Ronald Barthes – Camera Lucida This is such a personal form of writing, and with the best writing technique to date – really short chapters. There is the establishment of a clear purpose of the text, “I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’…” Barthes looks at how we define photography,…

This week’s lecture focused on photography and how it found its place in design. An interesting point was whether technologies influence our development or if we develop technology to suit ourselves. Photography’s origins begins in portraiture. As a much more efficient and effective means to do everything a painter can caused a bit of chaos…

Isotype: Representing Social Facts Pictorially Burke talks about the history, aim, legacy and value of isotype. Isotype is a method of representing statistics visually to create more memorable and accessible information. Isotype strives for a more educated society and tries to do this with its reinterpretation of seemingly uninteresting material like graphs and statistics. From…

This lecture we looked at the legacy of the Swiss International Style and adaptations of it. This is a period of design that I find visually inspiring – the cleanliness of the designs as a reaction to the chaos of war. Looking at Josef Mueller’s work there is a strong focus on structure through the…

Twentieth Century Design ModernISM. The world of ISMs. Woodham covers a very comprehensive part of the Modernist Design period and places great importance on everyday things such as interior, objects and furniture items. All influenced by post-war ideals of clean, neat, pure and healthy – abstract and geometric forms were featured in both the internal…

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…

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction In this reading Walter talks extensively about how the mechanical reproduction of artwork affects both it and the way we experience it. He talks about how works of art seem to possess an ‘aura’ and how that aura is lost on reproductions of that work….

Graphic Design: A History The boom in mass media production was not followed by a complimentary expansion into the design profession. In this reading, Chapter 1: The Nineteenth Century – The Advent of Graphic Design, Eskilson explains that the many anonymous jobbers of the 19th Century were not exactly ‘designers’ as their work was primarily…

The lecture covered design history starting with the Guttenberg Press which was established in 1456. How it impacted society and aided an illiterate population due to being capable of the mass production of the written word when prior to that, becoming literate was reserved for certain classes of society. This is when thought was put…