Madeleine Morley; Master László Moholy-Nagy Saw Photoshop Coming, 90 Years Ahead of Time (2019)

Madeleine Morley; Master László Moholy-Nagy Saw Photoshop Coming, 90 Years Ahead of Time (2019), AIGA Eye on Design, László Moholy-Nagy; Typophoto (1925): Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field by Helen Armstrong on pages 32-34, Jan Tschichold, “The Principles of the New Typography” 1928: Graphic Design Theory: Readings From the Field by Helen Armstrong on pages 35-38.

Questions / Prompts

  • According to these authors, what is their aesthetic approach, and why is it better than the traditional design/typography of the past?
  • What role should typography, photography, and other media play in shaping a new kind of design? 
  • How did technological advances influence aesthetic forms and theories in early 20th Century design?

Response

Moholy-Nagy used typophoto and felt that typophoto would be a powerful antidote for the slippery nature of the text, which means that the combination of words and imagery would help someone better understand the text that they read. Jan Tschichold focuses on the arrangement of the text. He claims that centered text is bad because it is hard to read with all the different sizes of text being placed one above the other.

 Typography, photography, and other media were a big role in shaping a new kind of design by creating books and magazines. Typography helped create new types of designs. For example headlines for magazines and certain brand names as logos. Photography is its own kind of design and I feel that it’s only going to improve further. Besides the quality of the image, I think that designers will find even more ways of telling a story just through a single image.

The technological advances influenced aesthetic forms and theories by create new forms of typography art. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy created typography combined with photos to create typophoto and Jan Tschichold created typography in an asymmetrical format as an expression to their movement. Which allowed printing to produce unique books and posters to have a new type of designs.

Annotations

Hitherto

Raison D’être

Axial Arrangement