The Medium is the Message
The Medium is the Mess-Age
The Medium is the Massage
The Medium is the Mass-Age
Marshall McLuhan
Ludwig Hohlwein, born in Germany 1874, trained as an architect and practiced until 1906 when he started a new career in poster design. He was seen as one of the most important people working in this field in Germany. He looked for new possibilities due to the breaking down of the groups (the groups being, fine art, graphic arts, illustration etc.), and so he merged all these groups together, to create a new style.
By 1925, Hohlwein had already designed 3000 different posters; many still collectible to this day.
Bernard Cohen came up with the Agenda Setting Theory which states that the new media have a large influence on audiences, in terms of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them.
"Through their day-to-day selection and display of the news, editors and news directors focus our attention and influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. This ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda setting role of the news media."
A good example of Agenda Setting Theory, where Time magazine
adjusted the same photograph to make the subject look more evil
David Klein, an American illustrator (1918-2005), created numerous travel posters for Howard Hughes' Trans World Airlines in the 1950s and 60s. His posters use eye-popping colours, iconic landmarks and scenic images to advertise global travel.
David Klein also designed general illustrations:
I really like David Klein's work, and I can see why it was so popular then and now. I love the bright colours in his work, and the composition in his posters, especially the New York poster seen above, because it reminds me of Times Square, and I would love to go to New York one day. I also love the patterns in his work, as they really draw the eye.
Alexander Brodovitch is virtually the model for the modern magazine art director. He didn't just arrange photographs, illustrations ad type on the page; he took an active role in making and organising all forms of graphic art.
Lester Beall was a master of combining images of America and graphic text to convey a message of what issues the country was facing. Because of the cultural and political information in these illustrations, Beall's work regularly saw the cover of magazines, journals and papers.
"The Medium in the Message" is a book written by Marshall McLuhan, and was set out by Quentin Fiore. In this book, McLuhan proposes that 'a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only be the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.'
McLuhan put together, even to this day, very strong opinions about why everything was beginning to merge, e.g. graphic arts, fine art, illustration etc.
Herb Lubalin was an American graphic illustrator. He wanted to get more out of typography than what was in the default system of the machine.
"What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page. It's designing with letters. Aaron Burns called it, 'typographics,' and since you've got to put a name on things to make them memorable, 'typographics' is as good a name for what I do as any."
Lubalin produced his own typefaces, and did a lot of advertisements for Ebony Magazine.
Above: Examples of Lubalin's typography work
Above: Two articles from Ebony Magazine
In an article at Eye Magazine, Milton Glaser answers the question: "How has the design field changed since you entered it over 40 years ago?"
He answers: "The most important change is the acceptance of the fact that design is an absolutely essential part of the process of business, and consequently, that it is too important to leave in the hands of designers."
Steven Heller (the interviewer) then expands on the question: "Do you mean that designers have reverted back to service personnel?""MG: How to communicate is determined within organisations significantly more than it was when I entered the field. The design process has now been integrated into a client’s control system, so that instead of going outside for people who had more understanding about how to communicate effectively, they now make their determinations from a marketing point of view and then, more often that not, go outside to implement those ideas … Clients now have a much greater preconception of what they want. The briefings are very different. The determinations of what is appropriate are very often those of a marketing department as opposed to the somewhat casual and random solutions that occurred when people didn’t know better."
The link to this interview/article is here.
Milton Glaser was the designer of the iconic I heart NY logo:
Overall, I do agree that the medium is the message, and that we, as designers, should follow this.
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