OUGD603 Brief 03: Five graphic design ideas from the Russian Revolution by Steven Heller

Animal Farm represents the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the early years of the Soviet Union. Looking at graphic styles could help to inform the overall design.

Five graphic design ideas from the Russian Revolution by Steven Heller:

(https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/five-things-graphic-designers-owe-to-russia)

Minimalist Colour

'The Modern colour palette was minimal, primary and bold. Red was the primary colour – the colour of the proletariat, associated with working class revolutionary forces since the French Revolution of 1789. When paired with black, it creates a startling visual combination (see El Lissitzky’s Red Wedge, below). In addition to that pairing, yellow, blue and green were also frequently used alone or in combination. Colour ink was at a premium, so the use of just one or two colours was common; full or four-colour reproduction was expensive, and other stocks of colour were limited.'

This will be something to take into consideration when working out what colours to use, I think that I should try and stick with one or two colours. Red is also an important colour.

Abstraction and Geometry

'Among the progressive art and design groups were the radically abstract Suprematists, founded in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich. They introduced a formalist combination of pure geometry – the reduction of content to symbolic shapes and forms, along with a limited palette (see below). That unprecedented combination was the foundation upon which Constructivism – aiming to make art that reflected a modern, industrial society – and other European modernisms evolved. Anti-antiquarian works that proffered graphic revolution were the paradigms for waves of similar aesthetics in Germany, Holland, England, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Many of these were, in turn, embraced by commercial designers and promoted by printing and typography journals in the capitalist world as codes for machine-age modernity.'

"Agitprop"

'All kinds of artistic viewpoints, from Cubism to Realism, became accepted expressive tools in the years that followed. But it was the unprecedented symbolic abstraction of Malevich and his contemporaries that became the recognised “revolutionary” art genre and the foundation of “agitation art”, or agitprop. In 1919, the Society of Young Artists was set up to produce posters and banners for social elevation and illumination, and a year later the Institute of Artistic Culture was founded in Moscow to train artists to produce design for proletarian use.'

Constructivist Typography

'Soviet graphic designers saw their work as a challenge to the old typographic order, and before Socialist Realism came to dominate the visual landscape (see below), avant garde typography was a defining element of the new Soviet aesthetic. Modern Constructivist typography was a melding of disparate typefaces in varying sizes. Typefaces were readable, but they were not composed on a page in the tradition manner of one or two typefaces in logical columns; instead there were multiple sizes and shapes within the same word or sentence.'