Digital

Cut-and-Paste
The designers of digital era are like a bunch of pre-schoolers. Digital design (our current era) is based around technology. With a thousand of tools and techniques at our finger tips you'd think it would be a snap to just whip up a fantastic poster and produce it, but no. the easy part is producing it, designing it is harder. sure there is a lot you can do but it still takes a lot of thought, planing and knowledge to come up with something that looks good and does the job its supposed to do, at the same time. Trial and error are key to all designing but the main key to Digital design is simply the basics; Cut and Past. Some of the best designers of this era made their names through this. Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko, founders of Émigré magazine, were great at this. As was David Carson, often haled the destroyer of typography, he stretched the boundaries of legibility beyond their limits by cutting, jumbling and pasting text and images as much as he could and more.

< One of Vanderlan's and Licko's Émigré covers, it does look a little more classic than what you might expect but digital designers like to draw from different eras as well as make their own style, these guys could destroy their texts but they like typography a bit more than Carson, Licko actually designs a lot of her own fonts (which I personally like). This cover may be a bit classic but it still holds true to the cut and paste style of digital. I like it, its simple, gets the point across whilst it still has me wondering "why do they have a picture of an old computer?" and its great how the threw a circle in with a handful of rectangles, it gets your eyes focusing on the hat.



> This is on of Carson's posters, its his typical mash-up of scattered images and random text. Only, most of his "random text" actually has a point to it, the thing that makes it appear to be random is the fact you cant understand what the whole thing says. All I get from the text on this is "Children's" and "It's Your World!" I can't make out what the black text says or what is after "children's". What I think of when i look at this is 'I could do this by cutting random things out, putting them in a bucket, shacking it up, and tipping it onto a page.'.

References:

http://www.gingkopress.com/ima/emigre-70-poster_zc.html

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/001655.html

http://gds.parkland.edu/gds/!lectures/history/1985/digital.html