SMAD 301 - The Media Arts (Notes + Review)

SMAD 301 at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia.  Study of how mediated communication molds perception and influences cultural change. Emphasis on how language and imagery, sound and music are combined in current media to create meaning. Consideration of emerging media and their implications for cultural design. 

 

Pre-Industrial Culture
Deeply rooted/ Rigid social roles and belief system

Industrial Revolution
-Spatial and Social Mobility
-Erodes traditional roles and beliefs
-Disposable income and leisure time is created

Consumer Capitalism
-Harnesses disposable income
-Fuels continuation of the system

Telecommunications
-Permits geographical dispersion
-Creates affiliation networks and virtual communities

Mass Comunications
-Fills Leisure Time
-Motivates consumption by distributing symbols and scenarios for constructing social identity based on material goods

a group of people who are linked by a shared belief around a brand
Brand Tribe

Chevy Silverado Ad
-incorporates Natural disasters, history, stereotypical american imagery
Marries patriotism to product
Controversial: Using historical struggle to sell a product

People who establish a trend
'Cool setter'

Brands become popular because they sell...
Ideas over products

What is beauty sickness?
When people are concerned more with looks than their career/schooling/etc.

Objectification theory
Women are told that their primary currency is their looks

What is a Megabrand?
A brand that sells many different products and services
ex. Virgin

Celebration, Florida
A community Disney owns in Florida where there is no advertizing - people literally live in a brand = 'brand nirvana'

Aberocrombie and Fitch Clip
-Sexual fetishes
-Attractive actors (male shirtless)
-Attractive imagery
-Gives sense of attractiveness, sex, and wealth

Amstel Beer Commercial/ Coal Commercial/ Women's Insurance
-depicts men as idiots - women are not depicted this way
-A reverse power structure is depicted
-While do men sometimes fit the stereotype depicted, women do as well

Video about children being marketed products
-ads guide children to be consumers

What is a new marketing strategy?
Social media

Why is social media advertisement good?
-can be customized and show you things you actually want to buy

Are we less adventurous now?
Yes, we want information brought to us

Editha Test
-are there 2+ women
-do the women talk
-do they talk about something other than a guy

Why is it hard to determine a 'good' graphic design?
It is a subjective matter

4 Graphic Design Elements
C - contrast
U - unity
R - rhythm
B - balance

2 Key Graphic Design Styles
Free Form and Grid Approach

Drawback of Free form
-hard to understand what it stands for

Examples of free form
ArtNouveau, Dadaism, Art Deco, Pop art, Postmodern

What is free-form?
free-flowing placement and text and graphics within the designers frame

Criticism of expressionism
Did not show enough emotion or resistence

what does 'dada' mean?
No

Dada
-depicts reality more
-personified by 'collage'

Examples of Grid Approach
De Stijl, Piet Mondrian, Rietveld

Who was a modern architect that created homes that were more like art?
Rietveld

What kinds of homes are in suburbs?
Colonial style homes - cost-efficient, tradition, easy to build

What is Grid Approach?
Objective and unemotional placement of design elements within a frame to create unity
-also uses geometric approach

Bahaus
German art school, linked to minimalized working-class housing
-impersonal

Which graphic design style is on the internet and why?
Grid approach for user experience

What did Blazer design?
-combined graphic design styles
-did 'I heart NY' campaign

Which typeface is a derivative of Bahaus?
Sans-serif

What font does most logos and ads use?
Sans-serif Helvetica

Why are logos memorable?
-lodge their way into your long-term memory
-unity, connectivity, never-ending

What does Nike's logo give an impression of?
motion and punctuality

What was before branding to make products memorable?
Figures that represented the product

Pre- Saul Bass movie posters
-busy, usually depicted different events in the movie and acted as a movie trailor

Saul Bass attributes
-leaves elements up to the imagination
-distills visual message down to singular, essential part
-captures viewers attention and stays in their long term memory
-turns substance into style

What colors did Saul Bass mainly use?
Primary colors - mainly red

What did the Catch Me If You Can movie trailer do?
-shows what will happen in movie with few visuals, but makes you wonder about the ending

For which approach is the message more important than the design?
Grid Approach

Which form draws attention to itself?
Free form

Visual Communication should ______________ and keep it in people's ____________
1. grab attention
2. long-term memory

What are three things that Saul Bass is famous for?
Logos, movie posters, and movie titles

What is a striking symbolic way of representing quantitative data via easily interpretative icons?
Isotype (created by Neurath)

Neurath's work has a strong influence on _________ and _____________
cartography and graphic design

What is an informational Graphic?
A visual display of complex information

Where does the most important information of an infographic go?
At the top

What are the two types of infographics?
Statistical: displays empirical, quantitative information (comparative with x/y axis)

Non-statistical: Verbal and qualitative information

What did visualization start with?
Cartography (which is now google maps)

A map of a baseball park is a _________ infographic
non- statistical

What is the future of infographics?
To make them interactive

Tech / app / social media is in a 'race to the ________'
bottom of the brain stem, primitive emotions

Why is technology updated so often?
To be persuasive

What keeps you on social media a long time?
Continuous scroll

What is used to make fake news sites seem more popular than they actually are?
Bots

What is an 'information silo'
People only read information that matches their point of view and beliefs
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SMAD 301 - The Media Arts Review

The socialization/acculturation process
We acquire our social identity from:
family, friends, surroundings, institutions and media.

Call of Duty video
showed real people in the dramatized war scene, promotes violence, desensitizes us to violence, Frank Sinatra's music in the background doesn't match up with the scene

Pre-industrial culture
social roles and belief systems rigid, deeply rooted (but comforting)

Industrial revolution
fosters spatial and social mobility, eroding traditional roles and beliefs while creating disposable income

Consumer capitalism
evolves to harness this disposable income and thus fuel the continuation of the system

Telecommunication
permits geographical dispersion, creates affiliation networks and virtual communities

Mass communication
fills leisure time, motivates consumption by distributing symbols and scenarios for constructing new social identities based on what we own, wear, read, watch, ect.

Chevy Ad
'This is our Country' playing in the background Chevrolet's Silverado truck ad mixes vintage photos and news footage with the song. Idea of the american dream: opportunity, moving up the ladder, happiness and family. 'You've been through some shit, Chevy will help you get through it.'

Chevy Ad article-Paul Farhi
Rosa parks posthumously becomes a pitchwoman for a line of pickup trucks.
Chevy says it was created to highlight key moments in American history as a patriotic statement
By including positive and negative moments it is meant to evoke the notion that the country has gotten up and kept going.
9/11 victim's daughter said the ad was only to evoke strong emotions from a terrorist attack and her mother's murder being used to sell trucks.

Ted Talk: Beauty pressure
Women learn from a young age that it is ideal to be flawless
Leads to widespread violence against women
Ads take parts of woman's bodies and turn them into things/objects
Kate Winslett spoke out about the magazine's use of photoshop on her body.
Young girls are groomed at an early age to behave a certain way
Conventional idea of what a beautiful man or woman is

Social media and teens
Kids used to want happiness and family values, but now they want fame and money (American Idol). It's all about the likes and validation from social media. 'Get rich quick' Kids are always plugged in.

Cadillac Commercial
Selling idea of luxurious lifestyle through images of black, gray and gold

Kingsford Charcoal Ad
Guy takes over grill from the woman--shows how it's a man's job. 'what if i just went into the kitchen and started making a salad, there's a technique' lights grill 'it's that easy with Kingsford match light'

Disney Messaging
Everything is romantic or competition based, girls pinned against each other. No representation of nonwhite, females. Beauty and the Beast examples

Marketing to Children
massive marketing leads young kids to want material things
ADD/ADHD and parental responsibility

Key elements
contrast
balance
rhythm
unity

2 key graphic design styles
freeform
grid style

Freeform
draws attention to itself
free flowing placement of text and graphics
in TV/movies: camera constantly moving such as opening credits in modern family

Grid Approach
the message is more important than the design
ensures unity.
supplemented by bauhaus and de stijl
objective and unemotional--carefully placed design elements to ensure unity, based on horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines

A case study: Saul Bass
influenced by Bauhaus which said to focus on the idea that graphic design should reduce a subject's elements to one dominant idea, distill a visual message to its most essential part, visual communication must capture a viewer's attention and keep the message in a person's long-term memory, designed the dixie cup design, kleenex, quaker, girl scouts.

Saul Bass Clip
focused on color and line theory--less is more, simplified everything,
changed how movie credits worked, used titles in a new way to create a climate for the story so it's not just 'popcorn time,' one of the first to make title credits interesting. helped with the Psycho scene in the shower--seeing so much with so little, 48 drawings that featured every clip that Hitchcock then used to direct

Neurath
developed the social and economic museum to convey complicated social and economic facts to a largely uneducated Viennese public. This led him to work on graphic design and visual education.
Created the isotype a way of representing quantitative information with easily interpretable icons.
Strong influence on cartography and graphic design.

Milton Glaser Clip
Famous contemporary designer, creator of I <3 NY, a lot of grid style, designed with purpose, rule of thirds

Informational graphic
a visual display of complex information like a weather map or Charles Darwin's 1859 drawings of finches

Benefits of the informational graphic
facilitation of the 6 key journalistic questions: who, what, where, when, why, how?
An aesthetic connection for the viewer/reader combined with the quantitative precision of numerical data in a dramatic format.

2 types of infographics
statistical
non-statistical

Statistical
visual displays of empirical, quantitative data

Non-statistical
visually pleasing arrangements of verbal and qualitative information: baseball stadium layout

Logos on clothing
hidden until 1970s, Ralph Lauren and Lacoste were the first to make their logos visible, people started wearing them off the golf course where they were originally intended

The aspirational age
17

Corporate taxes being lowered meant what for marketing?
marketing gained more control, starved the public sector, partnerships with private corporations became the solution

Change agents
The CEOS of tomorrow

Hip Hop and logos
young black men in inner cities wearing Nike and Hilfiger that skyrocketed the brand when hip hop came on the scene in 192

Broing
when Nike borrows style, attitude, imagery from black urban youth and they bring prototypes to inner-city neighborhoods in New York, Philly, Chicago to gauge reactions to new styles

Nike's charity
PLAY (participate in the lives of youth), Nike's inner city sports program that sponsors them and upgrades basketball courts for free and gets advertising out of it

Tommy Hilfiger in the ghetto
started off as a preppy brand, then reached the ghettos as kids thought the clothes spoke status. Hilfiger responded by creating clothes with bolder colors and bigger logos and got Snoop Dog to sponsor which made company sales skyrocket.

Susan Sontag
notes on the camp essay: cliquiness, it is the art of being in between or ironic.

Cool hunters
part of the in crowd, search out pockets of cutting edge lifestyles and video tape them

Imagery and advertising
imagery to equate products with positive cultural or social experiences

Effect of advanced branding
nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star

When did sponsorship become a booming industry
1984 LA olympics

Branding of the cityscape
Chesney, building take over. Queen street take over, Levi's increased spending on billboard ads by 301%.
Sponsor scandal of the 1998 winter olympics in Nagano, Japan: new broke about Nike's mistreatment of workers, CBS wouldn't air it because of ties with Nike

Branding of music
Rolling stones brought in the sponsored rock tour with Tommy Hilfiger

Nike and the branding of sports
created sports celebrities, like Michael Jordan and the JORDAN brand

Brands that flourished during the recession
beer, soda, fast food, sneakers, gum and Barbies.

Good of social media
Immediate access to info
Pervasive connectivity
Globalized voices--commenting/sharing posts
Hashtags
More level playing field for businesses: small companies can go global through an ingenious video or sharing opinions that resonate

Bad of social media
Selfies
Political tirades-online debates
Hiding behind anonymity
All talk, no action--venting online doesn't do anything
Ignorance amplified--don't feed the trolls

Pre-Bass posters
tried to show as much of the film as possible

Gone with the wind poster
small images of scenes on the poster, posters weren't easy to read and were more informative than attractive, huge fonts with a lot of pictures

William Addison Dwiggins
coined the term graphic design in 1922

Pre-gutenberg
before 1455-Egyptian wall art and Greek combination of nature and art

Gutenberg
1456-1760: printing press

Industrial
1761-1890: printing presses, mechanical typesetting machines. Invention of the lithography: made it easier to use images with words. Printed and colored cards became popular

Artistic
1891-1983: merged graphic design art styles with various technological advances including the halftone photographic screen process, color lithography, motion pictures and television

Digital
1984-pres. computer marks the beginning of the digital era

Contrast
differences in color, size, symbolism, time and sound in print or screen design. Proportion/scale: spatial relationship between design elements and the size of the page. A design should have at least one element that is emphasized

Balance
placement of elements within a design's frame. Considered balance if it equalizes the weight between the x and y axes.

Rhythm
the way design elements are combined to control movement of the viewer's eye

Unity
elements in a design should all be similar in content with words and pictorial elements fitting the same mood

Ethical
a graphic designer must balance utilitarianism, hedonism and the golden mean. Design should be readable, legible and useful. Golden mean is to reach an agreement between extremes.

Fair representation
giving credit when credit is due. Fairey's Obama poster design was a photo repurposed from the AP.

Art nouveau
1890--first commercial art style intended to make products and their advertisements more beautiful. Influenced by Asian paintings and screens. Revolutionary because it rejected Victorian traditions of commercial excess and a machine mentality

Dada
1916--dada emerged as a critical examination of the social structures that allowed such an event to occur. Expressed artist's rage with political leaders by the use of absurd, asymmetric designs. Writings and graphics intended to confuse, educate and gain attention. Tristan Tzara=one of the founders of the movement. Typography of different sizes and styles randomly distributed on the page. Rejection of classic left to right reading style

Art Deco
the last of the total styles, art deco united buildings, objects, fashions and typographical and graphic designs by its stylish and distinctive look. Noted for streamlined shapes and curved sans serif typographical lettering that presented the modern graphic look.

Pop art
combined organic vines of art nouveau designs and the rebellious philosophy of dada. On the Road by Jack Kerouac during this era. Combined political movements with opinions of hippie culture.

Punk
late 1970s, creators of punk placed typographical and other visual elements on pages in angry, rebellious, random ways.

New Wave
founded by Swiss Wolfgang Weingart and American April Greiman. Designs influenced by music and fashion.

Hip Hop
1970s, quick editing of visual messages to the beat of pulsating rhythms combined with pictographic images on walls, clothing.

De Stijl
1917, unemotional use of lines, common shapes, and the colors red, yellow and blue would usher in a new utopian spirit of cooperation. Translated as 'the style,' Abstract paintings with thick black horizontal and vertical lines. Use of the modular design approach.

Bauhaus
1919, emphasis on useful, simple and clearly defined forms.

Nigel Holmes
example of U.S. debt in terms of years so people would clearly understand the difference between a million, billion and trillion

William Playfair
founder of infographics. Printed charts about British imports, this became the first bar chart. he is also credited with inventing the pie chart

John Snow
Physician who plotted deaths with data of people who died during London epidemic

Charles Minard
created an infographic of Napoleon's disastrous march to Moscow and retreat during the War of 1812.

Edward Tufte
advocates for more education for infographic producers

Infofilms
statistical, combines the visual cues of movement with statistical information

Infointeractives
statistical, web-based data sources that allow users to engage with the presented facts in an interactive format

Fact boxes
nonstatistical, summarize key points

Tables
nonstatistical, rows and columns--stock market results or baseball scores

Nondata maps
nonstatistical, locator--gps, explanatory--where a story takes place

Other nonstatistical examples
courtroom sketches, tv schedules, calendars, icons, logos, timelines