Category: Response (Page 3 of 15)

This was an interesting read because it reminded me of music. In the reading, psychedelia was explored, and even terms such as grunge and etc. This reminded me of music genres that weren’t widely heard on the radio or music shows. There were musicians whose weren’t widely seen as well. Once they gain recognition, they get signed and their label starts pouring promotions for them. Listeners would usually state that the musician and their music has changed because they have become mainstream. The question then lies with, is it a hood thing or bad thing to become mainstream? 

According to the article and from my understanding, mainstream in general seems to be something that is honed in on, exploited, and reproduced. It is within the popular margins because the results encompasses the larger audience. An example could be the Dance Dance Revolution game, that use popular techno and bass songs. The songs used are targeting the youth and therefore bring the genre popularity. The concerns start rising when it gets pulled into mainstream. I feel that it has but it tries to avoid it. Another similar game that could be considered mainstream is “Just Dance.”

In terms of advertising, mainstream could signify the techniques being overused and replicated n a different manner. For example, CoCa Cola and Pepsi, and others, are all beverages and they could all have similar advertising techniques but the design would look different. The target audience could be different but it’s within the same general population. Someone is always out there trying to think out of the box for the next new thing, but in the end it seems that once it’s found, it’ll also find its way into mainstream. I don’t think it’s so bad. 

Demers, Joanna. “Dancing Machines: ‘Dance Dance Revolution’, Cybernetic Dance, and Musical Taste.” Popular Music, vol. 25, no. 3, 2006, pp. 401–14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877663. Accessed 27 Apr. 2022.

Hyman, Michael R., et al. “Research on Advertising Ethics: Past, Present, and Future.” Journal of Advertising, vol. 23, no. 3, 1994, pp. 5–15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4188934. Accessed 27 Apr. 2022.

Heller, Steven. Merz to Emigre and Beyond : Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. Reprint pbk. ed., Phaidon, 2014.

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

Wow, so much to say here is my first reaction to this text.  Two big main points I think of are, how taking elements from other designers’ work is a huge part of the design process, and I also think of how many designers just blatantly copy other designers work and plug it into a different context.  

It’s interesting, there really is a fine line between copying a designer and gathering inspiration from a designer.  Sometimes it’s really debatable whether a designer copied someone else or just used elements of that designer’s signatures.  Sometimes, however, it is absolutely obvious how lazy a designer is because it is so clear that their work is a copy of someone else’s.  

There is an art director I immediately think of, who shall remain nameless, who copied almost every detail of a photograph made many years ago by a renowned British photographer and used it as an album cover for a new recording artist.  What’s interesting to me too is that many young consumers today were born after the original photograph was made, and have no idea that this recording artist’s album cover is an almost exact copy of that photograph.  I guess it’s true that, in a way, there really is nothing new out there.

Reading this article was interesting especially having music and advertisement being involved. My internship is working at a music firm where we advertise artists, brands, and content creators. In the article, “It was born in a small community that shared proclivities for sex, drugs, and anarchic behavior—all threatening to the mainstream. Kindred visual artists, musicians, and designers developed means of expression that helped define the culture’s distinct characteristics. Psychedelic art was a distinct vocabulary, influenced by earlier graphic idioms, that overturned the rigid rules of clarity and legibility put forth by the once avant-garde moderns. Through its very raunchiness it manifested the ideals of the youth culture. For a brief time it was decidedly a shock to the system. But as it gained in popularity (like when it appeared on the cover of Hearst’s Eye magazine or the sets of nbc’s Laugh-In) it turned into a code easily co-opted by marketers.” Psychedelic is a new look in the art, music, and entertainment industry but some people didn’t like the idea of drugs or any “bad influence” being involved. But it speaks for the youth, it’s aiming for a specific target audience. When Psychedelic started going big, marketers decided to look for ways to advertise and make a profit from it. In my job, my boss and I look at trends and turn them into our own assets to advertise an artist. The publicity that the trend is receiving will help us boost our exposure for the artist.

“In turn, the record labels advertised and packaged these bands using the very codes that signaled “alternative” to the growing youth market.” In today’s generation (music industry), Psychedelic is still labeled as “alternative.” Artists that I listen to like The Marias, Melanie Martinez, Paramore, and Cannons, their identity has substances of psychedelic (colors, using drugs as metaphors, music, appearances, visuals, typography) and are under the genre of alternative.

“All it takes is the followers of followers to cut a clear path to the mainstream. Indeed the mainstream embraces almost anything “edgy,” although once the label is applied it is no longer on the edge.” The people have the power to make some content/song go viral. Also, when labels are not familiar with an “edgy” look, it is looked at as “unprofessional.” But when labels are open-minded or see that this “Edgy” look is going big on social media, they will decide to work with it because they’re going to make a profit from it. It’s a good and bad thing, it’s good because they’re giving artists a chance to light up their identity with their music, and bad because if labels don’t see numbers going up or are not willing to give the Psychedelic a chance, then it’s not seen as a “unique” style.