bau9: es gibt kein toilettenpapier!

‘You’ve fucked up my whole life and now I’m see­ing fuck­ing planes and points every­where. I’m ob­serv­ing every­thing, an­a­lyz­ing every­thing. In my apart­ment, oth­er peo­ple, stu­dents, pho­tographs …’

We look at the can of tea – and as a class we break apart the com­po­si­tion, the planes in the large logo – we talk about the hi­er­ar­chy, where the name of the prod­uct is placed – and how the nu­tri­tion­al in­for­ma­tion is down­played on back. All con­sid­er­a­tions of a graph­ic de­sign­er.

‘As far as I’m con­cerned, there no tea in that tea. It’s an Amer­i­can ap­proach to food: Give you a fla­vor you’ll like and load it up with high fruc­tose corn syrup,’ I com­ment. ’Cause I’m start­ing to think about the FLom­mist Man­i­festo of Food and what it would con­tain. ‘If you want real tea, start with a tea bag and some wa­ter. Doesn’t taste a THING like what’s in that can.’

(and as col­lat­er­al to this, the class is writ­ing down my ref­er­ence to The Fu­tur­ist Cook­book; which can lead to some fun culi­nary shenani­gans)

sum­ming up
Only three class­es left and the stu­dents who are get­ting it are get­ting it. They’re talk­ing about how they’re see­ing what we’re learn­ing – and how it could be used. We talk a lot about ap­pli­ca­tion of im­ages to struc­tures and the ma­te­ri­als that are cov­ered in the read­ings, go over some of the stuff one should ex­pect once they end up work­ing in a cre­ative field.

I note that typ­i­cal­ly a class like this fo­cus­es on the tech­niques cov­ered in the text­book, but in this case we’re work­ing around the text con­tent. The text is sup­ple­ment­ed by our Bauhaus stud­ies and it should all come to­geth­er in the fi­nal projects.

col­lab­o­ra­tion
An­oth­er dis­cus­sion top­ic this morn­ing is the im­por­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween friends, peers, oth­er stu­dents and oth­er de­sign­ers.

‘Two brains are bet­ter than one,’ a com­ment from one of my for­mer stu­dents, John Slinger­land, de­sign di­rec­tor at Dig­i­tal Gear. A few weeks back, he gave a talk to a lo­cal web de­sign club.

John ex­plained tech­niques for work­ing with cre­atives, adapt­ing a project to fit ac­tu­al au­di­ence needs thru com­pre­hen­sive, even un­usu­al re­search. I share a lot of this sort of think­ing with be­gin­ning stu­dents so the ideas sit dor­mant, un­til re­al­ly need­ed – in lat­er class­es and on the job. Note the three-pronged ap­proach is sim­i­lar to what I pre­sent­ed in the last class. A few of John’s slides:

Good de­sign is not a soli­tary process. It should in­volve oth­er in­di­vid­u­als. Col­lab­o­ra­tion can go pret­ty damn far.

‘I al­ways learn from oth­er artists – me and my friends work to­geth­er …’ ex­plains Bad Chick­en, whose class note­book is burst­ing with im­ages. ‘So all this stuff I’m learn­ing here I’m shar­ing with oth­ers. We come from hum­ble back­grounds, so we just play off each oth­er and learn from each oth­er. Very much like what we’re learn­ing from the Bauhaus.’

I men­tion the con­cept of GROUP WORK be­ing feared in ed­u­ca­tion – where­as it re­al­ly sets stu­dents up to do cool stuff be­yond their own lit­tle per­son­al bub­bles; but typ­i­cal­ly what hap­pens is one stu­dent does the work for the whole group (tho, that’s the stu­dent one wants to hire – and put them in a team that ac­tu­al­ly works to­geth­er).

Hell, even when Project Run­way does TEAMS every­one freaks out. More than one per­son work­ing on some­thing re­sults in bet­ter work, and this is an­oth­er thing I want to do to­day.

‘less is more’
The stu­dents are now used to re­search­ing Bauhaus mas­ters, they men­tion that the dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties had dif­fer­ent takes on the ma­te­r­i­al, but pret­ty much all spoke the same vi­su­al lan­guage.

We look at the Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe home­work and dis­cuss what’s work­ing, what isn’t. We talk about hi­er­ar­chy, what one sees first, sec­ond, third.

I give an ex­am­ple where stu­dents talk over each oth­er to show that peo­ple, on the whole, can only fo­cus on one thing at a time = hi­er­ar­chy.

It’s a sim­ple ex­am­ple I use a lot: Just have most of the stu­dents start talk­ing about some­thing – all at the same time – then have the ones left try to make sense of it all.

‘So what are they say­ing?’

‘I have no idea. It’s all a gar­bled mess.’

It’s our world. And we’re not evolved enough to take in every­thing; so we edit out what we per­ceive as garbage.

Here’s an­oth­er ver­sion of the vi­su­al stim­uli we have to deal with every day, high­light­ing just the TY­POG­RA­PHY around us:

Stu­dio Smack, Kap­i­taal, 2006

To­day it’s very im­por­tant that de­sign­ers know how to com­mand what they’re putting to­geth­er. Well-de­signed vi­su­als can al­low us to move thru the world around us with­out get­ting con­fused. Us­ing POINT LINE PLANE for good, not bad.

Back to the pri­ma­ry colour piece: We note where one’s eye is drawn based on the place­ment of el­e­ments. And I men­tion, in prac­tice, that’s where a graph­ic de­sign­er would put the call-to-ac­tion, or the logo. Like this:

(Placed low, cause that’s what Tschi­chold would have done)

(And I wish Lowe’s had a logo that would just set­tle on ONE font, not a mix of let­ters that don’t go to­geth­er)

More il­lus­tra­tion. Even nine class­es in, for some, ab­strac­tion is still a very scary thing to do.

And this ques­tion comes up (be­cause we’re adults), ‘What’s with the pubes?’

‘I don’t know how to draw burn­ing coal!’

I re­mind again, you don’t need to know how to draw for this class. All you need to be able to make is geo­met­ric shapes.

Of course this leads to a dis­cus­sion of SEX in ad­ver­tis­ing. Be­cause this is one of the THREE THINGS I’ve been told one should NOT dis­cuss in a class­room. The oth­er two are POL­I­TICS and RE­LI­GION. Tho all three al­ways show up in my class­es. And ONE can dis­cuss them in an aca­d­e­m­ic sense; that is un­til po­lit­i­cal cor­rect­ness kicks in; which has hap­pened to me a few times. Es­pe­cial­ly if one tan­gles hu­mor with his­to­ry.

Yes, SEX can be a com­po­si­tion­al el­e­ment. Be­cause hu­mans re­spond to it. We wouldn’t have a pop­u­la­tion if we didn’t. I men­tion the first ever overt SEX-based tele­vi­sion ad (that I re­mem­ber) in the U.S. It stood out amongst the rest:

Jean Naté Af­ter Bath Splash Com­mer­cial, late 1970s

Once the Ge­nie was out of the bot­tle (or body wash squirt­ed out of the cap) (or diet cola out of the can), there was no putting it back.

And the less said, the eas­i­er it is to get into the minds of the au­di­ence and let them draw their own con­clu­sions. ‘Less ac­tu­al­ly IS more.’

Mies van der Rohe, 860–880 North Lake Shore Dri­ve Apart­ments, Chica­go, 1949–51

Back to Mies – who is pret­ty much the rea­son our sky­scrap­ers look the way they do (the pro­to­types, above) – I ask if they could do their pieces over, how much could they take out and still make ’em work?

dood
Then I ask about THUMB­NAIL sketch­es.

‘I didn’t do any of that. Be­cause it’s so new to me!’ says I Don’t Draw. This class, for her, is be­com­ing a re­it­er­a­tion of her ear­li­er prac­tices, heels dug in. She WON’T draw.

My nice re­sponse to this is: ‘This en­tire CLASS should be new to you … Can you, at least, draw cir­cles, lines and geo­met­ric shapes?’

So THUMB­NAILS.

Every time I men­tion it in an aca­d­e­m­ic set­ting, stu­dents WHINE. Even in my ad­vanced class­es. They start moan­ing about how much they don’t like do­ing them. Which is al­ways a prob­lem, ’cause they’re one of the best ways to de­vel­op new ideas (ref­er­ence the Doc Brown speech from BAU6).

So I say, let’s call ’em SKETCH­ES. And they seem okay with that – but I take it far­ther:

‘If you don’t like that word, we can can­dy coat it even far­ther – let’s call them DOO­DLES.

‘You can DOO­DLE, can’t you? Does­n’t every­one DOO­DLE? Can’t be­lieve I have a bunch of re­cruits who can’t DOO­DLE. Your mom­mies aren’t here to show you how to DOO­DLE. We’re now go­ing to DOO­DLE!’

I talk with mar­bles in my mouth. Be­cause boot­camp. And I’m the sergeant.

I re­mind them hu­mans are great at this change the word shit. In fact, ‘Did you no­tice we don’t have TOI­LET PA­PER any­more? We don’t. Go look for it. All you’ll find is BATH­ROOM TIS­SUE.’

‘And An­gel Soft is not soft. We live in a world of lies and de­ceit.’

thumb­nail boot­camp
I throw them into a boot­camp. My goal: How many ab­stract shapes can I get them to make with­in a lim­it­ed time frame?

I ask them to DOO­DLE. Stick to POINT LINE and PLANE – do NOT get il­lus­tra­tive.

Which doesn’t work. The il­lus­tra­tors MUST il­lus­trate, it seems – but this stops when I short­en the time frame.

Mu­sic (looped):

Aleks Vek­sler, Flight of the Bum­ble­bee [elec­tric vi­o­lin remix, slowfly edi­tion]

I start them at three minute DOO­DLES. Then short­en it to one minute – then :45 – then :30 – then fif­teen sec­ond sketch­es. Over and over and over again.

Af­ter about 20 min­utes, I have them hand off their work to the per­son on their LEFT (op­po­site from last time) Then have them do 10 more min­utes – im­prov­ing upon what the oth­er per­son came up with.

It goes well, though we do have to have an in­ter­ven­tion with I Don’t Draw. The ab­strac­tion is just too much – but we’re all see­ing im­prove­ment in her form – now that she doesn’t have time to ap­ply lit­er­al mean­ing to every­thing.

‘What’s get­ting in the way is EGO and FEAR,’ re­marks Wal­dorf.

(Af­ter class I re­fer I Can’t Draw back to Graph­ic De­sign The New Ba­sics – to skim, it’s in the school li­brary. It has far more ex­am­ples than I’ve shown. I’m hop­ing it will help her with the fi­nal projects IF she just latch­es on to the con­cepts.)

‘Okay. No ex­cus­es. You each just did more than a dozen THUMB­NAILS in a half hour. No rea­son you can’t do this with your fi­nal projects.’

To re­view, I dis­cuss how all these forms are the ba­sis for just about every com­po­si­tion you’ll see out there: Graph­ic de­sign, film, ad­ver­tis­ing, game de­sign, the work of mas­ter painters (as bro­ken out by Jo­hannes It­ten back in the Vokurs):

‘You’re ready for jump­ing into your fi­nal projects. Have re­search and DOO­DLES ready for next class.’

On to home­work:

‘Find on­line and watch the se­quel to MAX.’

‘Is it re­al­ly the se­quel to MAX?’

‘Yes, it is. Only, MAX won’t be men­tioned at all, it was made by to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent peo­ple and the guy who plays Adolf Hitler ac­tu­al­ly is Adolf Hitler.’

Not avail­able on DVD, once avail­able on VHS, David Grubin’s De­gen­er­ate Art [PBS, 1993] is an ex­cel­lent ‘se­quel’ to MAX. Find on­line and watch, be pre­pared to dis­cuss in our next class.

Also: Re­search! Let’s in­for­mal­ly talk next class about the 9 mas­ters you are re­search­ing.

Have MANY thumb­nails DOO­DLES on Tues­day.

Plus, READ De­sign Ba­sics Chap­ter 12, pages 243–47

Our fi­nal class will be NEXT FRI­DAY.

—steve mehal­lo

Last year, FLOMM founder Steve Mehal­lo re­built a de­sign fun­da­men­tals course into a five week study of the­o­ries and work done at The Bauhaus (1919–33). This BAU blog se­ries will doc­u­ment the lat­est teach­ing of the course – with les­son plan – Sum­mer 2015 to a group of 8 col­lege stu­dents. What’ll hap­pen, who’ll shine, who’ll drop. Names (and some sit­u­a­tions) have been changed to pro­tect the in­no­cent as well as the guilty.

 
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