This is a great example of how food and sex sell. This is an ad for Teatro Restaurant. This is a great way to get 3 messages across. Number one, food. The make and female figures are made of vegetables which gets the point across that this is in fact an add for some sort of eatery. The second is sex, "what you see is what you get," anyone could figure out what these "food people" are up to. The last is dinner theater, the plate is the stage and the figures are the actors! "Sex is so prevalent throughout our lives, yet past repressions are so impressed on our psyches, that it is easy for the mind to make the cognitive leap and see sex in everything."



Source: The anatomy of design Steven Heller and Mirko Ilic

This particular piece that i've chosen has to deal with the photographs of the american troops humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison that were published on the internet. The artist, Copper Greene captured the iconic ipod ad and used parody, in a sense to get his point across. The figure has electrodes attached to his hands standing on a box. The electric wires printed in pure white, like ipod headphones, transformed it into a dark comedy.


Sources:

The Anatomy of Design. Steven Heller and Mirko Ili'c

Josef Muller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. In the 60's he was appointed the European design consultant to IBM. He was recognized for his simple designs and his clean use of typography. The shapes and colors he used inspired graphic designers in the 21st century.

A key part of his approach involved the use of a typographic grid, which divided space up into a number of consistent horizontal and vertical units.

This poster was made in 1955, I love the background color he has chosen. The black, curved lines varying in height and width pull you from the bottom left to the middle of the page.

Here is a neat video someone did. They animated a poster, Stravinski, Berg, Fortner which was done in 1955. Notice the straight, parallel and perpendicular lines.





Sources:

www.bombaycrow.com
www.youtube.com
www.coolibaa.com

Saul Bass, One of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century also was a master of film title design. Bass broke tradition by using jagged-point, bold lines and simple images in his designs. He worked with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Stanely Kubrick.
"symbolize and summarize" were the words that Bass lived by. After a golden period that lasted into the mid-sixties, his designs fell out of fashion. Aside from film sequences, he designed logos for United Airlines, AT&T and Quaker.

Loving Alfred Hichcock I have watched his movies many times, and always wondered who designed the openings. These extremely simple cut out designs are extraordinary.

My favorite is his sequence for Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger. The black cut outs against the gray background really catches your eye.(video below)



Sources:
www.designmuseum.org
www.saulbass.tv

Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright before taking the name of his family in Wisconsin, was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator. His main goal was to promote organic architecture. He completed 500 works in his lifetime, some being the Guggenheim and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Aside from being a brilliant designer, his life was filled with turmoil. Always spending too much money, never having enough, taking many mistresses, one who was brutally murdered by a servant.

My favorite pieces of architecture were his prairie houses that he had done for families all over the United States. They are wonderfully organic, and filled with his own furniture designs, window designs etc...

http://www.dana-thomas.org/ Here is a link to the dana thomas house website. This is a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house in Springfield, i've been there a couple times. It's beautiful and totally worth the drive!!


(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright)