C.O.P Lecture - Design and Modernism

C.O.P Lecture Design and Modernism 

-Modernism emerges out of subjective responses of artists/designers to, MODERNITY
- Modernism - embracing modern techniques/making images that respond to the sensations.
- It's about the way in which the modern wolrd helps us understand ourselves.
- Attempt to order chaos.
- Structure to the sensory overload that is the modern world.
- The modern world is contradictory.
- Designers responding to the qualities of the modern world.

Modernism in Design 

- Anti-historicism - the power of the new, inventing new things.
- Truth to materials - looking to the new ways of making visual communication. Modernists embrace the new world and all of its trappings, including new materials to work with e.g. concrete, new gadgets like cameras. Modernism starts to celebrate these materials - modern.
- Modern Film making explores the beauty of shutter speed and light effects, modern artists/painters will show the paint, not try to create an illusion.
- Form follows function - it puts functionality before aesthetics and the appearance. Solving a problem with your work, the thing created will have beauty if it has solved a problem. 
- Technology - product and celebration of new technologies.
- Internationalism - neutral but universal cultural language. 
- One of the criticisms of modernists making is that if you try to make your work superficially stylish, your work is going to look outdated as fashions come and go so fast. 
- Modernist design has created a timeless design so that things will not go out of fashion years later.

- Anti-historicism - no need to look backward to older styles. "ornament is crime" - Adolf Loos (1908)
- Truth to materials - simple geometric forms appropriate to the material being used.
- Seagram Building, New York - one of the best examples of modernist design. Designed using rational solutions. 

-Bauhaus - inter discipline art school. Reinvented how art and design was taught. 
- A diffusion of art into everyday life.

Internationalism:
- A language of design that could be recognised and understood with international basis.
- HArry Beck's underground map - piece of rational design.
- Understanding London at a glance.
- Style has been replicated in every major city in the world.
- Modernists get rid of decorative features (Serif typefaces)
- Example: Herberts Bayer's san serif typeface.
- Modernist photography - exploring shadows created from light sources and objects on to photo sensitive paper.

Russian Revolution (1917)
- Followed by cultural revolution.
- Overthrow communist kings present regime - established socialist country - idea that workers take over and everything is equally distributed. 
- Needed new style - became most culturally exciting and progressive country in the world - hyper modernism.

C.O.P - Colour Theory part 2

C.O.P - Colour Theory part 2

• We can't be sure whether a colour is a certain colour, it is when we put things around that colour that determine what colour it is. 
• We can't trust colour, it isn't something that is a given. 
• Physical aspects to colour, Physiological aspects and Psychological.
• Spectral colour is a colour that is evoked by a single wavelength of light within a visible spectrum.
• A single wavelength, or narrow band of wavelengths generates monochromatic light.
• Every wavelength of light is perceived as a spectral colour in a continuous spectrum.
• The colours of similar or sufficiently close wavelengths are often indistinguishable by the human eye.
• Colour is a theoretical phenomenon - it does not necessarily exist.
• Everything to do with colour is how we see it - basically an illusion.
• Type 1 - Is sensitive to red-orange light
• Type 2 - is sensitive to green light
• Type 3 - is sensitive to blue/violet light
• When a single cone is stimulated, the brain perceived the corresponding colour.
• If our green cones are stimulated, we see green and so on..
• Because of this physiological response, the eye can be fooled into seeing the full range of visible colours through the proportionate adjustment of just three colours: Red, Green and Blue.
• Spectral Colour : the eye cannot differentiate between spectral yellow, and some combination of red and green. The same effect accounts for our perception of cyan, magenta, and the other in-between spectral colours. 
• Additive colour: Light. - RGB primaries; CRT monitors. - Secondary - CMY
• Subtractive colours: Ink - CMY primaries; Film, prints. - Secondary - RGB
• Johannes Itten (1888-1967)
• Josef Albers - The interaction of colour (1888-1976)
• Contrasts: 
• - Tone
• - Hue
• - Saturation
• - Extension
• - Temperature
• Formed by the juxtaposition of light and dark values. This could be monochromatic.
• The key idea of contrast is to be able to differentiate between two colours. 
• Formed by the juxtaposing of different hues. The greater the distance between hues on a colour wheel, the greater the contrast.
• Yellow on a white background sits back into the background and blue stands out, on a black background the yellow stands out and the blue sits back.
• Formed by the juxtaposition of light and dark values and their relative saturations.
• Formed by assigning proportional field sizes in relation to the visual weigh of a colour. Also known as the contrast of proportion.
• Optical Balances - Yellow and Violet for example. Both colours hit your eye at the same time.
• Formed by juxtaposing hues that can be considered 'warm' or 'cool'. Also known as the contrast of warm and cool.