In modern day design should help bring balance to us. The design should have a purpose to help our surroundings, to help us, and to give the function priority. Design has an aesthetic aspect that it’s deemed as not essential and biased, it does not have it’s own purpose and many artists want to remove the expected look of a new creation. Design is different because it can impact how we see things, how we interpret media, It’s a way that bauhaus tried to unite the world through function beyond a particular community. Bauhaus saw that design plays a role in more than just functionality, but also the future communication and its potential for better understanding regardless of language and location. People need a reason to strive, a drive to achieve something, maybe people want to know why am I building this project. Designers want to show their talent, they may want to help, to be a part of history, make a living, enhance their respective field, could be that they were inspired by some sort of event good or bad. Technology has created many new jobs and also replaced others. Designers work together with technology to create new tools and to enhance a user’s productivity, there are other technologies that have made new discovery possible. Technology can help a designer test and see how effective their work is, does it bring a function or balance into society, or does it push us forward. Many technology can help those with disability and also connect us from anywhere. Designers can enhance previous technology to fit new changing trends. Designers face many problems and sometime backlash for creations which are not well thought out and do not benefit all. Some creations are not optimized or lack flexibility. Some are biased and don’t include certain populations. Designers have to set an example and be responsible for what happens with creation, its influence, and how it may positively or negatively affect society.
Author: Mark Gutiérrez
These artists wanted to renew different media or art to focus on its function. Bayer wanted to remove the aesthetics of typography and change the way grammar works to suit the new no serif and no capital letters in his universal typeface. Bayer also thinks that different languages pose a barrier to typography and how we communicate using typography. I think that combining photography and typography is already proving to be effective at communicating a thought or concept. Functionality over form has made new inventions like responsive design. Medias should combine to improve the message that one wants to convey. As Moholy-Nagy said, photography has aid typography in advertisement, the combination of the message in typographic format and the image to further point what this message is about. Language can determine the typography and more, Bayer himself removed “unnecessary” design to fonts and mentioned that the grammar must change to fit this design. He removes capital letters as he deemed it non-essential aspects of fonts and created his universal typeface. The education should bring out the creative side of the artist and remove outside expectations of aesthetic and works that don’t become real live project or apply to their field. Well, the idea of not connecting the students work with real projects is something that most people nowadays would consider them like a waste of time and not productive, as the end goal is to work in a particular field. In today’s age fonts are expected to be readable and legible and so sans serif is a more common, font although fonts still use capital letters.
Barthes makes an interesting point that images have intentionally messages, specifically in advertisement. Like we discussed in class ads can be targeted towards a certain demographic. He talks about “Italianicity” a lot throughout this reading and I think that advertisement purposely add subtle or maybe not so subtle hints of things a specific audience would be able to identify. Referring to his reading, he mentions Italy associate with pizza, which would be more like a culture aspect of that image, to target people who enjoy pasta and Italians.
One of the most interesting things about this reading was the concept of finding a limit to the meaning of an image, which he also wanted to answer by writing this paper. Is there a limit to the meaning of an image? He was questioning how an image gets its meaning. The topic of signifiers is highlighted in this section. Learning about the history and the origin of an image and its meaning. I thought about a cat some of its meaning as an image. A cat is a living organism (animal), can be a pet, it’s seen as cute, and in some places not domestic cats, but Tigers are considered guardians of a city, where lions are iconic and statues of lions are common in buildings, usually at the entrance, potentially representing a guarding or safety. With these in mind, I wonder what else they can mean? Realistically, I’d say images have finite meanings, even those that have stars in them. The concept of infinite may be applicable to a few things. A JavaScript loop is infinite in concept, but only when certain conditions are in place. Space is always expanding, so technically it is infinite. Numbers can increase, but doesn’t that mean that it’s always finite? Aside from the number of meanings an image can have, I think there are a few other factors that can add to an image. The perfect example is a location and how it is perceived in different places or living organisms. Water is something that humans, animals, and plants need and so we all need it see it as a source of survival, and humans and animals use it to clean their bodies. You could also clean a plant with water, but rain can do that naturally for the most part. A tool like a phone is not seeing as useful to a plant and most likely just a toy for a cat.
A lot of the authors hinted that hand-made work would be replaced by machines. Lissitzky used Gutenberg as an example of the new changes brought by technology. Rodchenko was tired of working by hands and new that this age would remove a lot of the manual work thanks to new ways to perform tasks. I’m not sure if some of them were also mentioning that art would change to digital; maybe photoshop? I guess for Marinetti he felt that artists’ work were overlooked and so it was useless and then suggested that they would destroy museums and places where art is often showcased.
Rodchenko kept referring to lines and grid which is pretty much how a lot of softwares are. Grids are essential in design in general. It’s interesting he uses the shape square which to mean refers to the creation of pixel used in every device.
I think that Marinetti would not agree with the rest. They all seem to be focused on art and technology but not on the same page. Lissitzky and Rodchenko mentioned the new age of technology and how it would replace a lot of the old ways of doing things. I think that Marinetti war theme is problematic. He tries to glorify war and also to dislike a lot movements that are often seen as empowering. I think that technology remains the future even now.
Language is a verbal form of communication. Language is more about sound or what we call speech. There are accents even in writing. The concept of accent is present when someone speaks in their secondary language or attempt to. One of the popular accents is the French; an accent often used in movies. Another popular accent would be a sailor’s. For human, language is different from other forms of communication because it uses the tongue movement. While sounds can be made in many ways, for speech between humans to happen the main thing is to be able to produce sound and have the right tongue imitation, hence the term mother tongue. There are different degree’s of stablished communication depends on how experienced the person is in that language. The less experience means that there are misunderstandings and commonly hard to understand what someone is trying to communicate. I tried to learn to count to 10 in German and I had a hard time pronouncing the number 3 (drei). It’s almost pronounced like “dry” in English, but it needs an extra effort from your throat, almost like expelling air while saying dry. I was listening to a German speaker while repeating it out loud. I noticed that the best way to learn a new language is to repeat it out loud and of course to first listen to a native speaker. When you do it out loud you can hear yourself and see why it didn’t sound the same. After many attempts I was able to get it. I can count to 10 in german.
Language in design is used to communicate what the business is about. Also, depending on the language it can be assumed that that’s the main target audience, although not the only target audience. Signs can be used universally to represent something. One of the most common signs are the male and female silhouettes, used for the bathroom indication of set gender. Signs can be used in graphic communication to let the user know what they are seeing. On a website the cursor(arrow) changes according to what it’s interacting with. If you want to click a button the cursor will turn into a hand with a finger pointing towards the button. People often associate icons or signs to a certain thing/s, like do or don’t, such as when to cross the street and when to wait. On a website we all know if a website says “loading…” or maybe even “…” it means don’t do anything, if you want to access that content. With all of this in mind you can potentially make bring in more customer into purchasing one of your products. A great example is how youtube has a thumbnail and the graphic can really make someone click on a video. Using this same formula you can intrigue someone with a catchy word or phrase or image. On a website it’s important to make your call of action stand out. You can use many things to get this right, maybe try a button design; as people know a button is something to interact with compared to like an underline text. Essentially, make it stand out with some sort of graphic, as a button is just a rectangle silhouette.
Finally, I think that both numbering and graphic systems show that it’s very effective to create representations of set object you want to communicate. It’s so easy to attach meaning to something like the male and female silhouette to represent the male and female restroom. The best part is you may not even need to speak the language to understand its meaning. This may be good or bad depending on what it is. I think for the most part these signs are used for, the purpose; explaining what this facility or object does in a quick way and universally mostly.
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