Dawson Stahly Essays - Aesthetics, Philosophical Movements

Dawson Stahly Design History Reading Response 7: A Brave New World In A Brave New World Byrne and Witte explore how designers have developed in recent years concerning technological advancements, deconstructivism, and their influence on typography. They discuss how personal computers have caused grids to fall out of fashion and, "given designers the ability to create until a page seems correct to them." After discussing how technology has cause for the grid to no longer find use in modern design, we delve into how deconstruction came to be, what reasons it is used for, and why it is crucial for a designer to know the impact that deconstructing can have on historical context. One form of deconstruction consists of creating typography outside of its legible purpose and using it as a more illustrative element in your composition. Katherine McCoy's Poster For Cranbrook's Graduate Program in Design is an excellent exhibit of how graphic design's postmodern style takes identity in illegibility and designed objects taking charge, abandoning the order and s et processes modernism had set in place before postmodernism's arrival. The use of text in that image is near illegible so it forces readers eyes to interweave their focus between design and text, giving each equal attention. This strategy also helps to reinforce conceptual ideas of designs where text is needed without letting it fall between the cracks unnoticed. As we discussed in class postmodernism saw stages before personal computers became available, strategies such as photo type were used to manipulate text and develop it in ways that became less of strict text and to view it more as an illustrated design. The computer and strategies like photo type gave postmodernist faster and more advanced ways to stray from the pro-western modernist approach that they were reacting against. The postmodernist ideas of art's value being a social construct can be a cause of why pieces that seem to be so chaotic and disorganized are seen. The designers of that time are fleeing from the idea o f certain methods being the only way to do things and that art can have any sort of presentation and still have value independently. I view the postmodernist movement as a sort of mix between Dada and Modernism because of how they didn't quite go to the extreme of anti-art, but they certainly didn't want to be constrained by guidelines and rulebooks in their design work. This is how I think postmodernism has contributed to liberating art as having such an open lens to what art really is' in today's world, so many different mediums and works have been introduced from abstraction in sculpture to performance that would not have been seen as anything artistic had it not been for the distancing we see from modernism. Bibliography Byrne, Chuck; Witte, Martha. "A Brave New World" 245, 249, 251; 1990. Drucker, Johanna. "Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide." 187-193. New Jersey. Pearson, 2009. Willette, Jeanne. "Beginning Postmodernism: Forming the Theory" 25 October 2013. http://arthistoryunstuffed.com/beginning-postmodernism-theory/