As fascism, spread in Europe and particularly in Germany, under the Nazi Party, lots of designers, academics and modernist thinkers had to flee persecution. This spread modernist ideas throughout the world, in particular to the United States of America. Where, after a slow transition from traditionalism, modernist designers found a new home, and a natural audience for their work. They worked in education - developing new American designers - advertising, corporate branding and so much more, cementing the modernist style and ideas into everyday life.
This week’s lecture concentrated on the impact, modernist designers and thinkers fleeing Europe had on American design, designers, even American life. With America ending World War II as the major world superpower, ideas from within would naturally spread worldwide. Seven hundred and seventeen Artists, three hundred and eighty Architects and one hundred Graphic Designers made their way to America during this period. Their impact on the design world is still felt and recognised to this day, and their ideas are the backbone of today’s design.
Modernist designers brought significant changes to how design was thought about and used. Some of their main contributions were: using systematic design methods, the less is more approach, use of geometric shapes, primary colours, sans serif typefaces, asymmetric page layouts, using grids for page layout, planned visual hierarchy and most importantly that as form must follow function, design must follow the content.
Whilst the term Graphic Design had been first used, in America in 1922 by book designer William Addison Dwiggins, (Source https://99designs.co.uk/blog/design-history-movements/history-graphic-design/#:~:text=In his article “New Kind,the visuals in book design. Last Accessed 08/11/2022) although it had originated in Europe earlier in the 20th century*.* It wasn’t until the influx of new modernist designers and their design methodology, that the term began to be recognised and be used regularly when discussing design.
Its transformation into a fully fledged profession was cemented by a specific Graphic Design degree course offered by Yale University in the 1950s. While earlier courses may have covered it as a part of a larger course, by concentrating a full degree programme to only Graphic Design, especially at a prestigious university such as Yale, its part of modern design was assured and a profession was officially born.
The amount of designers who contributed work and ideas which changed design, how it was viewed and how it was used, are too numerous to cover them all, in detail, from Europe there was: Jan Tschichold, Otl Aicher, Herbert Bayer, Alexy Brodovitch and Herbert Matter to name only a few. American designers influenced by the European Modernist style include Lester Beall, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Herb Lublain and Milton Glasser. All of these designers were involved in shaping modernist design principles, either in book design, typography, poster design, photography, corporate branding and even movie titles. These designers created the techniques and paved the way for the design of today and as a modern designer in the digital age. I am not only amazed and inspired by their work with much more rudimentary techniques than I have today. I am also aware of how much I owe them, in making design a genuine and valued career.
Lester Beall is one of the first American Modernist designers, he was heavily influenced by the European Avant Garde, and work he saw from the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts. He was a self-taught Graphic Designer, and this maybe helped him not to be pushed down the traditional path, which he had no time for, especially in a world that was modernising.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was commissioned to create posters for the Rural Electrification Administration, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, to try and bring America out of the Great Depression, at this time rural America did not have electricity to every home. The posters Lester Beall designed were seminal works the first posters, or graphic designs to be showcased in an exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1930s.
Lester Beall had to take into account many factors when designing these posters, including the limited literacy of the rural American population. He was comissioned to create three series of these posters, the first are the most recognised and famous but all are very modern in style, using photography, primary colours (often red, white and blue to symbolise that they were talking about a national endeavour) and subjects which fitted the timing of each series, an example of the design matching the content.
Source (https://go.distance.ncsu.edu/gd203/?p=56342) Last Accessed 08/11/2022
Source (https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/03/22/lester-beall-and-the-rural-electrification-administration/) Last Accessed 08/11/2022
Source (https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/03/22/lester-beall-and-the-rural-electrification-administration/) Last Accessed 08/11/2022