Jonathan Valero – February 4th

After having read both of the texts I was able to gain insight on inspirations old designers had and how they incorporated old ideas into their modern works.  Before I get into that I have to say when I was reading Helen Armstrong, Introduction: Revisiting the Avant-Garde from Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, all I could think was wow this is pretentious after reading it over 2-4 times I was able to understand it. An example of this is during this quote:

“Out of this recent push toward authorship, new collective voices hearken
ing back to the avant-garde are emerging. As a result of technology, content generation by individuals has never been easier. (Consider the popularity of
the diy and the “Free Culture” movements.) 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, more anonymous than individual, is beginning to emerge.”

This is a lot just to say technology makes it easy for anyone to easily and anonymously create content I know that authors probably have to be very articulate to please their publishers but I feel like the overcompliacation of the writing would turn off a more casual reader who might be interested in the topics being discussed  , alright rant over.

To answer one of the questions given contemporary designers should always keep a close eye to archaic techniques because nothing in design in original everything is stolen unless you were the one to create it. All design finds its roots in not just inspiration but taking what’s inspired you and expanding on it and making it your own. We can look at the font styling of Counting Sheep in the text, images are put as a visual for the reader to better understand their use as a numerical value which i’m sure the original designers of the symbols or tallies did not plan for them to be used this way but that’s what happens when we incorporated whats already been made into our modern works.

The visuals in Counting Sheep are not only aesthetically interesting from a designs stand point but also just as eye candy while reading the passage itself. When I was reading both the passages Counting Sheep was much easier to read despite being longer because it has those symbols as little distractions to break the long blocks of text. They served not only as an aesthetic distraction but a functional one this is an advantage of using archaic techniques they can always be reworked and reused to solve modern problems, not all problems need new answers to resolve them some are just hidden in plain sight.

 

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