Modernism era started with the last two decades of the nineteenth century as a result of enlightening and radical change in the commercial industry. As the ideological movement it originated with the rejection of all the previously stated beliefs about traditional forms of art, literature, religious faith, philosophy, and social organization. By the 1970s the ‘modern era was drawing to close’ because it was ‘no longer relevant in an immerging postindustrial society’ and due to emerging of new era of postmodernism in history of art. (Meggs, 1998) However, the modernists’ approach to work hasn’t been ignored by the practitioners of the field completely. Moreover, according to “The Cambridge Companion to Modernism” the “understanding of a major cultural episode” has been changing and updating over the recent years with the accruing of ‘more ambitious acts of contextualization’. Nowadays, we might have more Modernism, as well as more flexible way to understanding and interpreting it. Thus, the overarching theory I wanted to put forward in this work is the idea of how the modernism approach is still used in various projects, for instance, the web design and UX design practices.
For better understanding of the above stated thesis it is relevant to look more deeply into the origins of Modernism. Modernism is an ideological art movement that has appeared in the late 19th century with the skyrocketing technological progress and development of the ‘‘enlightenment period’’. Modernism corresponds to “enlightenment” concept in English. Modern word based on enlightenment has been produced from Latin “modo” and means that modernus separates past and present. (Aslan and YiBefore the concept of Modernism, graphic design pieces were overly decorated with imagery and supportive typography elements as the practitioners were aiming to fill every possible inch of blank space in their pieces. For example, such approach was seen mostly in period of Victorian and Arts and Crafts style movements, where the prices for materials were rather high and the main costumer for such works was the Government. Aforementioned periods featured similar visual elements: highly ornate and ‘busy’ imagery, illustrated typography and decorative outer borders. In complete opposition to boasting of a Royalty and attempting to represent subject matter truthfully the concept of modern communication design appeared. The power of machines and new technologies forced artists to cardinally re-think their practice. New methods allowed to think about mass production and the technology became a crucial theme in modernism. Thus, that was breaking moment for Graphic design as well and the style of overall communication design shifted drastically from the prior 19th century approach.lmaz, 2005, p.94- 96). The modernism ideology was simply to deny all the decorative elements and unneeded design and leave only the crucial, necessary and practically applicable parts. This approach has touched all the fields: from literature to music and started the period of questioning previous beliefs in favor of modern inventions.
Before the concept of Modernism, graphic design pieces were overly decorated with imagery and supportive typography elements as the practitioners were aiming to fill every possible inch of blank space in their pieces. For example, such approach was seen mostly in period of Victorian and Arts and Crafts style movements, where the prices for materials were rather high and the main costumer for such works was the Government. Aforementioned periods featured similar visual elements: highly ornate and ‘busy’ imagery, illustrated typography and decorative outer borders. In complete opposition to boasting of a Royalty and attempting to represent subject matter truthfully the concept of modern communication design appeared. The power of machines and new technologies forced artists to cardinally re-think their practice. New methods allowed to think about mass production and the technology became a crucial theme in modernism. Thus, that was breaking moment for Graphic design as well and the style of overall communication design shifted drastically from the prior 19th century approach.
According to P. Meggs, Graphic communications became more widely available during that ‘unsettled period of incessant change’ due to the rapidly lowering unit costs and respectively growing demand. In other words, the ‘Industrial revolution generated a serious shift in the social and economic role of typographic communication’. The ideas of ‘modern beauty’ and all the advanced art movements were explored, combined and then applied to functional design and machinery production at the Bauhaus school (1919-33) in Germany. But why did it matter to the word in large? The Bauhaus’s academic program was mainly focusing on the recognizing and promoting the creative way of thought and intellectual strength to put them in use. Thus, innovation in graphic design, new vision, occurred as a part of the modern-art movements at the Bauhaus. However, Jan Tschichold (1902-74) was the only figure who took the stated approach further then the walls of the Bauhaus and applied it to everyday design problems. As well as that, he managed to explain it to the large range of printers and type designers.
Driving back to the thesis: how does this ‘new vision’ of the Bauhaus and Jan Tschichold’s in particular connect to the 21’st century construction of the web page and overall graphic design that we know nowadays? Apparently, those modern approaches were a huge inspiration for Swiss design or, more commonly, the ‘International Typography style’ invented later on in the 1950s. The movement was led by designers Josef Müller-Brockmann at the Zurich School of Arts and Krafts and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of Design. The style itself favored simplicity, legibility and objectivity. What matters to the thesis severely is the construction and the set of rules which was applied to this style. Those include a unity of visual decisions achieved by placing the design elements asymmetrically on a mathematically constructed grid. Josef Müller-Brockmann, being a well-known theorist and one of the major figures of the new International Typography style movement, created a famous series of works for the Zurich Opernhaus in 1960s.
Mentioned poster-series appears as design pieces sized 1280 x 905mm. Each one of them had a repetitive layout pattern: two visually divided layers with the proportion being 3:1. The background illustrated usually in neutral grey color highlights the Zurich Openhouse name set using the large size of an AG medium font. Whereas the smaller rectangle introduces to the viewer the name of the play, address and main faces participating in it in two font sizes. The author’s goal here was to simply convey the needed message as fast as possible. As Josef Müller-Brockmann said himself: ‘The grid is an organizational system that makes the message easier to read, this allows you to get an effective result at a minimum cost. With an arbitrary organization, the problem is solved more easily, faster and better.’ By this example I wanted to outline the period’s most crucial rules and features which are still applied by young designers in any practice all over the world. To reinforce my words with facts let’s have a closer look into one of the world’s most popular practice: Web design.
‘World wide web’ invention is officially credited to physicist Tim Berner-Lee in 1989. He ‘accidentally’ came up with it while creating a database for a client’s software, to do so Tim Berner-Lee used hypertext to create an index of pages on the system. This eventually evolved into what we now know as web pages. Moreover, the first ever web page (launched by his team on August 6,1991) was purely textual and had the ability to only organize the context in two ways using HTML tables: horizontally and vertically. In three years, in 1994, the pop parody group Les Horribles Cernettes became the subjects of the very first photo on the internet.
Afterwards the software was updated and it didn’t take long for images to become a central and essential part of web-design in the 90’s and to nowadays. Later on, the internet began ‘its transition into the commercial powerhouse it is today’. The same year, a service GeoCities was invented. It was a crucial point in web design history, where for the first time software allowed internet users to actually easily create websites of their own. It was a period in web design that was fully experimental, where ‘freshly-made’ web designers brought their creations to life with bright, patterned backgrounds, clip art, and experimental text formatting. Leaving absolutely no room for rules and commonly agreed features.
But what is design in web? How is it linked to the approach of print designers of International style period and why does it matter? As it was written above, the ‘Swiss style’, inspired by modernism movement, featured legibility, a clarity of the message and was fully based on the grid system. Respectively, to design a web page means developing a grid system, in which various elements can be placed within a ‘ready-made structure that underpins the entire design’. Poulin, R. (2017). A well-designed grid structures the information for the better readability pace, but at the same time allows for the flexibility of placement on individual pages and provides a visual coherence across the whole series. Moreover, not only the layout features were brought up from the period of ‘modern beauty’, typography is the other important part of this ‘transition’. Swiss Style eliminates distractions for the viewer and allows the information-heavy design to be read and studied rather than merely seen and admired. Thus, the typeface decisions in both cases (web design and print design) are declined more to the sans-serif typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk and Neue Haas Grotesk which really hone in on the movement’s key principles. The modern web and swiss style design advocate that the typeface does not have to be expressive in itself, ‘it must be an unobtrusive instrument of expression’. As Massimo Vignelli mentioned in the documentary ‘Helvetica’: ‘I don’t think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word ‘dog’ with any typeface and it doesn’t have to look like a dog. But there are people that [think that] when they write ‘dog’ it should bark.’ Thereby, those are the unarguable rules of page construction which was originated, heightened in the late modernism period and developed into web design as we know it today.
The late modernism approach and ‘International style’ rules could be seen easily in most of the web sites. For instance, the web page is a place where designers battle to get the viewer’s attention in less than 3 seconds. To achieve such fast interaction the design layout and elements should be simple and only crucial and needed information might find a place there. As an example of application of those to real life projects, I would like to take the web site http://nerval.ch/index.php . It is designed using standard 12 column grid with margins being 40 px and the gutter approximately 20 px.
The landing page is welcoming us with a screen generally divided in proportion being 3:1, where in the smaller section on the right the navigation menu is placed. It might have been done due to the way we deal with the text and information overall: we read and absorb it from left to right. To my mind, that is why the user of a page is navigated to first look at the general sections of the website to his left and only afterwards they are welcomed to look into more detailed information for each of them on the left part of the screen. As for the typography, across the whole web site one dominating Sans serif font could be found. It is set in two colours: light grey and black to achieve more contract and to build a stronger visual hierarchy. Respectively, the same features and even layout proportion principals might be seen in posters series of Josef Müller-Brockmann for Zurich Openhouse. Thus, the strong connection between two examples of completely deferent fields is unarguably present.
As has been noted, the use of modernism approach, it’s rules and restrictions didn’t end up in the 20th century with the beginning of post-modern era. The movement followers built a strong community of designers who willingly passed along their knowledge of the field. This knowledge was taken by the young successors and turned in a completely new and flexible way of understanding and applying the modern design thinking. It was no longer about capturing the reality as it was, it went beyond and transformed into a complicated, leveled practice where the audience and the threated message are the central figures of the design piece. Moreover, not only the concept changed along the way: the applied materials and the overall understanding of how the final outcome might look like transformed severely. All In all, this is how the late modernism approach developed through the years and laid the foundation for UI/UX design practice.