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Design History
Katherine McCoy, Education in an Adolescent Profession
Prior to the 1900's, when the industrial revolution separated conception from production, Architecture was the only design field to predate GD. Typefoundries and printshops existed of course, but there wsa no standard for education. Visual communicators were left to their common senseStarting at this point in History might lead you to believe that graphic design is a subset of advertising. Not likely. All cultures have visual communications needs outside of the marketplace (Ex. safe sex campaigns.)
| Time | Social | Keywords / Education | Careers/People |
| 1900s | mfg. based economy, GD a response to commercial communication needs | Corrospondance school the leading "academy" of Graphic Design (1900-1930) | letterers, illustrators, boardmen |
| 1920s-30s |
Post WWI, pre WWII exodus brings German Bauhaus masters to America | codification of the revolutionary ideas of the 20th century "isms" as "basic design" courses believing design fundamentals should preceed applied design |
Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, Albers |
| 40s-50s | WWII (1939-1945); Suburbanization; Early Space Program (Sputnik, 1957); Television; Rock-n-roll |
The "Big Idea" -- Fusion of Bahaus "fundamentals" and master/apprentice (architecture) methods resulting in "sample and example" education -- critics say a week education without students' contact with the masters, those providing the "examples" |
Many self-taught visionaries: New York School -- Saul Bass, Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand Artists/Designers -- Ben Shahn; DeKooning, ManRay Copywriters -- Vic Schwab, Margaret Fishback, John Caples, Rubicam |
| 50s - 60s | Babies Booming; Korean and beginning of Vietnam War; Civil Rights; | Swiss School -- applied the Bauhaus functionalist ethic to a systematic graphic method that shared the Bauhaus values of minimalism, universality, rationality, abstraction, and structural expressionism Unlike The Big Idea, it stresses the grammer of design and is rather neutral on content |
Ciba-Geigy, Herman Miller, Manfred Maier, Armin Hoffman Basel Grids; Basel Method; International Style; Adopted as ideal corporate style Yusaku Kamekura, Ryuichi Yamashiro Pushpin Studios, Victor Moscoco |
| 70s | Feminism; End of Vietnam (1975); Nixon's debacle; Oil shortage | Saussere; Semiotics; Structural Philosophy; Syntactic formal experiments | Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Gunther Kieser |
| 80s | Pending threat of worldwide nuclear disaster; Rampant corporate greed | Design History "discovered;" leads to development of Graphic postmodernism--New Wave; Coping and Craving | Grapus Studio, Wild Plakken, Neville Brody |
| 90s | Digital revolution; Postmodernism enters mainstream (been around since 60's) | Author/Creator art; Scientific construction; visual literature (post-structuralist) reader/viewer centered | Barbara Solomon, Steff Geissbuhler, Paula Scher; David Carson |
| 2000 - | Post-industrial economy | data>information>meaningful communication; designer's viewpoint is the humanizing element | Steven Heller/War, conceptualists, strategists, aestheticists, management/consulting |
It is the human factor -- combustible client-designer relationships
coupled with marketplace accidents -- that inevitably lead to the visual gestalt
of an era.
Paula Scher
http://www.aigany.org/ideas/features/scher.html