by Ellen Lupton
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press
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© 2008, 2015 Princeton Architectural Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lupton, Ellen, author.
Graphic design : the new basics / Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips. — Second Edition, Revised and Expanded.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61689-325-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61689-332-3 (paperback : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61689-455-9 (epub, mobi)
1. Graphic arts. I. Phillips, Jennifer C., 1960– author. II. Title.
NC997.L87 2015
741.6—dc23
2014046286
For Maryland Institute College of Art
Book Design
Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips
Contributing Faculty
Ken Barber
Kristian Bjørnard
Kimberly Bost
Jeremy Botts
Corinne Botz
Bernard Canniffe
Nancy Froehlich
Brockett Horne
Tal Leming
Ellen Lupton
Al Maskeroni
Sandra Maxa
Ryan McCabe
Abbott Miller
Kiel Mutschelknaus
Jennifer Cole Phillips
James Ravel
Zvezdana Stojmirovic
Nolen Strals
Mike Weikert
Bruce Willen
Yeohyun Ahn
Visiting Artists
Marian Bantjes
Nicholas Blechman
Alicia Cheng
Peter Cho
Malcolm Grear
David Plunkert
C. E. B. Reas
Paul Sahre
Jan van Toorn
Rick Valicenti
For Princeton Architectural Press
Editors
Clare Jacobson and Nicola Brower
Special thanks to
Janet Behning, Erin Cain, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Andrea Chlad, Tom Cho, Barbara Darko, Benjamin English, Russell Fernandez, Jan Cigliano Hartman, Jan Haux, Mia Johnson, Diane Levinson, Jennifer Lippert, Katharine Myers, Jaime Nelson, Rob Shaeffer, Sara Stemen, Marielle Suba, Kaymar Thomas, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Janet Wong of Princeton Architectural Press
—Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Contents
6 Foreword
8 Back to the Bauhaus
Ellen Lupton
10 Beyond the Basics
Jennifer Cole Phillips
12 Formstorming
32 Point, Line, Plane
48 Rhythm and Balance
60 Scale
68 Texture
80 Color
98 Gestalt Principles
116 Framing
128 Hierarchy
140 Layers
154 Transparency
166 Modularity
186 Grid
200 Pattern
214 Diagram
232 Time and Motion
248 Rules and Randomness
260 Bibliography
262 Index
Foreword
Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips
This book is a guide to visual form-making, showing designers how to build richness and complexity around simple relationships. We created the first edition of this book in 2008 because we didn’t see anything quite like it for today’s students and young designers: a concise, contemporary guide to two-dimensional design. Since its release, Graphic Design: The New Basics has reached an enthusiastic audience around the world. Everywhere we go, we meet educators and young designers who have used the book and learned something from it.
What’s new in this volume? You will find updated and expanded content throughout the book, reflecting new ideas emerging in our classrooms at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The most important addition to this volume, however, is an entirely new opening chapter devoted to “formstorming,” a term originated by Jennifer Cole Phillips. Formstorming is a set of structured techniques for generating visual solutions to graphic design challenges. We open the book with this chapter in order to plunge our readers directly into the act of visual invention.
As educators with decades of combined experience in graduate and undergraduate teaching, we have witnessed the design world change and change again in response to new technologies. When we were students ourselves in the 1980s, classic books such as Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual (published in 1965) had begun to lose their relevance within the restless and shifting design scene. Postmodernism was on the rise, and abstract design exercises seemed out of step with the interest at that time in appropriation and historicism.
During the 1990s, design educators became caught in the pressure to teach (and learn) software, and many of us struggled to balance technical skills with visual and critical thinking. Form sometimes got lost along the way, as design methodologies moved away from universal visual concepts toward a more anthropological understanding of design as a constantly changing flow of cultural sensibilities.
This book addresses the gap between software and visual thinking. By focusing on form, we have re-embraced the pioneering work of modernist design educators, from Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus to Armin Hofmann and some of our own great teachers, including Malcolm Grear.
We initiated this project when we noticed that our students were not at ease building concepts abstractly. They were adept at working and reworking pop-culture vocabularies, but they were less comfortable manipulating scale, rhythm, color, hierarchy, grids, and diagrammatic relationships.
This is a book for students and emerging designers, and it is illustrated primarily with student work, produced within graduate and undergraduate design studios. Our school, MICA, has been our laboratory. Numerous faculty and scores of students participated in our brave experiment. The work shown on these pages is varied and diverse, reflecting an organic range of skill levels and sensibilities. Unless otherwise noted, all the student examples were generated in the context of MICA’s courses; a few projects originate from schools we visited or where our own graduate alumni are teaching.
Our student contributors come from China, India, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Zimbabwe, a wide range of US states, and many other places. The book was manufactured in China and published with Princeton Architectural Press in New York City. It was thus created in a global context. The work presented within its pages is energized by the diverse backgrounds of its producers, whose creativity is shaped by their cultural identities as well as by their unique life experiences. A common thread that draws all these people together in one place is design.
The majority of student work featured here comes from the course we teach together at MICA, the Graphic Design MFA Studio. Our MFA program’s first publishing venture was the book D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), directed at general readers who want to use design in their own lives. We have published a series of other titles since then, including Indie Publishing (2009), Graphic Design Thinking (2010), and Type on Screen (2014). These books are researched and produced under the aegis of MICA’s Center for Design Thinking, an umbrella for organizing the college’s diverse effor
ts in the area of design education research.
Complementing the student work included in this book are examples from contemporary professional practice that demonstrate visually rich design approaches. Many of the designers featured, including Marian Bantjes, Alicia Cheng, Peter Cho, Malcolm Grear, David Plunkert, C. E. B. Reas, Paul Sahre, Rick Valicenti, and Jan van Toorn, have worked with our students as visiting artists at MICA. Some conducted special workshops, whose results are included in this volume.
Graphic Design: The New Basics lays out the elements of a visual language whose forms are employed by individuals, institutions, and communities that are increasingly connected in a global society. We hope the book will inspire more thought and creativity in the years ahead.
Acknowledgments
The first edition of this book constituted my degree project in the Doctorate in Communication Design program at the University of Baltimore. I thank my advisors, Stuart Moulthrop, Sean Carton, and Amy Pointer. I also thank my colleagues at MICA, including Samuel Hoi, president; Ray Allen, provost; Gwynne Keathley, vice provost for research and graduate studies; Brockett Horne, chair, Graphic Design BFA; and my longtime friend and collaborator, Jennifer Cole Phillips. Special thanks go to the dozens of students who contributed work.
Editors Clare Jacobson, Nicola Brower, and the team at Princeton Architectural Press made the book real.
My family is an inspiration, especially my parents Bill, Lauren, Mary Jane, and Ken; my children Jay and Ruby; my sisters Julia and Michelle; and my husband Abbott.
Ellen Lupton
My contribution to this book is dedicated to Malcolm Grear, mentor and friend, who taught me to approach design from the inside out, and instilled an appetite for invention and formal rigor.
The culture at MICA is a joy in which to work, thanks in large part to the vision and support of our past president, Fred Lazarus; our new president, Samuel Hoi; provost Ray Allen; vice provost for research and graduate studies Gwynne Keathley; and our talented faculty colleagues. Deep respect and thanks to our students for their commitment and contributions. Heartfelt gratitude goes to my friend and close collaborator, Ellen Lupton, for raising the bar with grace and generosity.
I am thankful for the support of my family and close friends, especially my parents Ann and Jack; and my sisters Lanie and Jodie.
Jennifer Cole Phillips
Back to the Bauhaus
Ellen Lupton
The idea of searching out a shared framework in which to invent and organize visual content dates back to the origins of modern graphic design. In the 1920s, institutions such as the Bauhaus in Germany explored design as a universal, perceptually based “language of vision,” a concept that continues to shape design education today around the world.
This book reflects on that vital tradition in light of profound shifts in technology and global social life. Whereas the Bauhaus promoted rational solutions through planning and standardization, designers and artists today are drawn to idiosyncrasy, customization, and sublime accidents as well as to standards and norms. The modernist preference for reduced, simplified forms now coexists with a desire to build systems that yield unexpected results. Today, the impure, the contaminated, and the hybrid hold as much allure as forms that are sleek and perfected. Visual thinkers often seek to spin out intricate results from simple rules or concepts rather than reduce an image or idea to its simplest parts.
The Bauhaus Legacy In the 1920s, faculty at the Bauhaus and other schools analyzed form in terms of basic geometric elements. They believed this language would be understandable to everyone, grounded in the universal instrument of the eye.
Bauhaus faculty pursued this idea from different points of view. Wassily Kandinsky called for the creation of a “dictionary of elements” and a universal visual “grammar” in his Bauhaus textbook Point and Line to Plane. His colleague László Moholy-Nagy sought to uncover a rational vocabulary ratified by a shared society and a common humanity. Courses taught by Josef Albers emphasized systematic thinking over personal intuition, objectivity over emotion.
Albers and Moholy-Nagy forged the use of new media and new materials. They saw that art and design were being transformed by technology—photography, film, and mass production. And yet their ideas remained profoundly humanistic, always asserting the role of the individual over the absolute authority of any system or method. Design, they argued, is never reducible to its function or to a technical description.
Since the 1940s, numerous educators have refined and expanded on the Bauhaus approach, from Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes at the New Bauhaus in Chicago; to Johannes Itten, Max Bill, and Gui Bonsiepe at the Ulm School in Germany; to Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann in Switzerland; to the “new typographies” of Wolfgang Weingart, Dan Friedman, and Katherine McCoy in Switzerland and the United States. Each of these revolutionary educators articulated structural approaches to design from distinct and original perspectives.
Some of them also engaged in the postmodern rejection of universal communication. According to postmodernism, which emerged in the 1960s, it is futile to look for inherent meaning in an image or object because people will bring their own cultural biases and personal experiences to the process of interpretation. As postmodernism itself became a dominant ideology in the 1980s and ’90s, in both the academy and in the marketplace, the design process got mired in the act of referencing cultural styles or tailoring messages to narrowly defined communities.
The New Basics Designers at the Bauhaus believed not only in a universal way of describing visual form, but also in its universal significance. Reacting against that belief, postmodernism discredited formal experiment as a primary component of thinking and making in the visual arts. Formal study was considered to be tainted by its link to universalistic ideologies. This book recognizes a difference between description and interpretation, between a potentially universal language of making and the universality of meaning.
Today, software designers have realized the Bauhaus goal of describing (but not interpreting) the language of vision in a universal way. Software organizes visual material into menus of properties, parameters, filters, and so on, creating tools that are universal in their social ubiquity, cross-disciplinarity, and descriptive power. Photoshop, for example, is a systematic study of the features of an image (its contrast, size, color model, and so on). InDesign and QuarkXpress are structural explorations of typography: they are software machines for controlling leading, alignment, spacing, and column structures as well as image placement and page layout.
In the aftermath of the Bauhaus, textbooks of basic design have returned again and again to elements such as point, line, plane, texture, and color, organized by principles of scale, contrast, movement, rhythm, and balance. This book revisits those concepts as well as looking at some of the new universals emerging today. What are these emerging universals? What is new in basic design? Consider, for example, transparency — a concept explored in this book. Transparency is a condition in which two or more surfaces or substances are visible through each other. We constantly experience transparency in the physical environment: from water, glass, and smoke to venetian blinds, slatted fences, and perforated screens. Graphic designers across the modern period have worked with transparency, but never more so than today, when transparency can be instantly manipulated with commonly used tools.
Transparency and Layers The Google Earth interface allows users to manipulate the transparency of overlays placed over satellite photographs of Earth. Here, Hurricane Katrina hovers over the Gulf Coast of the US. Storm: University of Wisconsin, Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorogical Satellite Studies, 2005. Composite: Jack Gondela.
What does transparency mean? Transparency can be used to construct thematic relationships. For example, compressing two pictures into a single space can suggest a conflict or synthesis of ideas (East/West, male/female, old/new). Designers also employ transparency as a compositional (rather than thematic) device, using it to soften edges, est
ablish emphasis, separate competing elements, and so on.
Transparency is crucial to the vocabulary of film and motion-based media. In place of a straight cut, an animator or editor diminishes the opacity of an image over time (fade to black) or mixes two semitransparent images (cross dissolve). Such transitions affect a film’s rhythm and style. They also modulate, in subtle ways, the message or content of the work. Although viewers rarely stop to interpret these transitions, a video editor or animator understands them as part of the basic language of moving images.
Layering is another universal concept with rising importance. Physical printing processes use layers (ink on paper), and so do software interfaces (from layered Photoshop files to sound or motion timelines).
Transparency and layering have always been at play in the graphic arts. In today’s context, what makes them new again is their omnipresent accessibility through software. Powerful digital tools are commonly available to professional artists and designers but also to children, amateurs, and tinkerers of every stripe. Their language has become universal.
Software tools provide models of visual media, but they don’t tell us what to make or what to say. It is the designer’s task to produce works that are relevant to living situations (audience, context, program, brief, site) and to deliver meaningful messages and rich, embodied experiences. Each producer animates design’s core structures from his or her own place in the world.
Beyond the Basics
Jennifer Cole Phillips
Even the most robust visual language is useless without the ability to engage it in a living context. While this book centers around formal structure and experiment, some opening thoughts on process and problem solving are appropriate here, as we hope readers will reach not only for more accomplished form, but for form that resonates with fresh meaning.
Before the Macintosh, solving graphic design problems meant outsourcing at nearly every stage of the way: manuscripts were sent to a typesetter; photographs— selected from contact sheets—were printed at a lab and corrected by a retoucher; and finished artwork was the job of a paste-up artist, who sliced and cemented type and images onto boards. This protocol slowed down the work process and required designers to plan each step methodically.
