Applying Research on the History and Theory of Design to Design Activities

Understand how to find relevant sources of information on design history and theory

Explain where they might research information on design history and theory

Select information relevant to a given research task on design theory or history

Organise and present the research information selected so that it can be accessed and cross referenced for their future use

Incorporate and integrate research information into their own design activities

Give examples of current trends in design

Explain how design ideas have evolved, in one context of their own choice

Describe how an aspect of design history or theory has been interpreted in their own design work

Understand the formal elements and principles of design

Understand the formal elements and principles of design

Give examples of how formal elements and principles of:

Balance

Balance is the arrangement of lines, colours, values, textures, forms, and space. their are three types of balance: formal or symmetrical or informal or asymmetrical and radial balance. 

Formal or symmetrical balance has equal weight on both sides.

Informal or asymmetrical balance has a different weight on on each side to maintain balance. 

Radial balance is a circular balance moving out from a central object to maintain balance.

Balance is created in a work of art when textures, colours, forms, or shapes are combined harmoniously. In this image, notice how the photographer achieves a sense of balance by dividing the image into two sections: one half occupied by trees, and the other half by the water.

Proportion

The size of one part of artwork to its other parts is called proportion. Artists use proportion to show emphasis, distance and use of space, and balance.

Proportion is created when the sizes of elements in a work of art are combined harmoniously. In this image, all of the proportions appear exactly as one would expect; the human figures are much smaller in scale than the natural world that surrounds them.

Rhythm

Rhythm can help control the pace of flow in a composition; it’s patterned movement. Rhythmic patterns are built from elements and the intervals between them, and just as your ear will follow along with the rhythm of a song, your eye will follow rhythm created visually.

A pattern and a rhythm will exist as soon as you add multiple elements to the page. Two of anything implies a structure. It’s going to be there no matter what you do so, again, you should learn to control it.

Repetition creates flow and rhythm through the repeated elements. When the eye sees a red circle it notices other red circles in the composition and seeks to establish a pattern. In addition to repetition you can use alternation and gradation to create rhythm.

Repetition: creates patterns through predictability.

Alternation: creates patterns through contrasting pairs.
Gradation: creates patterns through a progression of regular steps.
Rhythm is created both through the elements the eye follows and the intervals between them. 

Changes to either alter the pattern. Variations in the pattern add interest. Emphasis of something in the pattern can break the rhythm and pause the flow momentarily.

There are three primary types of rhythm:

Regular rhythm: occurs when the intervals between elements are predictable, or the elements themselves are similar in size and length. Placing repeating elements at regular intervals would be an example.
Flowing rhythm: occurs when the elements or intervals are organic. This creates natural patterns that evoke a feeling of organic movement. Stripes on a tiger or zebra are good examples.
Progressive rhythm: occurs when the sequence of forms or shapes is shown through progressive steps. Some characteristics of elements might have stepped changes, or the interval might have stepped changes. This gradual increase or decrease in sequence creates movement. A colour gradient is a good example.
Any of the above types of rhythm can be used to create movement and compositional flow. 

Which you would choose depends on the specifics of your design: if the design is trying to communicate consistency, a regular rhythm is probably best; if the design is trying to communicate something more natural and organic, a flowing rhythm would likely be preferred. 

Emphasis

Emphasis is created in a work of art when the artist contrasts colours, textures, or shapes to direct your viewing towards a particular part of the image. In this image, the colours of the paddlers' jackets contrasts with the muted tones of the background. Our attention is immediately drawn to the paddlers, even though they are relatively small in scale.
Unity are applied in the design of products.

Emphasis is way of bring a dominance and subordination into a design or painting. Major objects, shapes, or colours may dominate a picture by taking up more space or by being heavier in volume or by being darker in colour than the subordinate objects, shapes and colours. There must be balance between the dominant and subordinate elements.

Describe how formal elements and principles of design are visible in the work of two major designers.

Karim Rashid

You may not recognize Karim Rashid immediately, but odds are you have at least one of his designs in your home. A staunch believer that everyone deserves access to great design no matter what their budget (it’s what he calls “designocrasy”), Karim has become one of the world’s most celebrated designers having brought thousands of new ideas and innovations to the widest-possible audience. As such, Karim has won hundreds of international awards, including the prestigious Red Dot, and his work can be found in more than 20 permanent collections including those of the MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and SFMOMA. Karim also calls everyone from Umbra to Giorgio Armani, Kenzo, Alessi, Artemide and Veuve Clicquot as his clients, and Time magazine once described him as the “most famous industrial designer in all the Americas”.

Clearly having conquered the industrial design realm, Karim recently turned his creative eye to architecture. We recently caught up with the designer cum architect to talk about the evolution of his career and the three eye-popping HAP condos he’s now got under construction for New York City. Hear what he has to say about his grand new endeavors—color, controversy and all.

What made you want to become a designer?

Karim: I don’t think I became a designer, I think I’ve always been a designer. I realized my life’s mission at the age of five in London. I went sketching with my father in England drawing churches. He taught me to see—he taught me perspective at that age and he taught me that I could design anything and touch all aspects of our physical landscape. I remember drawing a cathedral facade and deciding I didn’t like the shape of the gothic windows so I redesigned them. I drew them as ovals. I also remember winning a drawing competition for children—I drew luggage (my own ideas of how to travel). I read books from artists all over the world. I was obsessed with drawing eyeglasses, shoes, radios, luggage, throughout my childhood. Design, art, architecture, fashion, film—it was all the same to me: creation, beauty, and communication.

How would you describe your style?

Karim: First, I don’t have a ‘style’ and I don’t believe in style. My work tries to answer and speak about our technological age, and address the present subject matter at hand. I feel strong and confident in all parts of our physical and virtual creative disciplines from micro to macro. As Manfredi said—from spoon to city.

We often see architects dabbling interiors and industrial design, but it’s less common to see things go the other way. What prompted your decision to move into the design of buildings?

Karim: I always saw myself as a pluralist, even when I was a student. I don’t like the idea of specialization and admired creative people who touched many different aspects of visual culture. Like the whole idea of the Warholian factory; where you could move around in all the disciplines of the applied major arts. I promised myself that if I ever had my own practice, I would keep it broad and touch all aspects of our physical landscape—a cultural shaping.

How does working on such a large scale compare to working on the design of an object? Has the shift in perspective been an easy one or a challenge?

Karim: I love the larger experiential impact a condominium can have on people lives. With interior design or public space, I know that masses of people have access to my designs, and they are not just looking at it. Rather, they are physically immersing themselves inside my concepts. I feel that residents will have a great positive human experience that goes beyond just style.

An exterior rendering of HAP Four located at 653 West 187th Street, Inwood

All HAP Four (653 West 187th Street), HAP Five (329 Pleasant Ave) and HAP Six (1653-1655 Madison Avenue) take on unique aesthetics and are all very distinct from one another. What inspired the design of each of these buildings? And how does it feel to be able to make your mark on NYC?

Karim: NYC is based on the Cartesian grid that we have created for ourselves in almost all architectural components. I always believed that architecture ultimately comes down to a system of components, but what we need are industrial elements that are more free form and flexible in their configuration as not to end up in a strict Cartesian world. Working with HAP gave me a great opportunity to play with the idea of pattern, grid, and repetition. A pattern is a way of giving richness and depth to our Cartesian landscape. For this new condominium, for HAP Four, I wanted to create a building that uses pattern, geometry, light and color to provide the luxury of wellbeing to its inhabitants.

Day and night renderings of HAP Six located at 1653-1655 Madison Avenue, East Harlem

HAP Six is located on one of Manhattan’s most heavily trafficked streets. The heavy passage of pedestrians and transportation make the south facade of this building a potential global billboard. The three dimensional pattern unfolds across the East and West Facades along the balcony railing giving character and playfulness to the facades while producing beautifully faceted patterns of light that filter into the living space behind.

Color is life and for me, color is a way of dealing with and touching our emotions, our psyche, and our spiritual being. There are artists that became so acutely intensive, experimental, and investigative with colour like Yves Klein as well as Rothko and others. They spent most of their lives investigation in color. My career has unintentionally been an exploration of color. HAP Five stands out as a strong play of light, color and modular geometry. Here, we used the balcony as a design feature to generate dynamic play and variety along the facade of the building. The colored glass railing gives character and playfulness to the facade while producing beautifully colored light that penetrates into the living space behind. Each unit receives the large, yet intimate space that extends the senses beyond the interior, making the apartment feel bigger and brighter than it actually is.

Exterior rendering of HAP Five located at 329 Pleasant Avenue, East Harlem

The colour scheme of HAP Five (329 Pleasant Avenue) has received mixed reviews. What was your motivation in opting for cyan and watermelon over something more subdued?

Karim: An outside firm did the original render of that building and the colors were too saturated. If you were to see the original that my office created, you would see it’s much more subdued. However, contemporary design tends to be cold, alienating, and sometimes very inhuman. I’m interested in showing the world how a contemporary physical world can be warm, soft, human, and pleasurable and color plays a large part of the warmth of my designs. I use colors to create form, mood, feeling, and to touch the public memory. Colour is not just ‘is’ and is not intangible—it is very real, very strong, extremely emotional and has a real physical presence. I’m also thinking about using colors to create and work with the experience, or the human engagement of that certain task or function.

You often talk about the “democratization of design” driving your work. How did that manifest in these three buildings?

Karim: High design affordable to all is our human right! The HAP residences are projects in “designocrasy” and since we are building on very low budgets, the savings are passed onto the buyers so that the price pinpoints will be excellent and more ‘entry level’ apartments for younger people. Even though I also design luxury, I don’t design for wealthy people. I design for everyone. The design had to be very smart, maximize choices and use materials to have maximum impact. This was a dream project for me to realize the philosophical tenets I have been preaching for so many years. The budget constrains were challenging, but we were able to find solutions and suppliers that provided high design for little cost. Design doesn’t always have to be costly; one can design high design with little money.

Interior renderings of one of the HAP Six apartments

You are very eco-conscious. What are some of the sustainable/green measures you have taken with the HAP developments?

Karim: The ideal dwelling is one that utilizes technology seamlessly, from construction to human interaction, to create new traditions, shape new experiences, embracing family and community and be as sustainable as possible. We used biodegradable flooring throughout made by Parador flooring. All lighting in the buildings is either LED or fluorescent, which are low energy consumption. In addition, the buildings were built to the latest NYC building codes, which have continually evolved to be the most recent, and efficient energy code to date. The essence is to design spaces that meet the changing social behaviors of today; that are a mirror of the time in which we live.

Do you have any other buildings on the drawing board we should know about?

Karim: I’m presently designing hotels in Kuala Lumpur, Tel Aviv and Hannover; Kado Karim luxury condominiums in Jurmala Latvia (24 apartments); a restaurant and condominium in Tangier; condos in Tel Aviv, Miami, Montreal, South America; and a shopping mall in St. Petersburg.

It took me so long to break into architecture and now the momentum is here. I’m thrilled to design buildings where I can design every aspect of them from the door handles to the branding, to the furnishings to the other structures.

Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser is a very famous logo designer, he created many graphic designs and logos, his most well known logo is his I Love New York where nearly everyone knows or has heard of it. He is was interested in making his city well known and he has achieved this everybody has heard of New york. His career was around 1956- 2004, so this is when pop art was the most popular and I feel his Bob Dylan image represents pop art.

Milton is a digital designer all his work is done digitally which made it look so professional, he would of began by sketching his designs for his resent pieces. Milton uses quite a few formal elements such as composition, line , shape and pattern. I feel his most uses formal element is composition because this is what makes his pieces because of the way there are positioned.

I really like Milton Glaser’s work, I feel that it looks so simple and was probably so easy to do such as the NY logo but yet it’s so effective.

Few designers evoke as much praise from their eminent peers as Milton Glaser. Over the last five decades, he has been one of the most internationally renowned and highly influential figures in design. Vastly prolific, his versatility as a practitioner spans many design disciplines, including graphics, exhibitions, interiors, furniture and products.

To many, Milton Glaser is the embodiment of American graphic design during the latter half of this century. His presence and impact on the profession internationally is formidable. Immensely creative and articulate, he is a modern renaissance man—one of a rare breed of intellectual designer-illustrators, who brings a depth of understanding and conceptual thinking, combined with a diverse richness of visual language, to his highly inventive and individualistic work.

Having initially trained as a classical fine artist, his historical roots in design were as co-founder of the New York-based Pushpin Studio in 1954, with Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. In Pushpin, Glaser was in the vanguard of a movement that reacted against the strict authoritarianism and austerity of modernism.

Exploring and re-interpreting the visual material of previous era’s of both fine art and commercial art, (including that of Victoriana, wood-cut illustration, comic books, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco), they sought to bring fresh ideas, humour and a new decorative and illustrative approach to the design of record sleeves, book covers, posters and magazines.

Immediately recognizable, the work of Pushpin Studio evolved to become an international force in graphic design during the 1960s and 1970s.

British graphic designer John Gorham recalls initially encountering Glaser’s work in London in 1964:
At lunchtime, a colleague and I would go to Zwemmers in Charing Cross Road. They had books and magazines from the United States that you couldn’t get anywhere else. We found early issues of Pushpin Graphic. Milton’s work was in there and we thought, ‘God Almighty! It’s incredible!’ We bought whatever we could find and indulged in the luxury of knowing that we were virtually the only people in London who had seen this kind of work. We thought we were light years ahead of everyone else! It was the fist time I had ever seen anyone thinking like Glaser. To me, he was the most exciting and influential designer of that period. He revolutionized graphic design throughout the world. What I admired was the brain behind the technique.

Such was the international success of Pushpin that, in 1970, they were the first American studio to have an exhibition at the prestigious Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, a show which subsequently travelled to other cities in Europe and on to Japan.

Glaser eventually left Pushpin in 1976 to pursue other design work, and through his own company, Milton Glaser, Inc., has concentrated on expanding involvement as a multidisciplinary designer, undertaking exhibition, interior, product, supermarket and restaurant design projects.

Developing a major interest in publishing design (he was founder of New York magazine), he established with Walter Bernard (former art director of Time), WBMG, a magazine and newspaper design studio. Among his publication credits are Paris Match, L’Express, Esquire, The Washington Post, Fortune magazine and Banaradia (Barcelona).

As a lecturer, Glaser has taught at the Cooper Union and regularly (since 1961) at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Here he answers a series of questions, which give a rare insight to the man himself:

On the subject of clarity of communication, would you say this is something which is missing from much of today’s design?

One must understand this relationship between clarity and ambiguity, because it is an essential component of communication. You can’t make everything explicit to people. There has to be work for the mind to do. Often the communication is not immediately clear but becomes clear quickly. That duration between seeing and understanding is always what you play with in communicating ideas.

Do you think that there should be an initial ‘surprise’ in order for that communication to be effective?

Well you would like that to happen, but it depends on what you can do to make people pay attention. In a culture like ours, everything is screaming for our attention, so at a certain point we become immune to the screaming. The question then is what do we do to penetrate people’s immunity?

Has there been a particular approach to the diversity of your work?

I have always thought that in order to stay interested in what you are doing, to some extent you have to operate in the realm of what you do not know; that professionalism moves you forward towards a kind of rote understanding, in the same way that academic activity leads you towards academic, or repeatable ideas. In design, what makes things interesting is moving around in the areas you are not a master of, so that you can surprise yourself and develop your own understanding. That development of one’s own understanding is, I think it seems to me, a critical issue in design activity—and life itself, I suppose.

As a designer are you still constantly learning?

You should try to surprise yourself as you work, so that you don’t know all the answers in advance and simply repeat them. I have an approach I’ve been using throughout my life, which is to start first with the nature of the audience, second with the nature of what you want that audience to do and then third, the methodology by which you move that audience to action. I am a non-specialist. For professional reasons, the field is one of professional practice, which means that you diminish the possibility of error by knowing everything in depth about one subject. My aim is to have a broader view of design. I am certainly not unique in this way, but I like to think that it is possible to operate in many areas if your interest leads you that way.

For example, I am very interested in the design of restaurants, so I’ve designed them. And I’ve designed supermarkets—which is usually thought of as a highly specialized activity, reserved for those who have the credentials to do it. I felt that it was possible to do some of this work without credentials. I have been opportunistic and through the years have sort of blurred the distinction a little between professional practice in architecture, product design, interior design, graphic design and magazine design.

When you cross disciplines, from two dimensions to three, is it pure instinct that drives you?

Yes. Knowledge that is replicable. After all, if you have some idea how color functions on a flat surface, you will have at least the beginnings of an understanding of how it operates on a three-dimensional surface.

And so by using that knowledge, and your intelligence, you make comparisons. For instance, when I started doing interiors, I learned that the nature of light, and the nature of color, intersect in a very interesting way in three-dimensional interiors. It is very difficult to understand theoretically and you have to physically see it. As an example, I once painted a room in a restaurant a sort of French yellow and when that particular yellow was illuminated by incandescent light and turned the corner into shadow, it became this horrible green. Those kind of things you really have to learn on the job.

Has design become a commodity to be bought and sold, and less of an art?

I would say that is true to some degree. The idea of design as an artistic activity has changed over the last fifty years. Designers have always wanted to say that good design is good business, and that as a result it has moved more towards being a business than an art.

I use the words art and design with some trepidation, because everybody has their own internal definition of what those words mean. What I call art is rarely what other people call art, but there is has to be some agreement on what those words mean? I would say that with the professionalization of the practice, the widespread use of the computer and the conviction of business today, design is an important marketing tool, which is orientated more towards effectiveness than beauty.

Does this sadden you at all?

Personally it saddens me, because I think that there is some cultural benefit in maintaining a position that aesthetics of beauty and ideas, of coherence by virtue of beauty, are important to that culture.

It seems to me that once you reach a point where economics are the only criteria for what you do, you are basically in a bad situation. There has to be some kind of contravening notion that there are things equally important to money in the human experience.

What advice would you give to today’s students and the younger generation of designers?

I would say: take the responsibility for what you do. Design is an activity, which affects human consciousness, and the way people think and act. It also affects their value system, and you should take that seriously. I mean you don’t want to hurt people. You don’t want to injure people, you don’t want to misrepresent things, you don’t want to lie to them. In my view, the same principles involved in good citizenship should be applied to being a good designer.

Is there anything in design you have yet to achieve?

I think what I’m chasing after is what I’ve always chased after in my life, and that is how to see haw far I could go, how much more you could learn, how you can modify what you believe and how you can change what you believe. Basically it is a continuance. I have always been curious about what I was capable of doing- and I am still curious about that.

It is a question of how much you can stay within the context of what you are, and what you and continually change or refresh that. I was talking to a student recently who came in for an evaluation, and that great thing about the practice of design is that you don’t ever learn it fundamentally.

You never get to a point when you have understood what you are doing. You gat to a degree of understanding, but you always know there is more out there that you have not yet grasped. It is an ever-ending book, in the sense and you never get there. There is no point at which you say, ‘Ah! Finally I’ve got it!’ It’s like the search for the spiritual. There is no level in which you get there.

Drawing has always been such an important part of your work, but is it a skill that fewer designers possess today?

My feeling about drawing is that I have deeply invested in it because so much of my work is characterized by it, and I have used the skill as a means of developing a personal idiom which is harder to do through design alone. Although many designers have found another personal voice without using drawing, I feel it is at the root of everything, because it is essentially an intellectual activity. People think that it has something to do with the way your hand operates, but drawing is a decision by the brain to represent reality through any kind of means you choose.

There doesn’t seem to be an alternative way to develop a neurological path from brain to hand without drawing. You can’t do it sitting and thinking about it, so what happens is that the body itself is involved in the thought process. I can’t see any other way of doing it, in the same way that I can’t think of a man becoming an athlete without developing his muscles. There’s no way of becoming an athlete by sitting thinking, or using a computer. I think drawing is one of the instruments by which the brain changes its perception of reality, and it also develops a kind of acuity in terms of colour, form, shape and proportion. I don’t know how you would get that information another way. Unless the brain is engaged in solving a problem, which is to say you look at something and you try drawing, there is no methodology to do that in a theoretical way. I don’t know of a substitute for the development of judgement, and judgement itself is of course a core element in design. I don’t know how you would develop judgement without going through this very primitive thing of sitting down in front of something and trying to represent it physically in the world. I’m a great believer in that as an objective, although I don’t think it is taught very well.

What would you hope for the future of design?

Nothing I wouldn’t hope for culture in general. There needs to be a return to a value system which suggests there are other values; that there is a sense of community; that beauty and doing things well are important; and the whole idea of craft and caring for what we do, simply because it is important to do so, rather than receiving economic benefit. I don’t see design as an activity removed from everything else in the development of culture.

Once a design rebel whose imagery was totally synonymous with its time in recent decades, Glaser is now the greatly revered practitioner statesman of his profession. Steven Heller, a leading U.S. design critic, views his compatriot thus: “He is perhaps the most articulate of U.S. graphic designers, although ‘graphic designer’ is far too limiting a term to express what Milton does, and what he has accomplished. I think what he accomplishes in his work as a designer/illustrator is the pure articulation of an idea through form. Not only is he a brilliant aestheticist and form-giver, but one of the few designers whose social conscience, certainly in his latter years, has been a motivating factor in the kind of work he does.”

In the 1990s, Glaser has continued to expand the diversity of his projects, the profusion of styles and eclecticism of imagery which have all been a key factor in his idiosyncratic approach to design.

Viewing his work retrospectively, it his apparent that he is one of the very few designers who can knowingly, articulate visually, the most extraordinarily inventive and ambitious ideas in any style or form of his choosing. It is this dual capability of being able to execute all of his ideas himself, in combination with a prolific array of techniques, which is Glaser’s greatest asset.

He is one of a handful of post-war designers whose approach re-defined expression in design: “He opened a new way of seeing things. He was the equivalent to graphic design that The Beatles were to music at the time,” adds John Gorham.

Strikingly colourful, often outwardly exotic, and retaining the quality of a fine artist, much of Glaser’s prolific output of illustrative posters, blur the distinction between graphic design and painting. In contrast, his work in type design and corporate identity, display equal inventiveness in purer graphic forms. Over a period of four decades, the ever-artful Glaser has become the most celebrated of US designers, evolving a continually developing and uniquely personalised American style of graphic design, always defying the rigid constraints of any formal categorization.

As Gorham succinctly describes the Glaser phenomenon: “Milton has always been one jump ahead of everyone else.”