early 20th century - DADA, Surrealism, Futurism

In the early 20th century, artists started to rebel against society and authority with movements like DADA and Futurism. Futurists embraced destruction, war, danger, and the age of machines. Their philosophy was this is what the world is becoming. there is no way to stop it or change it, so embrace it. They wanted to destroy museums and relics of the past and all social conventions. Filippo Marinetti was the one who launched Futurism. Futurism impacted typographic design by pulling i into avant garde movements.

The DADA movement rejected logical order and sought to create non-sequiter imagery to express the chaos of the world. In their art, they "replaced logical nonsense with illogical nonsense". An example of a famous DADA artist is Marcel Duchamp. He rebelled against classic ideas of art by using found objects for his art.

The influence of Futurism and DADA created modern Graphics Design. Both of these movements were iconoclastic and closely related. Different factions of these movements arose and developed into more art forms, such as surrealism, which arose from DADA, cubism, and automatism.

Surrealism impacted graphics design with its visual expression of poetry, fantasy, and the subconscious.

Automatism was a psychic exercise that attempted to express "the foundations of thought "dictated" by the absence of all control exercised by reason."

synthetic cubism "signs" the graphic esse."nce of an object rather than appearance of the object

Artists in all of these art movements utilized concepts involved in structural linguistics (whether or not they were aware of seminology or the philosophy of Ferdinand Saussure) to create the unexpected, non-sequitors, or to rebel against authority.

Another very important influences to graphic design that emerged during this time is typographic materiality. Poets started to think about the way text looked and how it was arranged as much as the words themselves. this obviously was a major breakthrough in the development of modern typography.

Without the influences of the art movements that emerged in the early 20th century, pictorial modernism wouldn't have developed into the forms that exist today.

The influence of Art Noveau and the evolution to Modern Design

Art Noveau was a style that flourished from 1890 to 1910. It only lasted 20 years, but it was the initial phase of the 20th century modernist movement. It was a transitional that created new understanding and philosophies for space and form arose.


One of the important influences of Art Noveau was that it invented forms instead of recycling pre-exiting historical models. This is an important ingredient to abstract art. Another important way it influenced the development of modernism was with ornamental structures. ornament evolved with form defining it instead of just being added later. Symbolism and Philosophical concerns were also yet another important way Art Noveau influenced later art and design because symbolism and philosophical concerns became inseparable from creativity. Symbolism Philosophical concerns are inseparable from modern art.

Vienna Secession, which "fully exploded at the Bauhaus" formed as a Result of Art Noveau. he Vienna Secession sparked mathematical pattern. The Gaslow School was a counter movement of Art Noveau. The Gaslow School was a transition to 20th century aesthetic and involved strong rectangular structure opposing strong curvilinear elements.

An important concept that arose because of Art Noveau is meaningful incompleteness, which only showed minimal necessities of design and required the viewers to understand and complete the concept themselves.

Typography and Design in the Post Industrial Revolution

In the Victorian Era, design was ruled by cheap commercial need to mass produce and sell as much as possible. There was little sense of design. New types emerged from the frenzy of different illustrators creating text in their images. Chromolithography was used extensively until it was replaced by lithography. Many design aspects were forgotten and sacrificed to commercial consumerism. Book Design and many other product designs were horrible.

These are some of the things that developed in the industrial revolution:

* metal parts were used for type
* machines powered by steam
* increased efficiency with plates and lyleners
* photo-mechanized processes
* color lithography
* machine based type settings

William Morris was one of the mos important people to the process of revolutionizing type and design during the arts and crafts movement. His goal was to revive importance of the design and craft in mass produced objects. He revived the art of book design and almost single-handedly revolutionized attention to typography. His influence was wide-spread and effects modern design.

His philosophy: the shoddiness of mass-produced craft and design was a "moral failure". His Guild considered the "cheap and nasty" a cultural weakness.