Design of the 20th Century

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The car inspired by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler became the most popular car in the world with the highest sales all time. Hitler wanted a cheap and simple car for mass production to be suitable for his new road network. In 1933, he assigned the project to Ferdinand Porsche, who took until 1938 to finish the design. the Volkswagen Beetle is considered the most manufactured car of all time, with 21,529,464 units produced. Volkswagen Beetle 1966 model. (Source: Wikipedia) The Underwood No. 5 was praised for its feature and the adoption of easy-to-use technologies including:

For a short course in modern design, Design of the 20th Century may be all you need. The curator-authors have made perfect, compact sense of a freewheeling century and the figures who defined its styles."Superstar designers like Charles and Ray Eames have ensured that taking the weight off can be done in elegant, luxurious style, along with a host of other designers. These include the likes of Vernor Panton, Eero Saarinen, and Hans Wegner. Swiss designers also brought tremendous vitality to graphic design during this period. After studying in Paris with Fernand Léger and assisting Cassandre on poster projects, Herbert Matter returned to his native Switzerland, where from 1932 to 1936 he designed posters for the Swiss Tourist Board, using his own photographs as source material. He employed the techniques of photomontage and collage in his posters, as well as dynamic scale changes, large close-up images, extreme high and low viewpoints, and very tight cropping of images. Matter carefully integrated type and photographs into a total design. Art and design are both influenced by the politics, rise of technology, and the atmosphere of various periods. The produced pieces, poster works, or even the innovations of typography are all linked to the thoughts and challenges the various societies face. The economical, social, political, and cultural factors need to be understood as guides which help designers produce pieces which communicate with its public. Understanding aspects of the history of design assists us not only in the analyzing of both the historical and contemporary context but as an inspiration for future designers as well. The reference to the past and some of its revolutionary ideas gives depth to the piece. At times, the past may be on purposely challenged by new and progressive thoughts that are in constant demand.

Some innovations are heralded as turning points for civilization. The wheel propelled us great distances, the combustion engine transformed lives, and the television transported us to imagined lands. The chair doesn’t tend to receive quite the same status, despite literally lifting humans off the ground. But what started as something purely utilitarian has morphed into a beacon of design in the 20 th century. The marriage of form and function has made the chair an increasingly popular collector’s piece, with one even hailed as the best design of the 20 th century. Two artists were instrumental in founding the Cubist movement: Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Unlike the expressive attempts to capture natural conditions in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, Cubism was about flat, two-dimensional, distorted objects – sacrificing accurate perspective in favour of surreal fragmentation. In addition to such aesthetic, commercial, and corporate purposes, graphic design also played an important political role in the early 20th century, as seen in posters and other graphic propaganda produced during World War I. Colour printing had advanced to a high level, and governments used poster designs to raise funds for the war effort, encourage productivity at home, present negative images of the enemy, encourage enlistment in the armed forces, and shore up citizens’ morale. Plakatstil was used for many Axis posters, while the Allies primarily used magazine illustrators versed in realistic narrative images for their own propaganda posters. The contrast between these two approaches can be seen in a comparison of German designer Gipkens’s poster for an exhibition of captured Allied aircraft with American illustrator James Montgomery Flagg’s army recruiting poster (both 1917). Gipkens expressed his subject through signs and symbols reduced to flat colour planes within a unified visual composition. In contrast, Flagg used bold lettering and naturalistic portraiture of an allegorical person appealing directly to the potential recruit. The difference between these two posters signifies the larger contrast between graphic design on the two continents at the time. Modernist experiments between the world wars Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_module_version 0.0.5 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18112 Openlibrary_edition

Ming Dynasty Chairs

William Morris' famous Strawberry Thief wallpaper is a perfect example of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic