Gallery proposal

Here is my suggested layout for the installation:

Cuban poster art

Looking through books on my shelves I wanted include this as influence because I love they way they are designed. Cuban poster art from the 1960s through to the 1980s was heavily dominated in promoting various political/social themes and as a way to create national pride. They were specific to their audience, a semi literate country, were easily manufactured and distributed and encouraged the arts. They have had an influence purely in the way they look: colour, composition, type etc but they also interest me because on the one hand it could be argued that they act in the same way as JMB child safety posters as a social tool or it could be that they are opposite by using manipulative means to control a nation and divert thinking.

Why Not Associates

I then started looking at the work of the Why Not Associates because of the dominance in their work of strong typography. I was reading their section in "Contempory Graphic Design" and they write that the common theme in all their work is typography. Below I've included a photo of some stills from a project they did called Nike Heroes and it's so slow moving which gives even more stregth to the how the type wants to be emphasised. I've tried to trace some sort of lineage between 1950s/Swiss expression of moderism and more recent examples and I think Why Nots can be included within this because although some of their work looks nothing like JMB or uses helvetica they have obviously been heavily influenced by the the work and I thought their section in the "Contemp..." explained a similar process to chosing clients that JMB followed.



Here is the link to their site with the film, sorry couldn't embed it.

Experimental Jetset

After looking at JMB and the Helvetica documetary I wanted to look at designers still using helvetica but in a different way, with different reasons and 50 years on from when JMB started so I chose Experimental Jetset. Below is their section from the Helvetica film explaining their approach to the typeface but I was more interested in their reasons behind why they still used helvetica as an important aspect within their visual language and their take on modernism:

Josef Muller-Brockmann

JMB is my favourite designer ever. I love the level of intellectualisation he gave design with grids and why space was so important, his approach to interpretating music in his work for the Zurich Tonhalle posters, how clean everything is asthetically and his use of type.
Here is an animation of some of his work (not done by me):

Drink Coke. Period.

Realised I hadnt put too much up that wasn't either bikes< scuplture or me moaning about plaster of paris so hereis some stuff I've been looking at that has had a big influence on my designs:



I've rewatched this documentary to give an understanding of the development of modernism, why san serifs were used and why some people hate them. This modernist/Swiss style has has influenced the designs because I wanted some of them really clean and the type to be legible and for it suggest a bit more than the images were offering. Whilst at the same time understanding why grids, space and certain typefaces were used.

Contextualising