Final Readings May 12: Simply Complex

Remember: There will be no class meeting on Monday, May 5 because of Graphic Design Program reviews next week.
Reading due and your final assignment.

READINGS:
> Andrew Blauvelt, 2000, "Towards a Complex Simplicity," Eye Magazine vol. 9, No. 35.
> Virginia Postrel, 2003, "Surface and Substance," The Substance of Style, HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Comments

[Michael Bernstein Browne]

Michael Bernstein Browne

Towards a Complex Simplicity

Andrew Blauvelt

This article is like many previous in this book, a cry for something new in design. Though many of the terms he tries to define, becomes an exchange of one words meaning for another’s words all for the sake of sounding fresh.

Surface and Substance
The author describes design for its value and how it has been so influential in the private markets. Every large corporation has an expensive logo, nicely designed website, etc. and all this adds to form of legitimacy. Design has tremendous value it offers to private markets and a great example of this is Apple computers.

[nick steinhardt]

Nick Steinhardt

Andrew Blauvelt, 2000, "Towards a Complex Simplicity," Eye Magazine vol. 9, No. 35.

Blauvelt is hinting at the viewer's tiring eye, and in a hint back towards modernism, not visually overloading a page, but conceptually doing it. As a result of the excess of design in the1990s, heavily loaded imagery, less pure self-indulgence & self-expression, and conceptually taking control of our own mediums are what to work toward in graphic design. I feel that there is a hazy grey area in the kinds of work Blauvelt is either predicting or trying to facilitate. Complex simplicity is somewhat subjective and lends itself towards more interpretive art-like commentaries as well as critiques which can end up stirring argument over whether a piece's brilliance is truly worthy of a stripped down, perhaps uninviting formal execution. Maybe there can be both incredibly formal complexity as well as proliferating use of that complexity to drive multiple meanings and situations through the design, much like he states about the use of language's flow. This article also brings up certain key-phrases i hear coming out of motion graphics; hi-concept/lo-tech and (the not so admittedly used) lo-concept/hi-tech. The flashy array of images/growing plnts/bursts/glows taught in the first semester advanced motion class vs. the stripped down, supposedly conceptual version in the second semester. It is not always so easy to have a big-idea so groundbreaking or mentally stimulating, so lo-tech approaches I feel resort to simple humor and easy narratives. While not questioning this method's validity at all, I think that at the same time, overstimulating visuals with less (or about the same level of) concept are just as valid.


Virginia Postrel, 2003, "Surface and Substance," The Substance of Style, HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

I feel that an argument of the validity of aesthetics is one of such a back and forth argument, with such exaggerated responses as essentially comparing pepsi to hitler, and analyzing how churches need to use projection screens and rock bands to allure worshippers. Much of this assembly of examples make sense toward aesthetics being irrelevant, but that does not mean that we could cut them out of the picture entirely and the world would be okay with that and just understand that pure concept in its simplest most "true" form (whatever that may take shape as (oh wait, thats aesthetics again)) is acceptable. I think that as much as you try to break something apart into its simplest nature, or its most relevant form, you are still thinking about the form it takes, and therefore its aesthetic qualities relating to it being "truthful" or "completely objective." Other arguments bring up points of how the mind is, from day 1, actually conditioned to render the visual into formulating opinions, or making assumptions about others based on clothing or a general look. These, again, are characteristics one can recognize, but not necessarily overcome.