used the first release of Photoshop 1.0. It was slow, clunky, and honestly painful to use (we would run a filter and go out for coffee!) but the results were nothing like we had ever seen before.
Let’s watch this video from Graphic Design History on LinkedIn Learning to gain an overview of the time period, the advent of the personal computer, and its effects on the design industry. Watch from 1:57:58 – 2:01:49 on LinkedIn Learning via your Library Card or the YouTube video below.
Activity:As you watch, take note of the dates and designers who experimented with these new tools. Also, note how once again changes in technology radically altered the field of design and the role of a designer.
4. Reading Report 10: Authorship & the Social Responsibility Movement of the New Millennium
…Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.
There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programmes, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help…
FIRST THINGS FIRST MANIFESTO 2000
In a 1994 essay in Eye magazine, Andrew Howard reminded designers about the 1964 manifesto entitled ‘First Things First’ signed by British designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues. The manifesto’s aim was to “reject the ‘high pitched scream of consumer selling’ and omnipotent lure of the advertising industry in favour of what was defined as socially useful graphic design work.”
Several years later, thirty-three designers renewed the original call for a change of priorities and published ‘First Things First Manifesto 2000‘ in Adbusters, Emigre, Eye, Blueprint, Items in the Netherlands, and Form in Germany.
In 2014 – on the 50th anniversary of the manifesto – over 1600 designers across the world renewed their commitment to the manifesto.
In 2020 an updated version, FTF 2020, was published online and included a focus on the climate crisis and racial justice. “Our time and energy are increasingly used to manufacture demand, to exploit populations, to extract resources, to fill landfills, to pollute the air, to promote colonization, and to propel our planet’s sixth mass extinction.”
Check out this short 2:30 min video of David Berman, author of Do Good Design. Berman’s main thesis is: “Rather than sharing our cycles of style, consumption, and chemical addictions, designers can use their professional power, persuasive skills, and wisdom to help distribute ideas that the world really needs: health information, conflict resolution, tolerance, technology, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, human rights, democracy …”
Following the instructions below, read and annotate the text with your classmates in our Hypothesis group.
We will not be writing reading responses this week, but rather adding comments and peer feedback to this post.
The reading links above will automatically open Hypothesis. Login to your account and select our group. IMPORTANT!)
3. Consider these questions.
Here are the questions to which you should respond in this reading discussion:
When you compare the original version of FTF from 1964 with the later versions in 2000, 2014 and 2020, is there a central message/call to designers that hasn’t changed? What are the authors of the manifesto rejecting in the design field?
What stood out to you in the newest version of the First Things First manifesto, FTF 2020?
How did technology affect the authorship of the ‘First Things First’ manifesto over the decades?
4. Read & Annotate.
Consider the questions/prompts listed above. Start to formulate the answers to these prompts while you practice close reading of the essay with annotations. This will be part of your grade. Share at least 3 annotations in the Hypothesis group, including your questions, definitions, and ideas with your classmates. Add the tags: Social Responsibility and Reading Report 10 to your annotations.
When you annotate be sure to define or break down any words or concepts that you do not understand.
This week we will take a look at Post Modernism. What is it?! Well, that’s always up for debate. We’ve already touched on this movement/theory/era over the last two weeks without actually identifying it. See if you can recognize some of the postmodernist approaches and theories from the last two classes in our studies this week.
Activities
Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.
From about 1970 to 1990, Postmodernism shattered established ideas about design and art. A brilliant mix of theatrical and theoretical, Postmodernism ranges from the colourful to the ruinous, the luxurious to the ludicrous. It is a visually thrilling multifaceted style which so famously defies definition.
V&A EXHIBITION ‘POSTMODERNISM: STYLE AND SUBVERSION 1970 – 1990’
What the *&%!# is Postmodernism? Even celebrated design leaders of the Postmodernist era have a hard time describing what the term Postmodernism means. And as we shall see, that’s kind of the point. Last week we used Barthes and Hall’s Postmodern lens’ of Structuralism and Cultural Studies respectively to discover that meaning is subjective. It can change depending on the viewer and each individual’s life/cultural experience.
Activity:Get a scrap piece of paper and pen/pencil. Take a moment to write down the qualities of Modernism that you can think of. Think back to the early avant-garde (De Stijl, Constructivists, Bauhaus, New Typography) in the early 20th Century. What were their goals and ideology with regard to Universality in form, truth, and meaning? What were they rebelling against? Consider that some of their goals were realized by the mid-1960s when the Swiss/International Style went mainstream.
By the late ’60s and early 1970s, the rebellion begins again. The Postmodernism avant-garde was a direct reaction to mainstream Modernism.
What is Postmodernism? (12 min)
Let’s watch this video before we go any further. Here we look at some of the design styles seen and heard in the Postmodern era.
Activity:As you watch, write down the words that the designers use to describe this style/era and the work they produced during the 1970s-1990s.
Graphic Design History – Rejection of Modernism in late 60s-1990s (20 min)
In our reading of Steven Heller’s “Underground Mainstream”, we learned how in the late 1960s, mainstream Modernism (universality, simplicity, minimalist, structured, grid-based, corporate, design for all) was rejected in favor of the opposite (complexity, ambiguity, subjectivity, cultural pluralism, personal, experimental). This was the very beginning of Postmodernism in design. Let’s take a look back starting with the hippy counter-culture posters coming out of San Francisco in the late 60s, all the way through the 1990s anti-consumerist grunge movement in Seattle. In this broad time period with its range of styles, anything goes. The rejection of Modernist minimalism and functionalism and the embrace of personal expression, experimentation, mixed media, and styles from other time periods are the hallmarks of Postmodernism. Pay close attention to the sections on Punk and New Wave, Low-tech Seattle, and Postmodernism. These sections will be important to the Reading Response and Discussion.
Punk Pop & Post Modern – Graphics of the Big 80s (38 min)
This video looks at the 1980s, “the decade of shredding, remixing, tagging, overdubbing and deconstructing” and the Postmodern lineage from the late 1960s and 1970s.
Watch the following video from our Week 11 Agenda and respond to the prompts below.
Which elements of Modernism continued within the Postmodern era of the 1970s-1990s?
Which elements of Postmodernism continue today?
Are we still in the Postmodern era? If not what era are we living now?
Add your ideas in a comment in this Discussion post by Friday, November 19th at 6 pm to allow time for responses. Add at least 4 follow-up responses to your classmates’ comments by Sunday, November 21st, at 11:59 pm.
Punk Pop & Post Modern – Graphics of the Big 80s (38 min)
At this point, you should have collected a large number of sources to support your Research Project topic. You will also want to include at least 3-4 sources from the Library Databases.
This 5-minute video tutorial goes over the basics of using the City Tech Library databases.
At the top of the search form click the link Choose Databases to select the databases to include in your seach. Then click Save. Depending on your topic, you may need to experiment with the databases you include in your search, but generally the following are a good starting place. These databases include a wide variety of newpapers, journals, magazine and other media.
Business Source Complete
Communications & MassMedia Complete
Regional Business News
MasterFile Complete
MAS Ultra – School Edition
Use the form to execute a keyword search.
Enter your keywords in the first text box.
Select TX All Text from the Select a Field dropdown.
If relevant, restrict the search to specific dates using the Publish Date fields.
Navigate the results to find sources in HTML and PDF or links to sources in related databases.
In your own words:
“How do racial, ethnic, and/or gender stereotypes affect the meaning and reception of 19th and 20th-century advertisements at the time and today, and in what ways did advertisers intentionally or unintentionally reinforce societal biases?”
You MUST include the following:
notes of all important terms (ie. polysemy, linguistic sign, connoted, denoted, etc.)
2. notes that answer these questions:
• How do images hold and convey meaning?
• What are they trying to say?
• How do they persuade and influence us?
3. Use critical perspectives from the theorists we’ve looked at recently: Saussure, Peirce, Barthes, and Hall.
4. Use Barthes’ rhetorical analysis and close-reading skills,
1 start by contextualizing the advertisement (date, product, country of origin, advertising company/designer, intended audience).
2 describe the advertisement in as much detail as possible,
examine the characteristics of the objects, models/characters, environment, layout, typography, the interaction of picture elements, image quality, and composition of the entire ad.
5. Use Barthes’, Saussure’s, and Peirce’s terms,
1 articulate the meaning of the image and text used in the advertisement.
2 identify all of the signs at work.
6 Use semiotic terms,
identify the signifiers and the signified.
Use these terms to answer:
What is the linguistic message?
What are the non-coded iconic messages?
What are the coded iconic messages?
Identify the denotative and connotative aspects.
Are the signs icons, indexes, or symbols? Explain why.
Consider the cultural codes being conveyed in the advertisement.
Do you observe polysemic signs, myths, or naturalization?
7 Use Stuart Hall’s theories about reception and representation,
consider the effectiveness of the advertisers’ rhetoric and attempts to persuade and influence the audience at the time.
What was the original dominant/preferred reading?
How have the designers/creators tried to ‘fix’ a meaning using stereotypes?
Who created this advertisement, and who was the intended audience during the time period when it was circulated?
Why would the intended audience identify with this advertisement?
Did the advertisement serve any other purpose besides the sale of a product?
What impact has this advertisement or similar advertisements had on society?
Finally, is your personal reading of the ad dominant, oppositional, or negotiated? Why?
Watch the following video from our Week 11 Agenda and respond to the prompts below.
Which elements of Modernism continued within the Postmodern era of the 1970s-1990s?
Which elements of Postmodernism continue today?
Are we still in the Postmodern era? If not what era are we living now?
Punk Pop & Post Modern – Graphics of the Big 80s (38 min)
This video looks at the 1980s, “the decade of shredding, remixing, tagging, overdubbing and deconstructing” and the Postmodern lineage from the late 1960s and 1970s.
Consider the questions/prompts listed above. Start to formulate a response.
Draft your Response.
In your Research Journal, write a draft of your 200-word response.
Check for grammar and spelling errors.
Use the word count tool.
Use a grammar app or something similar to improve the clarity of your writing.
Use visual examples to supplement your reading response.
Post your Response.
When ready, create a new post titled “Reading Response 7 – YourInitials.”
Copy and paste the questions/prompts listed above. Paste your reading response from your Research Journal. Add links to your annotations in the Hypothesis group at the bottom of your post. Always add links and attribution for any images that you use in your post. Adjust any formatting issues that may have occurred while pasting. Use the Reading Response (Example) as a guide.
Please be sure to add the following title, category, and tags to your posts. For help with adding Categories and Tags, see OpenLab Help.
TITLE: Reading Response 9 – Your Initials
CATEGORY: Reading Responses
TAG: Reading Response #9
TAG: Your Name, Post-Modern and Reading Response 9
Due Date(s)
Your reading response is due the day before the next session Monday, 5/2, at 6pm to allow time for review.
Add the tags: Post-Modern and Reading Response 9 to your annotations.
Last week we learned about how the design of persuasive social media “massages” us and how that change/manipulation has lasting effects on society. As current consumers and future design leaders, your opinion and actions matter.
The topics we will be covering this week will build on our reading of Roland Barthes’ essay “Rhetoric of the Image.” We will explore representation, context, and the use of rhetoric in advertising, specifically concerning the perpetuation of ethnic and gender biases. The work we engage in today will inform your second and last research paper and hopefully also your Research Project/Presentation.
Activities
1. Representation and Context (90+ minutes)
Last week we examined Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media. We learned that the medium is integral to the message and how we receive it. This week we will look at representation and context by exploring the use of stereotypes in media (print, radio, television, and online advertisements). In your second Research Paper, you will use the terminology and approaches that we cover this week to deconstruct a historical or contemporary advertisement that uses coded cultural message(s) of racial, ethnic, and/or gender stereotypes.
We will return to Saussure (sign, signifier, signified) and Peirce (symbol, icon, index) to refresh our understanding of early semiotics. We will incorporate the terms we learned in the last reading of Barthes (connoted, denoted, iconic messages, linguistic messages) and explore additional terms such as encoding, decoding, polysemic, myth, and naturalization. Lastly, we will look at Jamaican-born cultural studies scholar and activist Stuart Hall who explored how the dynamics of media representation reinforce societal power structures.
Terminology
Before we go any further, let’s make sure we all understand the semiotic terms we will need to deconstruct an advertisement.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Sign: A sign is anything that creates meaning composed of a signifier and a signified.
Signifier: A word, an image, a sound, anything we see, speak or hear to refer to the sign.
Signified: The concept that our mind conjures in relation to the sign.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Icon: signifier resembles the signified
Symbol: arbitrary learned relationship between the signifier and signified
Index: signifier is caused by or linked to the signified
Building on Saussure and Peirce, Barthes argued that when we construct a sign (encoding), its reception (decoding) does not take place in a vacuum. Our individual experience, society, and culture impact its meaning and how it is interpreted. In our reading last week, we looked at Barthes’ close-reading of the Panzani advertisement. Take a look at this breakdown of “Rhetoric of the Image” by Lesley Lanir where he covers some of the following terms.
Encoding: creating a message for transmission (i.e., creation and distribution of an advertisement)
Decoding: the process of interpreting a message (i.e., watching and interpreting an advertisement)
Connotation: symbolic or cultural meaning (a coded message)
Denotation: Literal meaning (a message without code)
Linguisticmessage: words used to convey meaning
Non-coded iconic message: an image with literal meaning
Coded iconic message: an image with a coded message
Polysemic: a sign that has multiple meanings
Myth: a widely accepted meaning of a sign
Naturalization: in a society, the repeated use of signs shapes its meaning
Here’s a 9+ minute video that takes us through some of these semiotic terms from a film perspective. Advertising takes a similar approach.
Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist. He looked at the power of mainstream media (advertising, TV, film, etc) to understand the representation of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. Here are some of the theories and terms associated with his work.
ReceptionTheory: This theory asserts that advertising and media are encoded and decoded. The creator encodes messages and values into media which are then decoded by the audience. Audiences will decode the media in different ways and not always in the way the creator intended.
Dominant, or Preferred Reading: how the creator wants the audience to view the advertisment or media.
Oppositional Reading: when the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning. This can happen when content is controversial or when the audience holds different beliefs or is of a different age or culture.
Negotiated Reading: a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings. The audience accepts some of the creator’s view, but also has their own views.
RepresentationTheory: There is not a true representation of people or events in media. Designers/creators try to ‘fix’ a ‘preferred meaning’ through ideology or stereotyping. Historically, this is driven by people in power.
This 6+ minute video explains Hall’s Reception Theory:
In this 55 minute documentary from 1997, Stuart Hall offers an extended meditation on representation. Take a close look at 36:00 he speaks about representation in advertising. Note that this video was created is prior to social media and the internet era that we live in now. Consider if the power structure has changed and why/why not? Make sure you are logged into CUNY SSO (single sign-on) to view.
The use of stereotypes to communicate meaning and sell products has a long history in advertising media and visual communications.
As we observed in our readings on the lack of diversity in design, leadership in the field of advertising media and design was (and still is) dominated by white, heterosexual men. And as we see from our recent study of media and the message, and representation above, mainstream media is a powerful force for intentionally or unintentionally reinforcing biases in society. It’s changing, but women and BIPOC designers in advertising are historically limited. That lack of diversity in creative leadership has allowed widely-held biases to continue to flourish.
Here are some sources to get you started in your research for Research Paper 2. If you have already chosen a historical 19th or 20th-century print advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell the product, review the sources below to support your research. If you haven’t yet chosen an advertisement, browse the references below to find some.
History of racial, gender, ethnic, cultural stereotypes in advertisements
Due: The finished paper is due on April 25 by 6 pm
1953 Alcoa Aluminum advertisement
Overview
You will be reading and annotating an excerpt from Roland Barthes’ 1977 essay, “Rhetoric of the Image.”
Rhetoric is the ‘technique of using the means of expression to persuade’.
The hallmark of all rhetoric is that it involves at least two levels of language,
the proper or denoted and the figurative or connoted.” Aesthetics of Photography
This essay is challenging, but it contains important tools for deconstructing advertising using a semiotic approach and for the “close reading” of visual images.
Assignment
The second 2-3 page paper, due April 25, will be a response to this article.
In this paper, you’ll critically examine a contemporary advertising image in a manner similar to Barthes’ approach. You will be expected to employ the logic and terminology that Barthes uses in this text.
Stereotypes have a long history in advertising media, marketing, and visual communications.
Select a 20th or 21st-century print or TV advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell a product and demonstrate how mainstream media intentionally or unintentionally reinforces societal biases.
It should be a recent full-page print advertisement organized around a single photograph.
Using rhetorical analysis, examine the meaning of the image and text.
Consider the effectiveness of the advertisers’ attempts to persuade and influence the audience at the time and consider how today’s audience might respond.
NOTE: The advertisement must use photographic or illustrative imagery and must include text. Use the resources provided inWeek 9 Agenda > Stereotype in Advertising Media
Roland Barthes was a prominent French thinker associated with the field of semiotics and the Structuralist movement. This essay was written in response to a series of articles that Barthes had been following in a well-regarded linguistics journal. In his essay, Barthes attempts to demonstrate that images contain most of the same semiological elements, ie, signs, signifiers, signifieds, as a spoken or written language.
Semiological elements are present in an image, yet they differ from language in that they imitate nature, and are non-linear.
Every image, especially photographs in advertisements, consist of 3 messages:
(1) a linguistic message,
(2) a non-coded iconic message, and
(3) a coded iconic message
The linguistic message of an image is the textual component that works alongside representational aspects of an image (most advertisements combine text and image)
A linguistic message can direct the viewer toward a clear interpretation, or invite unexpected interpretations
The non-coded iconic message of an image is the objective, denotational, literal, perceptual, innocent meanings that can be understood from the image.
The coded iconic message of an image is the subjective, connotational, cultural, symbolic, ideological meanings that can be understood from the image.
Images are rhetorical in the sense that coded elements perform functions similar to those of persuasive linguistic devices
2: Write
Step 1: As you read, make notes to include with your submission
make note of all important terms
(ie. polysemy, linguistic sign, connoted, denoted, etc.)
make brief notes that answer these questions: • How do images hold and convey meaning?
• What are they trying to say?
• How do they persuade and influence us?
Step 2: When you’re finished your notes: Paper 2
Write a deep analysis of your chosen image-based advertisement using critical perspectives from the theorists we’ve looked at recently: Saussure, Peirce, Barthes, and Hall.
Expanding on your notes for “Rhetoric of the Image,” critically examine and deconstruct your chosen historical advertising image using Barthes’ approach. You will be expected to employ Barthes’s logic and terminology to deconstruct the advertisement. Include references to Saussure, Peirce, and Hall’s theories covered in the Week 3 and Week 10 Agendas.
You are writing this paper for possible submission to the City Tech Writer, an undergraduate journal for writing and research. Assume that your reader has no background in design theory and is not familiar with the theories and concepts you are presenting. Be sure to explain the theories and concepts as you present your analysis.
Process
1. Open the reading
2. Enable Hypothesis
Login to your account and select our group (IMPORTANT!) from the dropdown to make sure your annotations and highlights will be recorded in the group.
3. Read & Annotate
make note of all important terms
(ie. polysemy, linguistic sign, connoted, denoted, etc.)
make brief notes that answer these questions: • How do images hold and convey meaning?
• What are they trying to say?
• How do they persuade and influence us?
This will be part of your grade.
Make at least 3 annotations in Hypothesis, including your questions, definitions, and ideas
Add the tags: Barthes and Reading Response 9 to your annotations.
4. Write Paper 2
The second 2-3 page paper, due April 25, will be a response to this article.
Critically examine a contemporary advertising image in a manner similar to Barthes’ approach.
Select a 20th or 21st-century print or TV advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes
to sell a product and demonstrate how mainstream media intentionally or unintentionally reinforces societal biases.
It should be organized around a single photograph.
Write a deep analysis of your chosen image-based advertisement using critical perspectives from the theorists we’ve looked at recently: Saussure, Peirce, Barthes, and Hall.
Expanding on your notes for “Rhetoric of the Image,” critically examine and deconstruct your chosen historical advertising image using Barthes’ approach.
You are writing this paper for possible submission to the City Tech Writer, an undergraduate journal for writing and research. Assume that your reader has no background in design theory and is not familiar with the theories and concepts you are presenting. Be sure to explain the theories and concepts as you present your analysis.
Structure
Your introduction should present the main research question in your own words: “How do racial, ethnic, and/or gender stereotypes affect the meaning and reception of 19th and 20th-century advertisements at the time and today, and in what ways did advertisers intentionally or unintentionally reinforce societal biases?”
Using Barthes’ rhetorical analysis and close-reading skills, start by contextualizing the advertisement (date, product, country of origin, advertising company/designer, intended audience). Describe the advertisement in as much detail as possible, examining the characteristics of the objects, models/characters, environment, layout, typography, the interaction of picture elements, image quality, and composition of the entire ad.
Using Barthes’, Saussure’s, and Peirce’s terms, make your best attempt to articulate the meaning of the image and text used in the advertisement. Try to identify all of the signs at work. Using semiotic terms, identify the signifiers and the signified.
What is the linguistic message?
What are the non-coded iconic messages?
What are the coded iconic messages?
Identify the denotative and connotative aspects.
Are the signs icons, indexes, or symbols? Explain why.
Consider the cultural codes being conveyed in the advertisement.
Do you observe polysemic signs, myths, or naturalization?
Using Stuart Hall’s theories about reception and representation, consider the effectiveness of the advertisers’ rhetoric and attempts to persuade and influence the audience at the time.
What was the original dominant/preferred reading?
How have the designers/creators tried to ‘fix’ a meaning using stereotypes?
Who created this advertisement, and who was the intended audience during the time period when it was circulated?
Why would the intended audience identify with this advertisement?
Did the advertisement serve any other purpose besides the sale of a product?
What impact has this advertisement or similar advertisements had on society?
Finally, is your personal reading of the ad dominant, oppositional, or negotiated? Why?
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Formatting
Your paper will be submitted as a 750-1000 word typewritten paper, double-spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman.
Use Google Docs to write and organize your final draft.
Cite all materials researched for historical context, any related writings, and image sources.
Include images of the work you are referencing and any other relevant illustrations.
Use Grammarly or similar to review your paper for grammatical and spelling errors before submitting.
Citations / Works Cited Page
Use The Citation Tool
Use the Google Docs Citation tool > set to MLA to add citation sources to your paper.
IMPORTANT: Add citations within your paper for every fact, visual reference, or quotation that you reference in your paper. (See Adding in-text citation at 0:50 in the video for details.)
When you are done, add a Works Cited page at the end of your document. This can be done with one click using the Insert Work Cited button. (See Inserting a bibliography at 1:16 in the video for details.)
Use text to indicate the link to your paper (ie: Research Paper), select this text, and make it a link to your Google doc. (Do not paste the entire Google Doc link in the post)
Make sure the Google Doc link is set to “Anyone with the link” and Commenter is selected.
This will allow others to comment on your paper.
At the end of this session, students should have an understanding of the following:
An understanding of the prophetic and influential ideas presented by Marshall McLuhan in the late 1960s, specifically the theories in his book “Understanding Media” and his quote “The Media is the Message.”
Why these ideas relate to the persuasive technology that we interact with on social media platforms and how they are affecting human society.
Submit your Research Journal for mid-semester review
Each week you should be adding to your online Research Journal, documenting and critically reflecting on your influences, history, culture, likes, and dislikes.
This practice of being curious about your own design aesthetic is a way to gain experience engaging with critical design theory and preparing for your research project.
Twice during the semester, you will share your Research Journal with your professor (and your classmates only if you wish). If there is anything in your journal you don’t wish to share, you may duplicate the journal, remove the parts you want to keep private and submit it for review.
If you haven’t already*, create a post with the following metadata:
TITLE: Research Journal – Your Initials
CATEGORY: Research Journals
TAG: Your Name
Write a brief reflection about your experience keeping this Research Journal.
Below the reflection, create text link called: My Research Journal
Select the text, click on the link icon, paste the sharable link into the link box and press return. Your text link should look like this: My Research Journal
If you’d like to keep your post private, so only the professor can see your Research Journal, choose Visibility > Private when you post.
Set your post visibility to Private if you wish.
NOTE: if you have created your journal post previously, make any updates to your post to conform to these guidelines.
Activities
1. The Medium is the Message
Last class we looked at the American version of Modernism as corporate identity design and advertising in the 1950s-1960s began to take shape. This week we will move closer to the Postmodern era and examine Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media as television was becoming the dominant medium. His theories were radical at the time and have been influential in the study and practice of design and media theory. They are especially important now with regard to the persuasive advertising model used by social media.
McLuhan died before the birth of the internet, but many believe that his theories about electronic media were prophetic; that he envisioned the internet decades before its arrival. He spoke about communication technologies as having the ability to create a “global village” and the increasing loss of privacy as a result.
McLuhan argued that we should focus on the medium of communication itself and he defined media as a technological extension of the body. He used the term “media” in a very broad sense including the spoken word, the written word, the printed word, telephone, films, radio, television, etc.
There are many excellent interpretations and critiques of McLuhan’s ideas. Let’s watch a few videos to help us to understand his ideas in the context of today’s contemporary media.\
The media has the power to transform human nature and furthermore, no matter how powerful or persuasive the message, it’s the media that has changed our thought patterns and behavior. What does this mean for the “electronic environment” we inhabit? How do we decipher what media is fact and which is fiction? Discerning the difference is crucial now, more than ever.
“The idea is that the mediums have a far greater impact on the fundamental shape and nature of society than any message that is delivered through that medium. What has had a greater impact on society and the way that we interact with one another, all the content of every Youtube video ever made or the existence of Youtube itself? All the conversations that you’ve ever had, the existence of your cell phone?… How do the mediums that you use help shape the world?”
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE EXPLAINED BY DAN OLSON
This Is Marshall McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage (1967)
Created in 1967, this video could be describing the new mediums of today: the internet, social media, online video, video games, virtual reality, etc. Watch from start to 08:23 (or longer if you have time.)
“The electric age is changing you, it’s changing your family, it’s changing your neighborhood, it’s changing your education, your job, it’s changing your government, it’s changing your relationship to others. These little circuits are making our world go. The electric age is having a profound effect on us. We are in a period of fantastic change that’s coming about at fantastic speed. Your life is changing dramatically, and you are numb to it.”
Social Media is the Message
McLuhan believed that media (in the broadest sense) is an extension of humanity, of the human body, and mind. How does media affect us? Our bodies? Our relationships? Our understanding of the world? Are we being changed right now?
Tristan Harris, the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, believes social media as it exists now “is a simultaneous utopia and dystopia.” The utopia the user experiences is the dopamine hits and efficiency of on-demand everything, and the dystopia of the giant manipulative matrix that we are living in. How do we recognize the Matrix if we don’t know that we’re in the Matrix?
The Social Dilemma
In the documentary, The Social Dilemma, early leaders in social media, like Tristan Harris, have revealed that the medium of the internet, specifically social media, is becoming an existential threat to human society.
While he didn’t foresee the negative effect on society, consider Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic theories about electronic media in the late 1960’s, specifically how technology is an extension of humanity. Think about the current design of social media and the consequences of our growing dependence on it.
What will become of society if the persuasive technology used for for-profit social media advertising is allowed to continue as it is now? We will respond to this and other questions in our Discussion this week.
Below find the information covered in this session. Complete all of the following activities, videos, and assignments.
1. Representation and Context (90+ minutes)
Last week we examined Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about media. We learned that the medium is integral to the message and how we receive it. This week we will look at representation and context by exploring the use of stereotypes in media (print, radio, television, and online advertisements). In your second Research Paper, you will use the terminology and approaches that we cover this week to deconstruct a historical or contemporary advertisement that uses coded cultural message(s) of racial, ethnic, and/or gender stereotypes.
We will return to Saussure (sign, signifier, signified) and Peirce (symbol, icon, index) to refresh our understanding of early semiotics. We will incorporate the terms we learned in the last reading of Barthes (connoted, denoted, iconic messages, linguistic messages) and explore additional terms such as encoding, decoding, polysemic, myth, and naturalization. Lastly, we will look at Jamaican-born cultural studies scholar and activist Stuart Hall who explored how the dynamics of media representation reinforce societal power structures.
Terminology
Before we go any further, let’s make sure we all understand the semiotic terms we will need to deconstruct an advertisement.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Sign: A sign is anything that creates meaning composed of a signifier and a signified.
Signifier: A word, an image, a sound, anything we see, speak or hear to refer to the sign.
Signified: The concept that our mind conjures in relation to the sign.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Icon: signifier resembles the signified
Symbol: arbitrary learned relationship between the signifier and signified
Index: signifier is caused by or linked to the signified
Building on Saussure and Peirce, Barthes argued that when we construct a sign (encoding), its reception (decoding) does not take place in a vacuum. Our individual experience, society, and culture impact its meaning and how it is interpreted. In our reading last week, we looked at Barthes’ close-reading of the Panzani advertisement. Take a look at this breakdown of “Rhetoric of the Image” by Lesley Lanir where he covers some of the following terms.
Encoding: creating a message for transmission (i.e., creation and distribution of an advertisement)
Decoding: the process of interpreting a message (i.e., watching and interpreting an advertisement)
Connotation: symbolic or cultural meaning (a coded message)
Denotation: Literal meaning (a message without code)
Linguisticmessage: words used to convey meaning
Non-coded iconic message: an image with literal meaning
Coded iconic message: an image with a coded message
Polysemic: a sign that has multiple meanings
Myth: a widely accepted meaning of a sign
Naturalization: in a society, the repeated use of signs shapes its meaning
Here’s a 9+ minute video that takes us through some of these semiotic terms from a film perspective. Advertising takes a similar approach.
Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist. He looked at the power of mainstream media (advertising, TV, film, etc) to understand the representation of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. Here are some of the theories and terms associated with his work.
ReceptionTheory: This theory asserts that advertising and media are encoded and decoded. The creator encodes messages and values into media which are then decoded by the audience. Audiences will decode the media in different ways and not always in the way the creator intended.
Dominant, or Preferred Reading: how the creator wants the audience to view the advertisment or media.
Oppositional Reading: when the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning. This can happen when content is controversial or when the audience holds different beliefs or is of a different age or culture.
Negotiated Reading: a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings. The audience accepts some of the creator’s view, but also has their own views.
RepresentationTheory: There is not a true representation of people or events in media. Designers/creators try to ‘fix’ a ‘preferred meaning’ through ideology or stereotyping. Historically, this is driven by people in power.
This 6+ minute video explains Hall’s Reception Theory:
In this 55 minute documentary from 1997, Stuart Hall offers an extended meditation on representation. Take a close look at 36:00 he speaks about representation in advertising. Note that this video was created is prior to social media and the internet era that we live in now. Consider if the power structure has changed and why/why not? Make sure you are logged into CUNY SSO (single sign-on) to view.
The use of stereotypes to communicate meaning and sell products has a long history in advertising media and visual communications.
As we observed in our readings on the lack of diversity in design, leadership in the field of advertising media and design was (and still is) dominated by white, heterosexual men. And as we see from our recent study of media and the message, and representation above, mainstream media is a powerful force for intentionally or unintentionally reinforcing biases in society. It’s changing, but women and BIPOC designers in advertising are historically limited. That lack of diversity in creative leadership has allowed widely-held biases to continue to flourish.
Here are some sources to get you started in your research for Research Paper 2. If you have already chosen a historical 19th or 20th-century print advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell the product, review the sources below to support your research. If you haven’t yet chosen an advertisement, browse the references below to find some.
History of racial, gender, ethnic, cultural stereotypes in advertisements
Follow the assignment guidelines and prompts for Research Paper 2 – DUE Sunday, November 14th, at 11:59 pm
Working off of your reading response and research from last week on Roland Barthes’ 1977 essay, “Rhetoric of the Image,” select a historical 19th or 20th-century advertisement that uses obvious and/or documented racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes to sell the product.
In your paper, you’ll critically examine and deconstruct your historical advertising image in a manner similar to Barthes’ approach and include references to Saussure, Peirce, and Hall’s theories covered in today’s agenda.
