Design as Art, Bruno Munari | Notes 2

A Rose is a Rose is a

pg. 41 - 'The growing use of symbols such as roadsigns and trademarks on a worldwide scale demands absolute clarity of expression'

'It is no longer possible to confine oneself to local tastes'

'If a visual message is going to get across to people of different languages and backgrounds it is essential that the message does not lend itself to wrong interpretations'

pg. 41-42 - 'We are surrounded by countless visual stimuli, posters that flash past car windows, lighted signs, blinking lights, images that crowd in upon us on every side, and all intent on telling us something'

'We have already made a catalogue of stimuli in our own minds'

'...we arrange these images in order, rejecting those that do not interest us'

pg. 43 - 'so we all have inside us (naturally with some variation from person to person) groups of images, forms and colours which have exact meanings'

'It is true that a badly designed poster will have some effect if the walls are smothered with it, but a good posters would achieve the same results less wastefully by giving more pleasure'

'unhappily there is a lot of confusion and waste in these messages that surround us. They often weary us with their petulance, their insistence on cramming things we don't want down our throats and (what is worse) doing it clumsily'

The Stylists

pg. 45 - 'Styling is a king of industrial designing, and of all branches of design the most ephemeral and superficial. It does no more than give a veneer of fashion, a contemporary 'look' to any object'

'The stylist works for a quick turnover and takes his ideas from the fads of the day'

'The 'aero-dynamic' period was the golden age for stylists'

pg. 47 - 'What does fashion actually do? It sells you a suit made of a material that could last five years, and as soon as you have bought it tells you that you can't wear it any longer because a newer one has already been created'

A Language of Signs and Symbols?

pg. 76-77 - Hobo railroad signs / language of symbols

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Poster with a Central Image

pg. 84 - 'The old idea in advertising was that a poster should hit you in the eye...it is a way of getting information across to the average passer-by'

pg. 86 - 'There is one basic kind of poster that graphic designers often use, because it is so visually compelling. This is the Japanese flag, a red disc on a white background...'

'...the white background isolates the disc from everything around it, from the other posters, and because the disc itself is a form that the eye finds it hard to escape from'

Poster without End

pg. 88 - 'Posters are usually designed as single entities, enclosed within their particular dimensions, and then passed up on walls and hoardings three or four together and sometimes more'

pg. 89 - 'It is therefore in certain cases possible to design posters on the same lines as wallpaper...'

'...An Italian example of this...is the Campari advertisement displayed in underground stations...the red background holds the whole thing together, while the name of the product is cut to pieces and put together again in such a way as to make an endless game for the eye'

Children's Books

pg. 96 - 'In a book of mine in which I tried out the possibilities of using different kinds of paper, there is a cat going off the right hand edge of one page and looking - around the corner, as it were - into the next page. Lots of grown-ups never noticed this curious fact'