Frank Gehry

All I can say about Sketches of Frank Gehry by Sydney Pollock is WOW. Okay, I can say a bit more than that since I am pretty good about going on and on about something. I have always liked unusual architecture and used to watch shows about it on Home and Garden Television (HGTV). Frank Gehry has designed so many buildings that look like either were be terribly difficult and near impossible to make and keep standing. I loved them all. He is brilliant.

Frank Gehry established his practice in Los Angeles, California in 1962. The Gehry partnership, Gehry Partners, LLP, was formed in 2001 and currently supports a staff of over 120 people. Every project that his company works on is designed personally by Frank Gehry.

Frank Gehry loves to sketch and sketches out his plans for the architectural designs that he's making. He calls this "tentativeness, the messiness". Gehry’s sketches for each major project become buildings of titanium and glass, concrete and steel, wood and stone. Before his sketches are made into the finished building, he makes models from his sketches so that he can see how the building works and is going to be used. Gehry and his colleagues make sure that the plans are going to work by studying the model. His designs make it hard to distinguish between architecture and art. They look like unbelievably, large works of art. The strong appeal of his sculptural designs have led to his fame. He is one of the rare architects that have not only received critical acclaim, but popular fame. There has not been an architect since Frank Lloyd Wright that has become a household name like Frank Gehry has become.

Frank Gehry’s buildings are not made to just be another building. They are built from the inside out. Wooden block massing studies are constructed and reconstructed in step with Gehry’s own evolving sketches. Gestural models of cardboard, wood, and cloth act as intermediaries, keeping Gehry conscious of the three-dimensional implications. This makes him work in "two or three scales at once" and forces him to not think of the model as an “object of desire”, but to focus on how the building works. His buildings make people feel comfortable because when designing buildings he is concerned about how the people that are going to be occupying the building are going to use it and how he can make the building work best for them. This is probably one of the main reasons that he has become so well known.

Persepolis

Persepolis is a very good graphic novel that was made into a French movie in 2007. I never read the graphic novel, but I believe that the movie was very good and it was hard for me to stop watching it, so I ended up renting it from Netflix so that I could see how it ended. I had never thought about graphic novels before, because I tend to associate them with comic books and kid stuff. Not that I do not like comics. Garfield has always been my favorite and I still watch cartoons on television and I like to watch children's animated movies. I just did not realize that there were graphic novels with such serious subjects and that were not about super heroes or other science fiction topics that most more adult comics tend to be about.

Persepolis tells a story of a girl and her struggles and difficulties in life as she grows up into a young woman. Every girl goes through similar circumstances in life as they grow into adulthood. Life is not easy, but for some "not easy" is a definite understatement. This movie gave me a better understanding of what it might be like to grow up in a place like Iran. I know that my understanding of what someone like her might have gone through during pre- and post-revolutionary Iran is minimal, but it helped. When I was first watching this movie, I thought it happened a long time ago, I was very surprised that it took place just in the 1970s and 1980s. I felt bad to think of what she had to go through growing up and made me realize how very fortunate I was to have grown up in the United States of America and all the freedoms that go along with it.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese. He was born in the Bronx District in New York City in 1920. As a child, he drew a lot. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism. He was a freelance commercial artist/graphic designer until he opened up he own studio in 1950. Saul Bass was hired to design some posters and design title sequences for a few movies, but it wasn't until he was hired to design the poster and title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the "top banana" of film title design. His title sequences went from being graphics in motion to live action. He also liked dealing with ordinary things and making you look at them in a different way. He liked making the ordinary extraordinary. I like his style and I really enjoyed the way he dealt with the title sequence in West Side Story. I have always loved the dance sequences and of course the songs from this movie, but now I have a new appreciation for the title sequence at the end of the movie. I never really noticed or paid attention to the title sequence before, partly because I was pretty young when I watched the whole movie. I liked how the names were like they were part of the set instead of superimposed on the film, but were graffiti. Not only were his title sequences that were motion graphics interesting to watch, but his use of live action in the title sequences were equally as interesting to watch.

I was also surprised to find out all of the well known logos that he designed. It is hard for me to figure out how one person can hold that much talent in one human body. He died in 1996 and his New York Times obituary hailed him as "the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art."

Shepard Fairey: "Playing With Art & Commerce"

On November 11, 2009, Shepard Fairey was interviewed by Sarah Banet-Weiser who is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication at USC Anneberg and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity. During her introduction, she says that "his work challenges us to figure out it's meanings, refuses to sit still and disrupts boundaries between art, politics and consumer culture".


While he was attending the Rhode Island School of Design, in his freshman year, he worked at a skateboard shop named Watershed. There was a group of people that worked there that formed a team called Team Shed. Since Shepard Fairey was running the shop, he was team captain. They were making paper stencils to use for the designs on the shirts. A friend, while staying over with him one night, asked him how to make the stencils. His friend did not know what he wanted to use for the stencil, so he suggested an ad for wrestling that he just happened to see. He finished it because his friend did not want to. The whole thing was an inside joke that launched him into an early cult status with his Andre the Giant "OBEY" series.

When I watched Ironman 2 in the theater, I did not notice the piece of art that Robert Downy, Jr.'s character was taking down from the wall. After purchasing a copy of my own, my family and I were watching it and I noticed how similar it looked to Shepard Fairey's piece of art he made for Pres. Obama during his presidential campaign. I Googled "Ironman 2 Shepard Fairey" and found out that I was right. I also found out that it upset some people that he did that. I thought it was cool that the ones that made the Ironman 2 movie thought to ask him to make a poster in his style for the movie. I also thought it was cool that I had learned about Shepard Fairey and his graphic artwork in my graphic design class and was able to remember his name.

After checking out his website, I found out that he has created a lot of very detailed pieces and a wide variety of pieces. I also found out that what Sarah Banet-Weiser states in the video is true, "his art refuses to be categorized".

When Teenagers Speak, Corporate America Listens

The video, The Merchants of Cool, tells how corporate America are always in search of what is "cool". This is the largest generation of teenagers ever. They are the demographic that spends the most money by either influencing what their parents buy or by using the "guilt money" that have received from their parents. Parents give their teenagers money many times because they feel guilty for not spending more time with them. Also, many parents want to keep their teenagers happy and at home so they spend money on items like game systems and the games to go along with them as an incentive not to find entertainment somewhere else. Teenagers are growing up in "a world of marketing". Marketing is everywhere and most of it is geared towards them. Marketers go "cool hunting" to search for a certain kind of personality, someone that influences others and has the respect and admiration of their friends. Culture spies look for trendsetters, early adopters, forward thinkers, and/or leaders in their own groups to try to catch a trend before someone else does. They want to find a trend while it is still underground, because as soon as it is discovered and used it is not "cool" anymore.

Viacom is one of the "coolest" companies out there right now. One program they own is MTV. MTV is a cross promotional free-for-all machine that caters to the teenage demographic. The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves. The kids watch those images and aspire to be that "Mook" (a character portraying rude and crude behavior that is supposed to be typical of most teenage boys) or a "Midriff" (a teenage girl who is prematurely adult and that is very aware of her sexuality and how to use it to get what she wants) on TV. It is a media loop, because then the media watches them and so on. Some say that the kids of today are influenced by the media and others say that the media is a mirror image of society. This kind of reminds me of the famous question- "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?".

OBJECTIFIED

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design that was made by the same people that made Helvetica. Throughout this documentary, several industrial designers talk about why they design their objects the way that they did. Most people would not think much about the thought process that goes into designing something as simple as a potato peeler. As with other objects that we probably take for granted, they study people and their needs to make the object work better for them along with a design to make them appealing to the eye.

"Naoto Fukasawa is a lecturer in the product design department of the Musashino Art University and Tama Art University in Tokyo. Naoto Fukasawa's designs have won more than 50 design awards in Europe and America. His designs include wall mounted cd player / Muji, and Infobar / auKDDI. In his recent works, there are neon / auKDDI and twelve / Issey Miyake / Seiko. Other than Japanese projects, there is a range of projects with Italian, German and other European companies." He realized that there was not a need to create new forms. All that needed to be done was to take away from the product what was not needed and to keep only what was needed "and let the form and hierarchy be dictated by what materials that best allow them to do that and by how people connect with the product."

Naota Fukasawa









Jonathan Ive is Apple's Chief Designer. He believes that design is the search for form. He said that at Apple they like to design products that do not have obtrusive lights or buttons. On the new MacBook Pro laptop, the power button does not extend past the case and a thin power light on the front edge of the laptop only is noticeable when the lid is shut and it is in sleep mode. I personally have a brand new MacBook Pro laptop and the unibody design is very nice and sleek. My only concern is not being able to remove the battery. "'With technology, the function is much more abstract to users," Ive, then 32, told us. "So the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer." Even then, it was clear that Apple's head of design knew what he was doing. Ive defined his overarching design principles as "simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment.'" "'He likes to make perfect stuff," says Brunner, offering the first of three keys to Ive's success. That design perfection -- the first touch-screen smartphone, the dominant MP3 player, the first titanium laptop -- has become the benchmark by which companies in all industries judge themselves. "I've even had a plumbing company say, 'We want our showerhead to be our version of the iPod,' " says Brunner, now a partner at the design firm Ammunition. "Ive has this design ability combined with a craftsmanlike mentality.'"
I enjoyed watching this documentary. I never considered the role of the designer in making objects that we use on a daily basis. It seems to me that these designers are making sculptures instead of tools, appliances, gadgets or furniture. It's like they are making artwork for us to enjoy by not just looking at it, but by using it and possibly making our life better or easier.

HELVETICA

Helvetica is a documentary by Gary Hustwit. He tells the history of this typeface by having different font and graphic designers tell their feelings and opinions of Helvetica. Most designers believe that Helvetica is a modern, clean type that is good for anything. There are some graphic designers that pretty much only use this typeface. This font is believed to have the best figure-ground relationship that is properly executed. According to many of these designers, Helvetica says accessible, accountable, nonthreatening and transparent. It is well rounded with a perfect balance of push and pull. Some say that it is the typeface of capitalism and socialism. "There is a fine line between simple, clean, powerful and simple, clean, boring."

Helvetica, meaning Swiss typeface, was designed by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei in Munchenstein, Switzerland. Eduard Hoffmann wished to make a traditional font . Helvetica is seen all over the place in signs, logos and posters.
















"Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is information architect, type designer (FF Meta, FF MetaSerif, ITC Officina, FF Govan, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography. He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany's largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Projects included corporate design programmes for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing and way finding projects like Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts." Erik Spiekermann feels that this font is overused and does not make the product or company unique or stand out. He was the only one or one of the very few from the documentary that was not singing the praises of this well balanced typeface.