Julia Simons's List: Graphic Design Timeline (Art History)

• Kidd moved in 1986 to New York, where he would catch his big break designing the book cover of Chrichton’s 1990 “Jurassic Park.”

   

    

     

   

• Q: How did you get into the business of jacket design?

   

  Chip Kidd: It happened to be the first job that I was offered. I studied graphic design in Pennsylvania, where I grew up, but I knew that when I graduated I would go to New York. So, I did. I just went to every graphic design place that would see me, but eventually ended up at Random House. And it was an entry-level job, as assistant to the art director. Well, it wasn’t really what I had in mind, but I tried it for a while. It gave me a start, and it’s 24 years in October.

• Q: How did your persona in the design world emerge?

   

  Kidd: The thing about book covers, I think probably in most parts of the world, is that the designer gets credit on the jacket for what they’ve done. For most graphic designers, that’s not the case, in terms of how it works in print or TV commercials; you don’t see who made something on the piece itself. But in graphic design, you do. What was getting out there was the work itself. Over time that built up, to the point where people started to recognize my name.

   

• Q: What other forms of art you enjoy? I’ve spotted elements of popular art in your work. Do you identify with what was going on in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s?

   

  Kidd: I’m definitely affected by it. But I have very strong opinions about it, in that I think somebody like Roy Liechtenstein basically is a fraud who got everybody to buy into what he was doing. And paintings about comics became far more important to critics than the comics themselves. I’m much more interested in the comics themselves. I couldn’t give a shit about a decontextualized panel that was stylized by this person. But everybody bought into it, amazingly.

   

  Similarly, do I think Warhol was a great artist? Yes. But should he have given half the money to the guy who actually designed the canvases or the Brillo box or any of that other stuff that he totally appropriated? It’s based on something that somebody else made — that person should get credit, too. And they didn’t. I’m very much against that. It’s an abuse of the original designer.
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• Andrew Warhola, Jr., better known by his artistic name Andy Warhol, was born on the 6th of August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US. He became famous as the leading figure of the artistic movement called pop art
• After his death, Warhol's work was the subject of many retrospective exhibitions and a museum, The Andy Warhol Museum, was established in his hometown Pittsburg in memory of his art and life. Andy Warhol's work achieved stratospheric prices, up to US $100 million, only comparable with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, and Gustav Klimt, amongst few others.
• His first fine art works appeared in group exhibitions in New York in the beginning of the fifties. He had to wait until the beginning of the sixties to have his first solo exhibitions, the first being in 1962 in Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery where works such as Marilyn Diptych and 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills were exhibited.
• It was in the sixties that Warhol started his works on celebrities and iconic American products. Using his silkscreen method, he produced paintings of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali amongst others. It was also in the sixties that he opened his studio The Factory which became a meeting point for a wide variety of artists, writers, and celebrities. Andy Warhol and the pop art movement, was heavily criticized by art critiques that saw their work as a capitulation to consumerism. Andy Warhol claimed that Coca-Cola, for example, was a great symbol of America for it crossed all social barriers being affected, and consumed by, the rich and the poor equally.
• It was also in the sixties, more precisely between 1963 and 1968, that Andy Warhol produced most of his films and videos.
• Throughout the seventies, Warhol's work became more entrepreneurial and he spent much of his time with portrait commissions by rich patrons such as Mick Jagger, Liza Minneli, John Lennon and the Sha of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It was also in the seventies that Warhol did his famous Mao Zedong painting, founded the Interview magazine with Gererd Malaga, and published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.
• It was also in the 80s that he produced his famous painting of Michael Jackson, in the peak of his success with the album Thriller. He was in one hand once more heavily criticized for being a superficial, commercial artist that offered no depth in his works and in the other hand praised by other critics that saw in his work the ultimate expression of the spirit of the seventies America. Warhol also had a difficult relation to the media, to whom he either played dumb or refused to explain anything. In his words: "Just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
• Andy Warhol became known as the "Pope of Pop" for his role played in the development and diffusion of pop art. With pop art popular subjects, celebrities, mass produced objects, were included in the artist's palette. Such ideas was already being in use by artists such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Andy Warhol went as far as reducing his images to the icon's themselves, subtracting as the artistic "touch" from them and turning the production more and more into an almost factory like style. Emblematic are his painting of Campbell's soup cans, which he claimed to have eaten for most of his life, the images of celebrities produced with silkscreen, for which he had many assistants producing multiples with variations dictated by himself, and a BMW commission to pain a race car which Warhol did in a total of 23 minutes.

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• Born August 28th, 1917, one of the most prolific and important creators in the world of comics is Jacob Kurtzberg also known as Jack Kirby, the King of Comics. A writer/artist from New York, Kirby is responsible for a huge majority of the modern Marvel/DC superheroes and characters that we love, especially at Marvel where they’re still celebrating the success of last year’s blockbuster film the Avengers, which was originally created by Kirby (along with some guy named Stanley or something, I forget). Kirby’s creations range far and wide, and while they aren’t all just at the two most popular publishers of comics, it’s almost impossible not to find yourself a fan of his work and influence due to the sheer creative output he was capable of.

• The partnership of Simon and Kirby was hired to work the newly formed Timely Comics Company. The Timely line was, then, distinguished only by its two star-characters: The Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. More stars were needed then, and Simon & Kirby set about to create likely prospects, such as Hurricane, Tuk the Cave-Boy, Mercury, the Vision, Red Raven, Comet Pierce and, finally, the character whose creation was to bring the team into prominence – Captain America. (Moonlighting for another company, they also produced the first full issue of Captain Marvel Adventures.)
• By 1959, Kirby was doing almost all his work for the company previously known as Timely and/or Atlas, soon to be known as the Marvel Comics Group.

• A slight super-hero revival at other companies was leading to renewed reader interest. With nothing to lose, Marvel decided to try a few super-heroes. The first Fantastic Four, issued in 1961, marked the beginning. The product of Kirby and Marvel’s editor and head writer, Stan Lee, it was a shaky start but one which aroused interest and considerable fan mail.

   

  Editor Stan Lee had developed a new method of producing their books. Instead of beginning with a full script, which the artist would then illustrate, they began with an idea which would be discussed in conference between scripter and penciler and then drawn and paced by the artist as he worked. Dialogue and captions would be added afterwards to fit the pictures. This method allowed greater latitude in the artwork, but necessitated that the penciler not only be a competent artist, but, also a good story-man in his own right. Kirby, of course, was. And, the other members of Marvel’s small art staff at the time, Steve Ditko, Don Heck and Dick Ayers, were, also. Lee described the division of labor once by saying, ‘Some artists, of course, need a more detailed plot than others. Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean, I’ll just say to Jack, “Let’s let the next villain be Dr. Doom’… or I may not even say that. He may tell me… he just about makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing.”
• This technique, combining Kirby’s solid storytelling and Lee’s flashy dialogue, inaugurated the Marvel Super-Hero line.
• The Incredible Hulk
• The Mighty Thor
• Spider-Man
• The Avengers and the X-Men
• It was when he cut down on his workload that many noticed a marked improvement in the quality of Kirby’s penciling. In the past, he had often been too rushed to do sufficient backgrounding or to pay very strict attention to detail. His pencils were tighter now, much more ornate and all the more dynamic. Thor, for example, became a true saga of the gods, with its majestic pageantry, finely-detailed costumes, and awesome landscapes. Kirby’s many years of working at a feverish rate had trained him well as one of the comic industry’s fastest and, therefore, most prolific artists.

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• When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles".
• After freelancing, he opened his own studio in 1950 working mostly in advertising until Preminger invited him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.
• Now over-shadowed by Bass’ later work, Carmen Jones elicited commissions for titles for two 1955 movies: Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But it was his next Preminger project, The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the doyen of film title design.
• 1954 Designs his first title sequence for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones
• 1955 Creates titles for Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. The animated sequence he devises for Preminger’s The Man with a Golden Arm causes a sensation
• 1960 First title commission for Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus, and the last for Hitchcock, Psycho

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• Milton Glaser is one of the world's most celebrated graphic designers. His most famous work is undoubtedly the logo he designed for New York to promote tourism in the city in 1977 (below). Much copied, much used and much adored, the 'I love New York' logo is set in American Typewriter, a rounded slab serif.

• But Glaser is much more than the one logo. His work for Bob Dylan, DC Comics and The Brooklyn Brewery are just some of the logo masterpieces that cement Glaser as one of the most prominent designers in history.

   

  "The most important thing in design, it seems to me, is the consequence of your action, and whether you're interested, fundamentally, in persuading people to do things that are in their interests," he told Computer Arts: learn more in this exclusive interview. He's also the subject of a 2008 documentary film Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight.
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• She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early '80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design.
• Scher has developed identities, packaging for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, The New York Times Magazine, Perry Ellis, Bloomberg, Target, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. In 1996 Scher's widely imitated identity for the Public Theater won the coveted Beacon Award for integrated corporate design strategy. She serves on the board of The Public Theater, and is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and other publications.

• In the late 70s there was an economic crash...So she could no longer afford to put money into imagery—So she focused on type.
• use historical design to make visual analogies, and for its emotional impact and immediate appeal to contemporary audiences.
• Poster for CBS records (1979)
• At the time the design looked radically different than what was seen in design. But she obtained the label of Postmodern graphic designer because of this and many more to come.
• Swatch Swiss campaign (1984)
• example of postmodern design and became a controversial piece about "borrowed style" in the 80's.
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• 1. Pictures Used to Supplement Text

    

  In 1460, illustrations (in the form of woodcuts) were added to a printed book for the first time by European printer Albrecht Pfister, paving the way for combining words with imagery.
• In 1932 the ever popular Times New Roman font was commissioned by the Times of London.

• 3. The Art Nouveau Movement

    

  In 1890 the Art Nouveau (new art) movement began in Europe: a significant event in art and graphic design history. This transformed art and design at the time, infusing everything from architecture right through to advertising with a revolutionary grandeur.

    

  Even though the movement ended around 1910, its influence never died. Strong elements of it resurged in the sixties in particular and you'll still find the style used in many modern designs, art and advertising.
• The creation of PageMaker 1.0, the first desktop publishing software, by Paul Brainerd in 1985 finally opened the doors for anyone to create and publish graphic projects on their computers
• The first version of Photoshop, the modern giant of graphic design software, was released in 1990. It was also around this time that commercial internet service providers began to emerge, soon to change the world of communication, advertising and design forever.

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• Art Nouveau (the term comes from French and it means New Art) is an art style which was mainly manifested in visual arts, design and architecture in the late 19th century and the early 20th century (1890 – 1914), almost in the same time in most of the cultures and European countries , but also in North America.

• This modern style was considered an attempt to create an international style based on decorations. Art Nouveau was a style developed by an energetic and brilliant generation of designers and artists who sought to fashion an art form appropriate to the modern age.

   

  In many ways, this style was a response to the Industrial Revolution. The technological progress was welcomed by artists who embraced the aesthetic possibilities of using new materials in their art work such as cast iron.  Actually, the Art Nouveau style came into being in 1893 when Victor Horta introduces for the first time iron and casting into the homes of the bourgeoisie in Brussels.

• The Art Nouveau artists shared the belief that all the arts should work in harmony in order to create a “total work of art”: buildings, textiles, furniture, jewelry, clothes all conformed to the principles of Art Nouveau.

   

  After 1919 this style was considered old-fashioned and limited and the artist generally abandoned to use it as a distinct decorative style.

• The Art Nouveau Style is characterized by the use of sinuous, long organic lines and temperate and dark colors. The most used colors are mustard yellow, dark red, olive, brown and some violet and blue now and there.

   

  The specific ornamental characteristics of this modern style is asymmetrical and undulating lines, that were often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, insect wings, vine tendrils and other sinuous and delicate natural objects.

• The prints from the Art Nouveau period are very important for understanding this movement. For example, the lithograph “Tropon” by Henry van de Velde (1898) shows the distinctive color choices of an Art Nouveau Print with dull green, brilliant ochre and orange, which were combined with the letters of the word “tropon”. The simple composition of this artist combines a new style of color choices with the curvy lines.

   

  “Tropon” by Henry van de Velde (1898).
• The two-dimensional Art Nouveau pieces were drawn, painted and printed in popular forms such as posters, advertisements, labels and magazines. The style was typified as extravagant, flowing and with curved lines, often with a floral motif. But it was perhaps the commercial application of the style that gives its particular appeal, directness and lasting presence.
• The technological progress in lithographic printing allowed for color printing on a large scale for the first time and therefore to make the graphic style of Art Nouveau to be widely available. The commercial poster runs were extended to allow for more copies to be sold to collectors.
• The Art Nouveau movement had a great influence on illustrators, artists and the printing trade in America including Art Nouveau revivial in the post-war 60s hippie movement. Even today, some of the best features of Art Nouveau can be seen throughout the visual communication industry
• Artists all over the world are using as inspiration today elements of this modern art style like the sinuous lines, floral elements, the nature features and the characteristic colors.
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• The Industrial Revolution, which is usually said to have occurred first in England between 1760 and 1840, was a radical process of social and economic change.
• New materials, particularly iron and steel, became available.
• Greater human equality sprang from the French and American revolutions and led to increased public education and literacy. The audience for reading matter proliferated accordingly. Graphic communications became more important and more widely accessible during this period of incessant change. As with other commodities, technology lowered unit costs and increased the production of printed materials. In turn, the greater availability created an insatiable demand, and the era of mass communications dawned.
• The nature of visual information was profoundly changed. The range of typographic sizes and letterform styles exploded. The invention of photography—and, later, the means of printing photographic images—expanded the meaning of visual documentation and pictorial information. The use of color lithography passed the aesthetic experience of colorful images from the privileged few to the whole of society. This dynamic, exuberant, and often chaotic century witnessed an astonishing parade of new technologies, imaginative forms, and new functions for graphic design. The nineteenth century was an inventive and prolific period for new typeface designs, ranging from new categories such as Egyptian and sans serif to fanciful and outrageous novelty styles.

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• 15,000-10,000 BC
   The first known visual communication, with pictographs and symbols in the Lascaux caves in southern France.
• 1760
   Industrial Revolution begins, setting the stage for advances in graphic design production.
• 1890
   Art Nouveau movement begins and changes design, making its way into all types of commercial design and utilizing all types of arts.
• 1917
   James Montgomery Flagg designs famous “I Want YOU for the U.S. Army” poster. The poster, a self-portrait, was actually an American version of a British poster by Alfred Leete.
• 1919
   The Bauhaus, a German school, is founded, eventually providing the framework for modern design.
• 1990
   Photoshop version one released, and physicist Tim Berners-Lee develops the world wide web, along with HTML and the concept of website addresses.

• Piet Mondrian, born in 1872, is often called the father of graphic design. Although he was a fine artist (not a graphic designer) his use of grids inspired the basic structure of the modern advertising layout known also as the grid system, used commonly today by graphic designers.

   

  The term Graphic Design was first coined by U.S. book designer and type designer William Addison Dwiggins in the early 20th C.
• The following years saw graphic design in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application. A booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly advertising and packaging. The emigration of the German Bauhaus school of design to Chicago in 1937 brought a “mass-produced” minimalism to America; sparking a wild fire of postmodern architecture and design.
• I Love New York campaign by Milton Glaser.Another notable designer of the latter 20th century is Milton Glaser who designed the unmistakable I Love NY ad campaign (1973), and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968). Glaser took stylistic hints from popular culture from the 1960s and 70s.

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• In an effort to propagandize and to recruit support for the war, both Axis and Allied nations communicated their messages via poster. While the United States tended to feature drab, straightforward design in these efforts, the British and French took more creative approaches. During the war years, France’s Jean Carlu combined newer artistic traditions (particularly Cubism) with a strong sense of composition to create bold and interesting poster art. Many argue that Carlu’s work presaged and may have significantly influenced corporate graphic design and logo creation.

   

  The post-war economic boom in the United States and elsewhere created an increased demand for graphic design. While much of the work was rather straightforward commercial design exhibiting few innovations, there were exceptions to that rule.

• The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.
• During the turbulent and often dangerous years of World War II, many of the key figures of the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States, where their work and their teaching philosophies influenced generations of young architects and designers. Marcel Breuer and Joseph Albers taught at Yale, Walter Gropius went to Harvard, and Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.