Graphic design is today an artistic discipline and a creative profession, but there has been a long way to go. It can be considered its birth in cave paintings, where our ancestors created symbols, trying to communicate a message, or for magical purposes, calling for abundant hunting, by depicting scenes of archers shooting animals. Or showing everyday scenes.
The interest in the representation of movement, the basis of animation, can also be seen in the representation of 8-legged wild boars. The first traces of the beginning of animation...
Evolution
But the evolution of different cultures, for example, the appearance of the Book of the Dead, a funerary text, in Egypt in 1540 BC. The first book where hieroglyphic writing and images are mixed. Or the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, written and illustrated by hand with ink. These are representations where design becomes important. In this case, editorial design , self-publishing.
Without a doubt, the invention of the printing press and movable type in the 15th century made serial representation a reality, and a message could be disseminated with text and images to a wider population.
But it was with the Bauhaus school that it was defined as an artistic discipline and workshops were created to teach all its variants.
The Bauhaus was created in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, by Walter Gropius, an architect, with the aim of creating a different kind of artistic education, which, after the industrial revolution, conceived ideas of uniting craftsmanship, art and society.
The architectural basis of the school means that geometry, present in nature and which has accompanied art in any composition since its beginnings, will be the basis of the graphic design studied at the Bauhaus.
design
Dadaism gave importance to letters as images and geometric typefaces were created that provided great solutions to many designs of the time. Geometry is a mantra in the school, any design is based on geometry.
Artists and teachers like Mondrian, with his geometric paintings based on the golden ratio, Kandinsky who relates color with music, where each color represents a musical note, and white is silence. Mathematical basis as in ancient Greece.
The Bauhaus had two more locations, in different cities, Dessau and Berlin, but the wars in landline number list Europe put an end to the school.
The three locations in Germany were:
1919-1925 in Weimar, founded by Walter Gropius.
1925-1932 in Dessau, founded by Hannes Mayer.
1932-1933 in Berlin, founded by Mies van der Rohe
Workshops on typography, textiles, ceramics, industrial design, mural painting and photography are the workshops taught at the Bauhaus and are the basis of today's art schools.
New Bauhaus
But a new school was born in the USA, the New Bauhaus of Chicago, founded by Lázló Mogy Naly in 1937, a photographer and teacher, where his compositions are geometric in nature, as if they were black and white paintings, since his works are based on the relationship between photography and painting. Other teachers such as Gyorgy Kepes, with Russian constructivist influences, painter and filmmaker, published books on film theory, making geometry his main interest.
It was there at the New Bauhaus where Saul Bass, a student of Kepes, a graphic designer born in the Bronx, studied, where he developed professionally making posters for major films of the time, such as the poster for Carmen Jones , 1955, or Anatomy of a Murder in 1959. Both by director Otto Preminguer, among a long etcetera.
Saul Bass
But Saul Bass is not known for his posters, which are a work of genius, with pure, primary colours, geometric composition and a symbol that alludes to the film. Saul Bass is known for the credits of great films. In fact, he is considered "the father of credits", credits based on that training in graphic design from the New Bauhaus school, but in movement, with animation, and music to match.spiral man
He did the credits for the film Carmen Jones , where he began to experiment with the first digital animations, with that moving fire. In Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), where he stands out for the typographic design, imitating the first Roman typefaces. In The Age of Innocence (Scorsesse, 1993), imitating in time lapse the opening of the textured flowers with handwritten typography that alludes to the lovers' love letters. And of course, he worked with Hitchcock in North by Northwest (1956), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).
His work has been and continues to be an influence on many authors , for example Juan Gatti, a graphic designer who works with Pedro Almodóvar at the production company El Deseo, designing the posters and credits inspired by the work of Bass. The poster for Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Almodóvar, 1989) is a clear influence on the poster for Anatomy of a Murder, being almost a tribute, where the fragmentation of body parts with geometric shapes and primary colours condense the essence of the film.
In short, graphic design is an artistic discipline that is based on geometric composition, and with Femxa you will find courses such as Autocad 3D or Graphic Design with Illustrator where you can learn and study the main characteristics to be able to create logos and posters from scratch, learn the key concepts necessary for typographic design , layout and colour. A creative and complex profession, but with many possibilities to find employment, improve the image of your company, or simply discover a new world of graphic possibilities, which are related to other arts, such as drawing, animation or cinema.