Lesson Task / Semester 3

Focusing on Pioneering Designers

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Week 9

Within the broader milieu of Neo-modernism, we focus on Marian Bantjes, who set design trends with her unique application of typography, loose illustration and well-balanced compositions.

  • Objective observation
    During the interview, Marian mentions, “When I worked at Digitopolis, I was working almost entirely on the computer, basically the computer and with photography. And now I am using a wide variety of materials, sometimes still involved with a computer and sometimes just with the materials themselves. But having a space like this allows me to obviously store them all, and to work on these various surfaces in different media.”
    What is your opinion on the use of the computer combined with different media? Write one page (350 words) on your opinion of the importance of media and design and what your take is on the use of computer technology.

Throughout the program, we have learned how important it is to use pencil and paper to sketch and test our ideas before moving to the computer. Everyone works differently, of course, but I find the ideas flow much easier when I draw or write by hand rather than trying to do it directly on my PC.

Adding other media into the process of creating a design is very interesting and inspiring and opens up even more possibilities than just a few sketches on paper. It does not necessarily mean one has to use art supplies or expensive, rare things. In the movie, we see how Marian uses everyday items such as pasta or flower petals to create beautiful compositions later used to form patterns for a design.

In my opinion, any way of expressing yourself is good. I see design, photography, art and any creative discipline as parts of a whole where the different pieces intertwine. It can be intimidating to try to create something on a media we have not used much before. Still, if we see it as experimentation, we remove the pressure of having to produce an outcome, and we just play with it and see where it takes us. Maybe it is a creation worth using on a book cover, perhaps gives us inspiration for something else, or it ends up discarded. Experimenting and incorporating works made with other media can only enrich your designs and make them more personal and unique.

A computer is an essential tool available to designers. It offers many digital tools that help us work in a way it was not possible before. We live in a digital world, so it will always be necessary to bring designs to a digital form. However, I recognise the importance of testing and developing ideas before we do so. And the more materials and techniques we can use to expand our creativity, the better.

In conclusion, it might not be a requirement to combine the use of the computer with different media to be a good designer, but it can be very beneficial, and Marian Bantjes is an excellent example of it.

  • Pushing technology and changing philosophy 
    While describing her development of style, Marian states, “I am not an expert on illuminated manuscripts by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a couple of purposes of it. But one of those purposes is definitely to invoke wonder in this way that was very interesting to me was feeding directly into my ideas about that symbiotic relationship between graphics and text.”
    How do you think this links to the philosophy of the Swiss International School? How is it different? Has technology given us an advantage in expressing the symbiotic relationship between image and text? What about Marian’s work? Is this reflected in her work? Do a write-up (350 words) on the relationship between image and text, as seen in Marian’s work and relate this back to the Swiss International School. Substantiate your answers with relevant facts. You may use a visual example of both Marian’s work and that of the Swiss International School to facilitate your analysis.

The relationship between words and images is an essential element of design. Words and images may correspond to one another. The opposite extreme occurs when the image and the words do not illustrate but rather contradict each other. When the relationship between text and images is not too literal, the viewer must play a more active role: they must discover the main idea themselves and participate in creating the meaning of the message.

In Swiss Style, there is also a symbiotic relationship between image and text. As Josef Müller-Brockmann put it: “Copy and a picture are arranged and related in accordance with objective and functional criteria. The areas are sensitively organised with an assured touch in mathematical proportions, and due attention is paid to the rules of typography”.
The difference is that Swiss Style is characterised by simplicity, functionality and lack of ornamentation with the use of only sans-serif typefaces, while Marian designs are very decorative and elaborated, and the typefaces ornamental and complicated.

Communication is the Swiss Style’s primary goal, one that dictates the need for symbols appropriate to the content of the message. On the contrary, Marian’s intricated designs often make the viewer pay close attention to try and figure out their meaning or the hidden words.

To illustrate this, I include some examples below. The poster on the left by Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann reads “less noise” in red type, and the photograph shows a person covering their ears with their hands, depicting the discomfort of noise pollution. To the right, Marian Bantjes’s work, requires to pay closer attention to the poster to work out that the circles represent grapes, then realise there are letters written on them and that they actually form the names of R-Wines’ grape supliers.

Creating graphic designs in the past required a lot of labour, and making changes to them was far from easy or simple. I am not sure technology gives us an advantage in expressing the symbiotic relationship between image and text, as this relationship already existed in illuminated manuscripts in the year 400, but it is clear that it is now a much quicker and straightforward process.

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