The Bauhaus influence

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From the course by California Institute of the Arts

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

1072 ratings

California Institute of the Arts

Ideas from the History of Graphic Design

1072 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Graphic Design

This condensed survey course focuses on four key periods or themes from the history of design. Together we’ll trace the emergence of design as a recognized practice, why things look the way they do, and how designers approached specific design problems in their work. Each week, a short quiz will test your knowledge of concepts, and a short reflective assignment will give you the opportunity to analyze the questions designers ask themselves today. This is an essential course for emerging designers entering the field, or for students interested in learning more about visual culture and analysis. No previous experience is required.

From the lesson

Modernism in America

Modernism in mid-century America through the eyes of four key designers.

The Bauhaus influence4:54

A symbolic language4:45

Case Study: Scope Magazine1:17

Developing corporate identities3:07

Meet the Instructors

Louise Sandhaus
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art
Lorraine Wild
Faculty, Program in Graphic Design
School of Art

There's a lot of argument about when American design really became modern.

But a lot of people agree that the start of graphic design as we

know it in the United States began with the work of a group of younger

people who were kind of looking at things going on in Europe, mainly the Bauhaus

and then looking at modern art and starting to think more creatively about

the kinds of commercial assignments that commercial artist could get, and

started making work that fused typography and symbols together in really new ways.

It's always hard to look at work of the past and recognize just how unusual

it looked because we don't know what we're comparing it to,

but everything we're looking at in this sequence

is work that really appeared radically new when it came out.

I want to start with the work of Lester Beall.

Lester Beall was a young designer who went to the University of Chicago.

He graduated in the middle of the Depression.

In one of his memoirs, he writes about spending a lot of time in the library

looking at magazines about modern art and

contemporary art both in Europe and the United States.

And when he starts to make work, he starts making really interesting and

unusual things like discover for small magazine that was actually speaking

to an audience of printers, it's called PM. It meant Printers Monthly.

And it was just an industry magazine published out in New York that

mostly carried news about the printing business but would also have special

articles about ideas that were going on in the contemporary world that would be of

interest to people making the advertising that the printers were hoping to print.

This is a cover by Lester Beall for an issue that's dedicated to the Bauhaus.

And the interesting thing is it uses black and red and the big,

almost abstract, contrasty composition were just the initials ‘P’ and

‘M’, and then two red bars create the form of the cover.

It's super striking.

But the interesting thing is that P, which looks like one of those old Victorian

wood-cut Ps, is not really a Bauhaus element.

It's something that would have, to Lester Beall's mind,

been more American, more American vernacular.

And the way he kind of makes a collision with that P and

then that big square serif abstracted M is really a beautiful way

of kind of reclaiming now this new visual language for an American audience.

He created some really unusual work at that time that utilized

a lot of things that came out of modernist work in Europe,

like this cover of a book called Modern Pioneers in Peoria,

where he manages to put together an airbrushed illustration of Davy Crockett,

laid over a picture of a factory, laid over machinery, the back cover with the ‘h’.

You have to put the idea together in your mind by looking at all of the pieces of

the composition, so it connects the present and the past.

So that the idea Pioneers in Peoria is not only the history of Peoria but

also pioneering industries.

And then the entire thing is kind of tied together with this energetic,

swoopy black line that is meant, I think, to create a mental map for you.

Lester Beall moved to New York City, and

he started doing a lot of freelance design.

This is a book for a company that made photo engravings.

Those were the kinds of metal slugs that were needed to

print illustrations in newsprint at that time.

He, instead of showing you exactly how photo engraving works,

uses an image of a hand and the idea of transferring an image in the positive and

the negative was a fragment of a photo of a hand cut-off by that

big black diagonal line that divides the double-page spread.

And then that big swooping white shape behind it all,

which creates a kind of frame that doesn't exactly fit but which has this great

visual energy around a straightforward description on how photo engraving works.

Lester Beall, in this piece, has re-imagined how you could describe or

teach somebody about a technical process.

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