There was nothing useless in what I've learned in this course.

     First of all, I really appreciate this opportunity and what I've learned throughout this class and Meggs' History of Graphic design. To be honest, I took this class because this class is one of my major requirements, and I didn't really know what this class is all about. I was surprised and, at the same time, worried when I first see this encyclopedia-like a book, because I'm not good at reading, rather I don't like reading. What's more, I'm not good at writing either, so it was kind of challenging for me for the first several weeks until I got used to it. However every week when I post my weekly journal and some peers gave me comments, it really encouraged me. Also it was such a great opportunity to acquire opinions from different perspective and further more thoughts of peers which I didn't notice.

     I was taking three Art and Graphic Design classes this quarter, and there were several times that I encountered the words or ideas I've learned throughout this class. There was a time when Kent had mentioned about "Dada art movement" in the other GID class, I was reading Chapter 13 and learned about Dada the night before. Also there was a time I have to draw famous artist's artwork and write a paper about that artist. I was working on Renoir's artwork, and knew that he was one of the artists who lost his job as an artist by getting an affection of the Industrial Revolution. The knowledge I'd acquired in this class were really helpful in such a moment. Then I realized why this class is a requirement for my major and why it is important to understand the history of art.

     There is one more thing that I'm thankful for this class. For a long time, I was thinking that everything related to art has its origin in Europe, and Europe developed "art." There are a lots of famous artists, sites, and museums in Europe. It might be true but I realized how narrow-minded I was after I read this textbook. Every countries all over the world has their own charms in art and something traditional. I'm a Japanese and I'm so proud of Japanese art, graphic design and architecture. This book made me realize that, therefore I did several research about Japanese Art nouveau and students in Bauhaus in past weeks. Now I'm thinking about going to Japanese Art College after I graduate from Foothill College.
     As we all know, art and graphic design has been changing their form for centuries starting from Pre-Historic to Post Modernism. Every art movement has inherited the good parts of the old one and goes on. Now we are living in the century that has went through many past movement and it's such a fortunate that we have a lots of things we can learn and bring in to our modern arts and designs. I had mentioned about this for several times in past weeks, but I really hope those good old techniques and trend won't be forgotten. Because we are living in the high-technology society and it's really easy to relay on digital techniques rather than analog. I'd like to use both analog and digital techniques for my artworks by using knowledges I cultivated throughout this course.

     Why I like art is that there are no boarder lines between countries. Why I came to the United States to study art is that there are many students from all over the world and I thought I can meet a new and different ideas and their unique characteristics in their artworks. It was really a great opportunity to learn and acquire what my peers research about and how they catch the concepts and ideas every week.

Variety of Interactive Media around us

 I can't believe that it's almost the end of the quarter and this will be the last journal for me to write in this class. We have learned from the invention of writing to the brand-new technology and its design embrace us. But still I really appreciate the development of technology, because without it we can't even deliver our thought like this. As the chapter come close to the end, I felt like the number of people who had contributed to the Graphic Design evolution increased. It was really hard for me to choose the topic to write about, but this time I'd like to talk about the development of interactive media.
     The examples of interactive media are really broad, probably from computer game, telephone, to nowadays advertisement as far as media which people can communicate both ways.
I was really excited when I first experienced interactive TV show, such as quiz show. All you have to do is to use remote controller and press the button and you can literally enjoy the show with the entertainer in the TV. But now, it seems like we can also join the TV show via using our cellphone.

As some of you might have experienced, Kinect for X-box is also a kind of an interactive media. There is a censor inside the camera and you are going to stand in front of the camera, as the way you move the character inside the game will move as well. So you can enjoy playing game with moving your body. 

Augment Reality, AR, is a great example of interactive media. Here is a example of AR for IKEA products. AR make your image, idea or dream visually possible. 

     Today we are surrounded with many high technology products, and I think interactive media will continue to develop, rather I guess it'll take a major role in our daily life. As I noticed looking at several art college website, I could find a variety of majors that we didn't have before. Interactive design major is one of the example. I'm really looking forward to experience a new interactive media in our near future.

Artistic Haight-Ashbury Street

     As I went through this week's reading, I was so glad to see that our familiar places, bay area especially San Francisco, features a lot of post modern artworks starting from the period of after war.
As the textbook mentioned that "the first wave of poster culture emerged from the late 1960's hippie subculture centered in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco" (448), nowadays we can still see a lot of psychedelic and colorful wall-arts, posters and buildings in that area. It's one of my favorite place to go anytime.
    Here is pictures of Haight-Ashbury street which I take, as you can see there still exists a traits of post modern art culture in the atmosphere. Especially, the second image is a typical example of psychedelic concept of wall-art, which visually makes me feel so high. Usually psychedelic art are inspired by such as drugs, music especially rock and reggae, that is to say hippie cultures, and are created with vivid colors thus those artworks are impressive to our eyes. You can see a lot of unique shops with unique yet psychedelic designs.

There is a museum called Haight-Ashbury museum of psychedelic art and history (http://www.haightashburymuseum.org/) and you can still see a lot of artworks of old and latest psychedelic posters. Also there is a NPO called "Haight Ashbury Street Fair" (http://www.haightashburystreetfair.org/), they are dedicated to celebrating the cultural history of Haight and Ashbury and artists sells their posters, artworks which are mostly related to music and hippie culture.

     It's such a pleasure that those art traits still exist and popular among people. I hope kind of people's attempt and eager to art continues to go on, and at the same time it helps them to create a new genre of arts. 

Company logos around the world

     For this week's reading, I really enjoyed Chapter 20 mentioning about how company logos or multilingual signs had been created which are still in use today. 

     Looking at several logos of companies, I noticed that there is always coherence between actual design and its meaning, and every single type faces, line strokes, structure, and colors are related to each other. And I found interesting pictures about color of the famous company logos around the world.

 The first picture classified logos into color scale, and you can see what is the most used color in the world. As you can see, there are many blueish logos around us. According to the picture of color chart below, blue means trust, dependable and strength. In color study, blue is recognized as a color to make people calm down, by contrast to red color. However red captures our eyes the most thus it's suitable for public advertisement in order to get people's attention, so that you can also find a lot of logo marks with red color around us. I found out that company with rainbow colors are famous for world wide such as Google, ebay, and Windows. Rainbow can be anything, in other word knowledgeble.
Also logos such as Bank of America, NBA, American Airlines, and Mobil use blue and red colors, which is the colors for the American flag. So colors of the logo can be their national color to imply its origins.

     I really agree with what Tom Geismar said that symbol must be memorable and have "some barb to it that will make it stick in your mind", and at the same time it must be "attractive, pleasant, and appropriate. " The logos and symbols we can see around us today have a great impact so that it remains the same for several decades up to now. 

Japanese students in the Bauhaus

     Chapter 16 has a lot of interesting information and I got really interested in the Bauhaus. Needless to say, the Bauhaus has a lot of influence on artworks, architecture, and particularly artists, which made a new step to the Modernism. I wonder if there is still the Bauhaus exists, what influence can be applied to the modern arts. It is such an unfortunate that it had closed due to the conflict between Nazi. 

     There were two Japanese students who went to the Bauhaus to study architecture and designs, Takehiko Mizutani (http://www.bauhausreedition.com/contemporary-bauhaus-design-furniture-complements/mizutani-takehiko/), the first Japanese student there, and Iwao Yamawaki (http://www.artnet.com/artists/iwao-yamawaki/) and his wife Michiko. Mizutani attended lectures of urban city planning, condominium and apartment design, and furniture design by Joseph Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and many other famous professors and artists. After he came back to Japan, he introduced what he had learned and seen about the Bauhaus and applied their educational strategy, policy and courses to Japanese fine arts education. Likewise, Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki also learned about architecture and photomontage in the Bauhaus and they applied the latest technology to Japanese architectural design. Among all those Japanese students, Iwao Yamawaki was the only person who actually constructed architectural building using the Modernism philosophy and technology cultivated in the Bauhaus. Mr. and Mrs. Yamawaki also created one artwork named "The end of the Dessau Bauhaus." This artwork includes the photomontage of Nazis army and the Bauhaus. 

     Before the beginning of the World War , there were less influence from abroad in Japan. But thanks to those people who went to study abroad and brought back the latest technology in Europe to Japan, now we can see many of Modern artworks. It can be also said to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who went to America and opened the art design school in Chicago. We can greatly appreciate those artists' effort today.

Surrealism and Photomontage

     Every decades and centuries, new art styles take place of old styles and thus the sense of art became flexible. There is nothing like "what does it have to be art." I learned this by the Dada movement through Surrealism, one of my favorite art movement, because they have done what I, probably the people in that era as well, have not expected which is really unique and caught my eyes.

     One of my favorite art technique is photomontage. Until I read Meggs' History of Graphic Design, I didn't know that Dada artists claimed to have invented the photomontage technique such as shown in the picture of the poster made by Hannah Höch (p266 13-29). Here I'd like to introduce one of my favorite photographers called Jerry Uelsmann (http://www.uelsmann.net/). He is an American photographer know for the forerunner of photomontage and sort of a surrealist for his unique and unconventional designs in 20th century. All of his artworks are made in his black room, mounting several films together without using any digital tools we have today. I really like how he made his photographs by using traditional techniques just like people in that era was used to do. 

     Not only the artworks made by using techniques of photomontage but also collage, those artworks tend to be unique and transcended the common sense of pattern and form, thus viewers have to think carefully what are the messages that those artists are trying to deliver. This makes those designs impressive and the impact received by designs stuck in our head.  Here is a quote from Jerry Uelsmann, saying "One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye." One thing I have noticed throughout reading these chapters is, like he said, artists tend to express more of their inside conflict, concerns, and opinions during the era of confusion by war. 

Art nouveau and the influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints

     The topic about Art nouveau, an international decorative style, thrived during the two decades from 1890 to 1910 was really interesting for me.
     As you've already learnt from the previous chapters in Meggs' History of Graphic design, Europe has developed their own art style and manufactures in their early times. However as the time goes by, the international trading across continents and countries became more active and that influenced artists and their works each other. Also people became more interested in amusement and art, and needless to say, the demands of such as printing, advertisement, art books, graphics, and posters has increased from  mid 19th century. Moreover influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement leaded by William Morris, artists became more concentrated on not only surface appearance of the manufactures but also its materials, the making process, and value. Thus, I think each art works in this era classified such as art nouveau, modernism, and impressionism are sophisticated in many ways. One of the possible reason is the influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e.
     According to the Meggs' History of Graphic Design, it states that "Ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world" and defines an art movement of Japan's Tokugawa period (1603-1867)" (196.)

Since Japan was under the national seclusion, there were no influence from the outside countries except for approved Holland and China, thus they have developed their original and traditional art style. Ukiyo-e are made by the woodblock print and most of them are published with the style of emaki, which is the traditional picture scrolls, thus it has a realistic narrative tones. Hishikawa Moronobu, Katsushika Hokusai, and Ando Hiroshige are the famous Japanese Ukiyo-e artists still acknowledged up to today. Their use of colors, lines, texture and density in Ukiyo-e prints are highly evaluated by European artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin and brought in their art works. It was Felix Bracquemond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Bracquemond), a French impressionist painter and etcher, who discovered the Hokusai's Ukiyo-e prints in Paris around 1856 and familiarized its traditional techniques. 

     Although it's good to have their own traditional art techniques and charm points, the influence from the other countries tradition give a birth to a new style of arts and I think this influence is really positive perspective for both of them. Today I really appreciate that we have such a great opportunity to be able to encounter the mixture of traditional arts. 

Industrial Revolution VS Arts and Crafts Movement

It is obvious that Industrial Revolution has a lot to do with the development of Graphic Design, began with the invention of the steam-powered letter press printing machine, and importantly the invention of photography which made it possible to print photographic images.

I was really excited while reading Chapter 9, because it seems like everything is getting close to the standard of our urban life which are all familiar to us, for example, the invention of camera, magazine, product advertisement, and letterforms which we uses for our daily digital demand. Industrial Revolution made "labors" work much easier, less time consuming, enable to produce a lot of products in short time, and therefore their work got steady. I thought those development are all towards positive direction for the first time. Here, I emphasized the word "labor" not the "artist."

On the other hand, there were also a reversed movement which is called Arts and Crafts Movement leaded by William Morris and John Ruskin. Their belief as artists is to make one and the only things, which is handicrafts.  Artists who didn't appreciate the benefit of Industrial Revolution were followed Morris' idea towards what is it to be as an artist. It is also obvious that after the Industrial Revolution, a lot of artists lost their job and their hard work didn't meet the demand anymore. But I was really impressed by their passionate art works and letterforms made by their own hands. Ironically part of their hard work was absorbed into digital and mechanical design however.

I think it can't be defined whether mechanically made products are better or hand made products are. But sadly, even today I feel like designs, products, or advertisement made by machine meets more demands than those made by artificially human hands. I think we need to look closely how beautiful and sensitive handicrafts are and we should not forget that all of the privileges are originally made by human hands. Graphic Designers have to think about merits of both handicrafts and digital designs.

Innovation and Decay

This week, I've learned how printing techniques and, accordingly, Typography has developed through 15th to 17th Century. There are a lot of people related to the innovation of new calligraphy, printing technology, illustration and typography during that era, which surprised me.

As you all see that according to the Meggs' History of Graphic Design Chapter 5, since the appearance of movable type machine which was invented by Johann Gutenberg, the demands of books had shifted from manuscript books to mechanically-produced books, because it took a lot of times and effort to make even one manuscript books.
However, what I though good about this era is that there are a great amount of beautiful books or bibles which are made of the collaboration of typography by machine and human-hand-drawn illustration or manuscript such as Copperplate engraving, woodcuts printing, and other techniques.
I think people in that era were really concerned for beauty and art. They were concerning about how to use the empty space of typographic page effectively, how to get people's attention, and how to make it looks interesting or beautiful.  I think this is what we call "Design" further than "Art." So I think that is one of the reason why there was the Graphic Design evolution in Renaissance.

Mostly in our current time, when the new technology has invented and became main stream, the demands for old fashioned things are decreased and decay. For example, how many people still write letters instead of texting to someone? I think sometimes it's good to be back on good old style, and I'm sure it will improve your sense of art or creativity. It can be writing letters, drawing without using pen-tablet (I guess it's not yet familiarized that much) or taking photographs using film camera, moreover it'll be more unique and creative if you can collaborate old and new technology like they've used to do.

Field Journal #2

In this week, I've read Meggs' History of Graphic Design Chapter 1 to 4. It took me a while to go through every pages, however it was exciting because I felt like I was studying a world history. Then I realized that world history and the history of graphic design, art, and our writing styles are strongly related each other. 

The book begins with the Innovation of writing, which was found over 200,000 years ago in Africa. 

Yet there was no way to represent oral words, they were painting pictures or figures on the wall of cave or rocks for visual communications, rituals and recording stuffs. 

I can't even think about the time there was no writing language but to draw pictures to communicate with people. 

As time goes by, there is a need to keep records for religious need and dominating or governing their own countries or colonies. So the writing style changed its form little by little, such as Cuneiform, Sumerian writing, and finally Hieroglyphics of Egypt.

The story of Rosetta Stone is well know by many people, which is that Napoleon send expeditors to Egypt and they found a stone with 2 languages and 3 scripts, then in 1822 they finally succeeded to read the sentences.

Not only the writing system but also the things to be written are innovated at that time.

There was a tablet, made out of mud, and in Egypt they made paper-like substrate for manuscript called papyrus. 

Then, there came a time of invention of Alphabet. It took some centuries for the original alphabet to became the one we are using now. But finally after Roman conquered Greek in 2nd Century CE and they replaced Greek alphabet to Latin alphabet which is the most similar style of the modern English. 

Chinese calligraphy is totally different from Alphabet system, because it is visual language and there are more than 40 thousand characters. Here is a my favorite quote from the book; Chinese calligraphy was said to have bones(authority and size), meat(proportion of the characters), blood(the texture of the fluid ink), and muscle(sprit and vital force) (Meggs' History of Graphic Design p.37.) As a Japanese, whose language is similar to Chinese ones, I can really understand what this quote honestly means. 

Printing technique was first invented in China, which really surprised me. But I think it was only possible because they have also succeeded to make papers out of pulps.

The evolution of writing system and calligraphies made people possible to publish illuminated manuscripts which is really important for their religious briefs. I can't believe that people around that era could make such a perfect hand-writing manuscripts by taking much time and effort. It can be evaluated as a whole art.

In our society, written language is really important for our daily life, but it was the same in the very beginning of human beings dawn for almost the same purpose. But it is really interesting to know how our writing style has developed due to the environment and needs for each time of history. 

Field Journal #1

For a long time, I'd been thinking that Graphic Design is pretty much about "art." However, as I turning over the page of "Meggs' History of Graphic Design," I started to think that my definition of Graphic Design was wrong. Probably it was not just wrong, but I thought that it cannot be said or explained by one word; art. It is obvious by looking at each pictures on the pages.

This book begins with the invention of writing. At this moment, I stopped and started thinking that "wait, is this also a kind of Graphic Design?" But as I think deeply, I became to think that whatever the form is, if that things are to communicate to people or have meanings it is a kind of art.

It is really interesting for me to see the developing of "typography" as time goes on. Obviously it is because of the invention of tools and machines but also because of each publishers met needs which is to outshine what they really want people to know within the environment where there is a lot of information, and
also to give audience a strong impact in order to prevail expansive competition.

As the time goes on, I noticed that Graphic Design became the combination of original typography and drawing, painting, and photography. In this way, Graphic Design can have more strong impression and uniqueness. However, I was really surprised and also wondered that each designs never be the same. Which made me thought that imagination can be infinity and beyond.

Since I was grown up in the digital and information age, I came across a lot of Graphic Designs around me without truly knowing it. However I'm sure this book will lead me to the further understanding of Graphic Design, let me notice the importance of Graphic Design, and help me cultivate a sense of uniqueness and creativity.