So I wanted to talk a little bit about typographic deconstruction, which was a movement that happened starting in the 1970s and it went on through the 90s. So we'll talk about some of the key influential designers that were part of this movement and artists. So deconstruction is the potential of layering of imagery and multiple readings and it's kind of exploring old ways of looking at things. and then deconstructing.
And it's approaching design without ties to history and past theories. So one of the important visual artists that kind of began this movement was April Greiman. And April Greiman studied at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland from 1970 to 1971. And she was a student of Armin Hoffmann.
Wolfgang Weingart and she was really influenced by the international typographic style. If you look at her work, and we're going to kind of go through some imagery, her style includes layering type to make it kind of look like it's floating in space. She also uses geometric shapes, exaggerated letter spacing, and eccentric color.
Sometimes she creates this real sense of depth by combining graphical elements with photography, which is one of the things that kind of brought her to utilizing Macintosh technology. So in 1976, Griman moved to Los Angeles, where she established this kind of multidisciplinary approach that really extends into her current practice. And she...
In the 1970s, she really rejected the belief that was among many of her contemporary designers that computers and digitalization would compromise the international style. Instead, she exploited pixelization and other digitization errors and really felt they were integral parts of digital art. And this is a position she really has held throughout her career.
In 1982, she became head of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts, also known as CalArts. And in 1984, she lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual Communications, as she felt graphic design was kind of limiting to future designers. She really wanted to expand it. And so what you really see in her work is a lot of layering, a lot of emphasis on the depth. There's combinations of graphical elements and visual imagery, and you can see that also in the Swiss International Typographic style.
But what she's doing differently is she's starting to really utilize computers, and she often would bring in part of the pixelated image into the space. And it's really interesting if you look at some of her work and you look at... She has these areas where it's just this like...
zoomed in area that's really pixelated and she's kind of paying homage to the computer and to the digital environment that she's designing in. She's you know does works in different disciplines and so this was a show just an installation of some of her video work and it's it's always to me I really appreciate how every design she creates is really visually interesting and powerful. She's really thinking about type in different ways. She's exploring color, graphical image, and placement. And she is really utilizing the computer in an innovative, interesting way.
And remember, this is all new. Before, you know, the 1980s, computers weren't part of the design process. You know, the computers emerged with the Macintosh and that's when designers started to use them. So she's really a pioneer in this new technology. Many designers were not embracing it at the time.
Okay, so we'll just kind of keep going and looking at her imagery. So, you know, around the time, like in 19, I'd say the late 1980s, there was a designer named David Carson. And David Carson is really interesting because he wasn't formally trained and he didn't approach design in the same way that other well-known designers approached it in. He basically really just came in with force and decon... constructed all of the preconceived notions about design that had actually been built up and thought about and were in place because of the Swiss design movement and their approach to educating designers.
And what David Carson is really recognized for is breaking the rules. He's really inspired a generation of young designers with his bold understanding of cultural style. He wasn't formally trained.
He never went to design school. He had a few seminars in design, but he was a sociologist. That's what he went to college for. And then he became a high school teacher.
And he didn't draw. He basically didn't have a lot of the tools that formally trained designers had, but he jumped in with force to the digital revolution and started using a computer. And he...
You know, as a 26-year-old high school teacher in Oregon, he changed his whole life when he received a flyer for a summer graphic design program in Tucson, and he went to this summer graphic design program, and he got excited about design, and he really embraced these digital tools and this new software that included QuarkXPress and PageMaker. QuarkXPress is no longer around, and, you know, this software was kind of the first of its kind. And he started to work in design and his first job really, his first major career move was when he became art director for Transworld Skateboarding and then surfing magazine named Beach Culture.
And Beach Culture was a really innovative magazine and his design started to really kind of take off in 1992. He got hired by a magazine called Raygun, and he really inspired young designers who sought to kind of tap into the freedoms of this new bold style that he was using. And, you know, his big statement that he made was, don't mistake legibility for communication. And in kind of a really different philosophical view, he felt that design could be really personal and that you should bring yourself into the process and that you should communicate your own ideas about what was being said in the piece.
So because he was commenting on a lot of articles, he really sought to kind of bring in information about his feelings on what was being communicated. And Ray Gunn was this American alternative rock and roll magazine and it was in... being published in Santa Monica, and it had a very chaotic, abstract style, not always legible. And it was really innovative in that musical artists and pop culture icons that were featured in this magazine were really ahead of the curve.
So Radiohead, Bjork, Eminem were all featured in this magazine way before their competitors. And Carson really approached the design in a very personal way. And he deconstructed typography.
extensively in Ray Gunn and he didn't feel that type had to be legible, which is, as we know from studying Swiss design, a completely different philosophical approach to that. And so often you see in his design type that you can barely read, type that goes on to white that becomes kind of almost blurry, type overlaid on top of imagery that makes it compete with the imagery. but he did have this really interesting visual aesthetic so when you look at his designs there's something interesting and compelling and you're really intrigued by it so he had this kind of almost intuitive approach that worked for him he could make design interesting and break the rules which is actually really challenging and that's what you'll find in this book cover project it's not super easy to make interesting work when you're breaking all the rules but he managed it he has this kind of innate ability and he also um you know prove that the audience has a lot more tolerance for type that you can't read or even even fully see the audience will read it if it's good design and so you know I want you to really look at him and we're gonna be talking more about him as kind of the weeks go on because you're gonna do a project on him and so he's really an exciting designer and I'm gonna show you also a TED conference talk that he participated in this week so you can kind of get a sense of who he is. But lots of other things were happening in his line, but one thing that David Carson did is he started... He was working for non-mainstream magazines.
So Ray Gunn was not mainstream. It was a very small publication. It had a specific audience. But what happened was he got the attention of other designers. One of those designers was named Neville Brody, who we're going to talk about in a little bit.
But Neville Brody designed for magazines like Emigre. And there were other publications out there that were doing really innovative things with design. So Emma Gray was a digital type foundry in Berkeley, and it really coincided with the birth of the Macintosh computer.
And it created some of the very first digital layouts, and they're pretty interesting. Oh, here's some more David Carson work. David Carson eventually started to work for corporations like Pepsi, and he did some design work for them. But here's some of his layout with his work. So going back to Emma Gray.
So Emma Gray... was really innovative, using the Macintosh in really creative ways. They received numerous innovation awards.
And now there's a complete set of the magazine at the Museum of Modern Art. So Google Emma Gray, and you'll see some really interesting designs. They had kind of a long run. They were around from 1984 to 2005. And they approached typography in really interesting ways. And so this particular slide that I'm showing you, you can see that it's typewriter font.
It's cut to the edge of the page. The text is actually becoming the image, the graphical elements, and it's interesting. So typographic deconstruction occurred because there was a lot of thought to really disrupting the system. and making type its own visual element that was interesting to look at and that communicated a message that was maybe something the designer was really interested in communicating. And so it became a really vibrant force in the 90s.
And so when Neville Brody started to get excited about David Carson and the way he was approaching his work, it was pretty significant because Neville Brody at the time was a very...... established designer and well respected. And so we'll talk a little bit about him. Neville Brody was born in Southgate, London, and he studied at the London College of Printing. And he was taking on big clients like Nike at the time that he got inspired by David Carson.
And so if you look at some of his Nike design work, you see a lot of that David Carson influence. But in his, he was a little bit older then, but when he was first starting out, he was really influenced by the 1977 punk rock scene. And there was a lot going on with album cover design.
The whole punk movement was emerging. And so you can see some of that in his style. This is another advertising campaign he did for Macromedia Fireworks. Very David Carson inspired.
And we'll just kind of look at some of his other design work. You can see he was really doing innovative things with type and image and with layout. And he designed over 20 typefaces during his career.
He was art director for a magazine called Face Magazine. And he participated in this project called Fuse Project. It was an interactive magazine that challenged ideas about typography.
And like, you know, April Griman and David Carson, and He was an avid user of the computer as a design tool and really promoted it and used it in his practice. And so I want you to just think about these designers and also thinking about the technology and how the technology changed and really kind of shaped this movement. So we've looked at a lot of movements, Art Nouveau, Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus, Swiss, Constructivism.
cubism, psychedelic, and now deconstruction. So take a look at Emma Gray, Ray Gunn, Fuse, and the punk movement, and that will kind of prepare you for doing this next design, which will be specifically about David Carson, and it'll be kind of a book cover on David Carson. And I want you to put, unlike Swiss design, I want you to put some of your emotion into it. Think about who he was. He was a surfer, a sociologist, a designer.
He worked for Raygun Magazine and try and communicate some of those things about him. So we'll be talking, like I said, a little bit more about David Carson in the next week or so.