notes

Death of the author - Looking at the piece, audience finding out meaning for themselves rather than an 'author' telling them what to think
Everything is a 'text' - Anything we can see we can read
Intertextuality - One thing that relates to another
Visual Communication
Assumptions [my dog & the arrow] the idea that a dog should understand that pointing means to go over there.
Cultural modes of signification
What is Graphic design?
A sign is "something which stands to somebody for something in some capacity" -charles sanders
Graphics originated from cave drawings [40,00 AD] .They had different styles & some were almost logo like flat colour, vector style drawings.
Text / font history
History of Visual Communication
Chinese have over 4750 characters which are very pictorial 
Cuneiform = wedge shaped, referring to the marks left on the edges of the text when creating the writing symbols.
one of the first written languages. written from left to right.

The Alphabet

Originates in Egypt

The Rosetta Stone shows Hieroglyphics, Hieratic script & Greek alphabet used in Egypt from the time of the third century B.C.

Romans were the first to use baseline within text as before letters would be set in more of a tight form them could now extend on letters such as g & p.

Books used to be very expensive as the only way to re create them would have been to copy the whole thing by hand, this would also mean there would be more room for mistakes while copying. Some people may have been writing for 14hours a day, this meant that because of the long process of re-producing them, the only books likely to have been copied were of great importance at the time such as the bible. 

The Book of Kells, was highly decorated or illustrated, it is a 'insular' which means it was produced in monastic centres in Britain arround the seventh & eighth centuries. They were the first manuscripts to use spaces between words to make it easier to read. They used decorative, abstract patterns adopted from Anglo-Saxon & Celtic metal work.

Illuminated Manuscript = decorated with silver or gold leaf, heavily illustrated.

Lithography = 18th century, this was used to write/ draw on a surface & used as a print.

The first photo was in 1826

Constructivists - Russian Movement, politically motivated based on social changes, rejecting the western development. A leading designer of this time was Lazar Markovich [El] Lissitzky 

The Avantgarde = Front Guard, new /uneasy / untraditional 

Futurism = explores every medium of art.

Dada 1960-1920 - response to rejecting new design, breaking logic.

The Social role of graphic design

-Largely focused on 'Visual style'

-can cause problems with appropriateness

-importance of ideas

Political

-changing view points, expecting to effect beliefs

Information design

-illustrations

-info

"Quality in graphic design is measured by the changes it produces in the audience"

from this quote I get the idea that graphics design can be seen by anyone as good, and might been seen by others as bad, I think it's a personal opinion whether or not you think it's a good design. But I also think that a design could be seen as successful if it does what it was intended for, e.g. if the purpose is to make the audience have a different opinion on something and it does then it has been successful. 

to do... read Blanchard T 2004 Vivienne westwood  fashion 

Traub Artist in marketing in education 2006

*check blackboard*