User:ThomasW/Notes Look Closer Five

Beirut, Michael, Drenttel, William, William, Steven (2006) Look Closer Five, Critical Writings on Graphic Design, New York, Allworth Press

"Early twentieth century movements like de Stijl and Russian constructivism attempted to connect design to larger political, social and spiritual ideologies" p 6

"The design artefacts you leave behind will be your ultimate legacy" p 6

"An important way out of the current predicament is for graphic design to reclaim a position of critical autonomy. By autonomy, I do not mean a wholesale withdrawal from the social or the kind of freedoms the fine arts claim. Graphic design, precisely because it is a instrumental form of communication, cannot divorce itself from the world, Rather graphic design must be seen as discipline capable of generating meaning out of its own intrinsic resources without reliance on commissions, functions or specific materials or means." p10

"In the twentieth century, modern designers hailed pictures as a "universal" language yet in the age of code, text has become a common denominator then images–searchable. translatable. and capable of being reformatted and restyled and alternative or future media." p 24

"In our much-fable era of information overload, a person can still process only one message at a time. this brute fact of cognition is the secret behind magic tricks: sleights of and occurs while the attention of the audience is drawn elsewhere." p25

"Political leaders have long fears images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them." p46

"First, Technology has considerable undermined our ability to trust what we see, yet we have not adequately grappled with the effects of this on our nothing of truth.Second, if we are indeed moving from the era of the printed word to an era dominated by the images." p47

"Graphic designers (and lots of other folks, too) shoulder a dilemma of identification: how to balance the role of emissary with the role of saviour" p78