As the son of a chemist in the city of Antwerp, Belgium, Henry Clemens Van de Velde was one of eight children. After passing the entrance exams, and against his parents wishes whom wanted him to follow in their footsteps with a middle-class career, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. It was here…
The Bloemenwerf house is in Uccle, a suburb of Brussels, Belgium. This beautiful home was designed by Henry Van de Velde as his first major piece, and venture into full architecture, although never trained in the field. After being strongly influenced by the British Arts and Crafts Movement, “art for the people, by the people”,…
This is a poster designed by Satyajit Ray for his film called Devi, which means Goddess released in 1960. Instead of focusing on creating posters that would attract audiences, Ray focused more on the content of his films and designed posters that distilled the essence of his story. The conception of his posters would usually…
As commissioned by the Grand Duke of Weimar, Henry Van de Velde grew his craft seminar to into what would be called the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar. After leaving the school in 1914, he suggested a gentleman by the name of Walter Gropius, who later combined the Arts and Crafts…
Rick Valicenti is an American graphic designer centralized in Chicago. He was born November 20, 1951 (age 68 years), in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He went to school at Bowling Green State University and the University of Iowa, where he obtained an MA and MFA in Photography (Bantjes 2006). Early on in his career, Valicenti quickly realized…
Susan Kare is a graphic designer who made her name in the field by creating iconography for the first iterations of home computing. Her background in the arts and her positioning in silicon valley in the 1980s allowed her to bring a perspective to iconography in computing that largely defined the trajectory of icons in…
Katie Butler: Before he burgeoned into the advertisement titan in adulthood, Jules Cheret lived off of commissions from local theaters and other organizations. By the time he was eighteen, however, he received the opportunity to work with perfume engineer Eugene Rimmel to design advertisements and business cards. This was massive for Cheret, who would eventually…
Katie Butler: By the middle of the nineteenth century, Jules Cheret was a household name thanks to his distinct take on lithographs. Before Cheret reformed the technique of posters being tediously copied with austere and dull colors, this artist reinvented the wheel by painting directly onto stone with vibrant colors. One of his poster commissions…
‘One Art Group Show’ was painted in 1983 as an advertisement for an art exhibition led by Tai-Keung’s art group the “One Art Group.” This design instantly stuck out to me because unlike most of the paintings you will see from Tai-Keung, this piece has a red geometric grid-like symbol that is printed in the…
Katie Butler: In the midst of the nineteenth century, cultures around the world were resetting on nearly every level. In America, at the cusp of events such as the Mexican- American War, the Civil War, the festering of the use of slavery, and the transition of the American mentality from Romantic ideals to Transcendentalism, almost…
ART AGAINST AIDS is one of Friedman’s later works, made in 1987. This work was made for a coalition of artists and galleries to have an exhibition to raids money to benefit the American Foundation for AIDS Research. From what I can gather about Friedman and his personality, he most likely did this poster for…
Alan Chan’s redesign of the Coca-Cola logo serves as a kick start to his career and has helped quickly increase people’s interest in his work. Though he has done other logos and company designs, it is the redesign of Coca-Cola’s universally recognized logo into Chinese that took people by storm. The reach the product had…
‘Exhibition of 13 Hong Kong Famous Artists, Nagoya’ is a good example of the type of style and finesse that artist Kan Tai Keung involves in his work. It is not clear who his client was for this painting, likely for an art exhibition in Japan, regardless this design in particular was created in 1989.…
Dan Friedman had his postgraduate education split between too very different graphic design schools, Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm and Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel.[1] Ulm was a high modernist institution while Basel was more intuitive and exuberant.[2] While teaching at Yale, Friedman used his knowledge of the two extremes of design to help formulate projects for his…
This is one of many that was shown in Shanghai at one of his solo exhibitions. This piece of art was displayed amongst other pieces Alan Chan created during the 10-month design course that eventually led him to pursue design and visual art as a career. These pieces are important because they embody the style…