This week we looked at Modernism and a number of movements that occurred within it. World events and politics shape design, and in turn design shapes them – the connection between major world events and how they influence design.

At the beginning of the lecture we looked at WW 1 and how it gave rise to the use of graphic design for social influence. Propaganda posters being the best example, we looked at a few and deconstructed them.

In the poster above, the little girl is looking at her father as a role model, the boy is playing with toy soldiers suggesting a metaphor that he will be a soldier one-day himself. Through the use of guilt in the words that directly addresses the father “Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?” they play on the idea of humanity and glorify war, encouraging people to enlist. It also shows the people-centric focus that was being used so as to influence them.

It is the same with the recruitment posters featuring Uncle Sam where glorifying war became the norm.

Women during the time played a large role as well, often depicted as needing protection or vulnerable, national symbols and role models. This was often used to boost morale with women used as the identity of Britain.

There was also a battle going on between German designers and British designers . They often re-envisioned posters of the enemy force to their own advantage. This is seen in the bloodied hand of the liberty loans poster above. Here you can see also that the use of metaphor was much more common in German design than that of the British.

Next we looked at information design in posters such as those used in enemy aircraft information posters for the public to be able to identify the differences between each.

One last topic that I found very interesting was the design that emerged out of Soviet Russia. Limited colour and tight budgets required designers to think of new ways to get around those barriers.

The tutorial focused on semiotics; the interpretation and use of symbols and signs. Saussure brakes it down into two parts. A ‘signifier’ being the form of the sign and the ‘signified’ being the concept it shows.

As a class, we went through a number of mages depicting various war propaganda posters and analyzed them from a semiotic point of view. There were a few images that were hard to really understand what was trying to be communicated but overall a great way to see how design elements were used then compared with now, where you start to see a very similar approach.

A main point for me in the tutorial was around the concept of form follows function. I feel that this still very much at the forefront of design today, or rather, it certainly leads the design of a product – almost always comes first. Contemporary design I feel is always trying to find a middle between both.