Victorian Era Advertising!

This image from :Thinking with type: a critical guide for designers, writers, editors, and students by Ellen Lupton, published by Princeton Architectural 2010

This week’s blog post focuses on Victorian era advertising.  My example of a Victorian era advertisement is a poster for a steamship cruise.  In the era the majority of advertising was done with posters and/or by word of mouth, the poster was made to further promote a specific occurrence.  I found my example by looking in one of my textbooks for another course, Typography, I had remembered reading something about different decorative font choices earlier on so I flipped trough the book and found the picture that accompanied the article.  The design is very ‘In your Face’ and ‘flashy’, typical for most work around that time.  The type choices include large, decorative fonts all piled up on top of one another.  This was popular in the Victorian era because typefaces only had a certain amount of letters that could be used at one time.  For the period I believe the artwork would have been of fairly good quality, but today it would contain many ‘faux-pas’.  The first thing that attracted me to the piece was the very large, aggressive text.  This then led me to the different intricacies in the individual typefaces an eventually the on the poster, which, I guess, was is the whole point of a poster!

Cheerio

Renaissance Style

This week's blog post is a rendering of a typical renaissance page layout.  The page was rendered by hand using a fine point black marker.  The function of this piece is to explore some of the graphic styles in our history and test different rendering techniques.  Traditionally this particular type of layout would have been used in books during the renaissance period to create unique and interesting pages.  The original illustrations would have been much more detailed and would usually have incorporated colour.  It is amazing to imagine how much time artists must have spent creating a single page.  Typical elements of a renaissance page include embellished letters, intricate borders, and detailed illustrations.  My design follows the style of this period by incorporating an intricate border into a spread along with an embellished first letter.  No specific artist  influenced my rendering, I gathered most of my information from google and text books.  I believe the audience for this piece would be any young adult to senior who is interested in learning about design history or even those who just appreciate a nice visual piece of work. I found this assignment quite enjoyable, but VERY time consuming, overall a pretty good experience!

Snow Day!

Thought I would share this because of the snow day...

This is from: http://www.designfreebies.org/free-vectors/free-vectors-early-winter-snow-flakes/

Inspired by Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Forms

Oops forgot to press post on that last entry let's try for round two...


For my example of Graphic Design from the 21st Century that has been influenced/ inspired by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic forms I found a clothing line.  The tee shirts feature images that are almost exactly the same as some of the older Egyptian characters along with some other more modern images.  The function of the clothing is to wear and make a statement to others.  I found my example while searching online for clothing with hieroglyphs on them.  The style of the graphic design is a bit strange because it mixes street art style along with the hieroglyphic forms which creates a nice mix of new and old.  I believe that the quality of the art work is perfect for the demographic because it is simple and not high maintenance.  The first thing that attracted me to this design was the simplicity.  This was followed by an interest in who the clothing is aimed at which I deduced to be teenaged males and maybe those who enjoy skateboarding which I find quite interesting.


This assignment was neat because I discovered that old is regularly mixed with new design when it comes to clothing.




Image from the website: http://sneakhype.com/clothing/2010/01/hieroglyphics-x-souls-of-mischief-x-adapt.html

Aloha!

Ahh yes the very first post.  This blog was created for a design course and I am curious to see where it goes :)

Cheers