Week11

For Heller, the issue of mainstream vs. subterranean is essential in the current design because, despite the stile’s popularity, designers often duplicate or steal ideas. Heller introduces the argument in the paragraph that current design became significant because marketers were continuously looking for new methods to express themselves and relied on modern culture to do it. Heller also continues to talk about how they will alter the work slightly if even that, then they reissue them, to the world as new products.

So, sometimes the original work goes unnoticed while the copy gets a lot of credit. As an artist student I couldn’t say I didn’t know that these types of things go on. It’s understandable to get inspiration from past products but to take old ideas and copy them just isn’t right and has a bad effect on the design world. For one when doing this you’re not really being creative and before you know it everyone will all have designs that look almost the same, which gets boring and would eventually lose the attention of the audience because it doesn’t intrigue them anymore. The underground designs had no formal link with the designs that came to mind. They did, however, emerge as a byproduct in order to deter the public’s attention. It is in fact, that the underground appears to have only two options for dealing with the mainstream: join it or change it. The underground will either adhere to or disconnect from the ideology provided, depending on the individual and the ideology presented.

What gets our audiences and get people looking at what our doings are our unique styles and how we present things to them, it’s all about standing out. For instance, in Nike ad saying, when it comes to the designer, the phrase that Spike Lee used was “Just Do It”. He stole this slogan from a man named Gary Gilmore, who when on death row said, “let’s do it”. Dan Wieden then took off lets and added just and that’s how Nike came up with their famous slogan. That’s one of the only times I can think of when they stole an idea or altered one to make a new product or campaign. This is where the designs or the designer that I will be addressing for my final presentation fit into this separation.

Underground design that affects related jobs is mainstream, and corporate culture steals ideas from the underground counterculture movement. The specific posters I chose was the collaborations between Michael Jordan and Spike Lee. When reading an article on what was the inspiration for the ad campaign, I found they were trying to sell Michael Jordan sneakers, there were a bunch of Michael Jordan sneakers coming out at this time. When doing this Nike tried to tap into the “Sneaker Head Culture”. The shoe industry was growing fast, and people started to have somewhat of an addiction to shoes. Most people were fine with a couple pairs of sneakers, but some people were collecting more than a hundred pairs of shoes. I think these are ways has the work in question shaped the mainstream.

Sneaker Head is people who is collecting shoes

Citations

https://nike-justdoit.weebly.com/influence-on-pop-culture.html. (n.d.).

Barnard, Malcolm. Graphic Design As Communication, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook