Month: September 2020 (Page 1 of 7)

Art in the past seem to lack personal creativity freedom. People were limited to what they learned and studied about art and design but were never taught the importance of how to create something from your own imagination. instead they learned how to do something in a specific way and continued on with that mind set. A new idea that can lead to new art for the future is how Gropius talks about theory. People just designed things for the sake of looks but never asked why? What is it suppose to do? why does it do that? and if thats what it does, how should it look. The theory behind design can help push art further into a better future.

Art and Language together in art can play a great role together. Where as images can represent a more emotional message with its visual. While Typography can read out the message that the story or image is trying to tell a better with more information than the image alone. Its important for language to play a roles so that it can make art universally understood.

I think when teaching students about art and design. They should always teach traditional and newer styles that exist during that teaching. It can give students plenty of options of how to approach what they work on and how they work on it besides just following on style, their minds can open up a world of combination of styles that they learned and make into something else. maybe start a new combination of styles that most people wouldnt think about. Similar to how we can mix two types of fonts as long as are still eligible and dont ruin the design and look.

what is lacking in art of the past? What sort of new strategies or ideas will lead to a new art for the future?  What role, according to these authors, should typography, photography, and other media play in the new art?  What role should language play in art and design? What should education or “the academy” teach artists about their field? Which of these ideas need to be updated and which continue to hold true in 21st century art and design?

The artist and the medium through which they express themselves are always evolving. Whether the artist evolves and changes their medium or the medium evolve forcing the artist to adapt or reinvent themselves. As society continues its course through modernism, changes will be inevitable and thus a stand-up against technology would be futile. Typography throughout its history has played different roles in conveying messages and ideas. Over time, its role changes, and the stoplight has often shifted to a point where its relevance questions have risen. And its role in the mind of the reader.

Beatrice Warde defined the role of printings as the courier of thoughts, ideas, and images from one mind to other minds. Before there was photography, the type carried the duty of providing scenery, and visual ideas. Through the rise of technology, we’ve come to succumb to our own laziness and lost touch with the art of the written word. Ideas and thoughts have nonetheless not stopped its transfer from one mind to another.

Machines will not get better than they were yesterday and become even proficient at accomplishing their tasks. Their intent was to make lives better and provide precision that humans otherwise couldn’t. While some see machines as a threat, another approach would be to utilize them for their core functionality; aid. It applied to art as well, to create new and more meaningful experiences.

According to Walter Gropius, “A work of art depends on the talent of the individual who creates it”. This is true in some way, but what happens when the creator of such work of art only knows the fundamentals and has never explore past them. I believe in order for an artist to produce a wok of art that is meaningful to someone else and carries within some type of message, that artist needs to explore the outside world for answers.

The artist themselves need to be free and express however they need necessary or according to the current circumstances. This can apply to now a days when a designer takes classes according to their major or as ended to graduated. Some of us may not have the time for extra courses to feed our minds with new ideas, or some of us may not have the money to attend these new courses. Therefore we are limited to learning the fundamentals of design without exploring other branches of design itself.

With new technology emerging, most of the hand made designs become machine made. With this new technology I believe there is a loss in the essence of typography hand made with fresh ink, color etc. Herbert states “the manual skill and approach of the craftsman was seen to be inevitably replaced by mechanical techniques.” I understand the advancement of technology will progress throughout time and all we can do now is learn of adapt to it. We have to learn new skills in order to not be left behind in the field of design.

Aside from the literal role design plays in the world today, which is to produce art to advertise industrial products, “Creating design theory is about building one’s own community, constructing a social network that questions and illuminates everyday practice” (Armstrong 7). “In contrast to the predominant modern concept of the designer as a neutral transmitter of information, many designers are now producing their own content.” (Armstrong 10). The shift in the focus of design has produced an array of work from designers such as their own magazines, theoretical texts, books, and products. According to author Bruno Munari in his book, Design as Art, design isn’t about serving a select group and producing masterpieces anymore. The role design should play in the world today should be serving the community and connecting art to life. Essentially, to humble the idea of what art is and bring it down from its pedestal into reality.

According to designer and author Helen Armstrong, one of the things that distinguishes the field of design from other creative occupations is how exposed the work of a designer is yet how little acknowledgement the designer and subculture of design get. “Design is visible everywhere, yet it is also invisible—unnoticed and unacknowledged” (Armstrong 7). The field of design was built upon the idea of anonymity, the goal simply being to deliver the client’s message. For example, the objective of the academy Bauhaus at Weimar was truth and clarity; they believed “…artists had to detach emotionally from their work in favor of a more rational and universal approach…cleansing visual language of subjectivity and ambiguity” (Armstrong 11). In her essay,“Dematerialization of Screen Space”, Jessica Helfand challenges the current design community to become the new avant-garde. “Helfand asks that we think beyond technical practicalities and begin really “shaping a new and unprecedented universe.” Just as designers in the early twentieth century rose to the challenges of their societies… Delving into theoretical discussions that engage both our past and our present is a good start.” (Armstrong 15). She believes it is important for designers to think theoretically in order to address the new challenges of society like designers of the past did in their time. Part of the prospectus of the Bauhaus read, “‘Thus our task is to make a new kind of artist…wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work’” (Munari 27). Even in the foundation of art design that Walter Gropius founded at Bauhaus, the goal was always to make the designer think and not succumb to fear of exploring new ideas. 

Technology has been playing a role in design for a very long time, occupying the minds of designers with the same questions that past designers also had. Young designers have recently been taking the route of something referred to as “authorship”. They produce their own content, sign their work, and brand themselves; this being possible through technology. “Digital technology puts creation, production, and distribution into the hands of the designer, enabling such bold assertions of artistic presence” (Armstrong 9). Technology is allowing designers to create in a way that they couldn’t before, and it is changing the dynamic of the producer-consumer relationship. This is also removing the anonymity designers have in their field. They can now market themselves in large platforms with their name written all over their work, whether that’s on a website, a watermark, their social media, etc. “As a result of technology, content generation by individuals has never been easier… As more and more designers, along with the rest of the general population, become initiators and producers of content, a leveling is occurring. A new kind of collective voice…is beginning to emerge” (Armstrong 10). This collective creative voice that is being referred to has more to do with the subculture of design than with the individual designer itself. The platform of design is being used as an open platform to share ideas, tools, and intellectual property, moving the subculture out of the shadows of anonymity more into a world of leaders, and advocates for social issues. 

An issue that remains present in the face of design today is the identity crisis design is facing. “Issues like authorship, universality, and social responsibility, so key to avant-garde ideology, remain crucial to contemporary critical and theoretical discussions of the field” (Armstrong 15). While ideas like authorship are new and evolving, universality is an old one that though designers are trying to move away from, they can’t help. Because of the use of the same technology being used by a lot of current designers, there is bound to be a universal component to a lot of designs. There is also social responsibility, which has all a history, present and future in the world of design. The field of design is figuring out a mix of new and old methods and ideologies while still theoretically questioning them. Designers are responsible for solving this problem in order to connect their art to the real world. Like Bruno Murani said, “The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and public, between living people and art as a living thing…There, should be no such thing as art divorced from life.” (Murani 25).