OUGD402 - Monocle 24 Section D Podcast

Section D is a podcast by the magazine Monocle. I decided to listen to it after one of my lecturers recommended it.

This particular episode I listened to was about how modernist design has had an impact on logo design. Particularly the 1940’s to 80’s when before this era, it was thought that a brand needed a consistent image, however modernism changed this and was all about simplifying a vision. For a brand, structure was important and consistency was the first thing to think about however as companies expanded, they needed logos that could be flexible. Instead of using one major colour in it’s identity a company used as many colours as they wanted. Deconstruction of a logo allowed flexibility and during this stage of modernist design this was the key to a successful company.

Another article that was included in this podcast was about the 25^th birthday of Photoshop this year. The discussion discussed how Photoshop opened up new possibilities putting the dark room tools on a screen and making it much simpler to edit photos. However this development in technology meant that the art of photography began to disappear and more commonly, terrible photographers would rely on this software in postproduction. However Photoshop opened up a whole new trend of cut and paste culture where memes and the Internet culture merged. Many of photography work in graphic design nowadays is entirely synthetic and the art of retouching is now where the skill lies.

This podcast was very interesting and simplified the term modernism for me, which means I can now understand its effect on graphic design. It was also interesting to listen to the history of Photoshop and made me realise how artificial photographic work can be these days.