influences: a poster designer
Cassandre was a poster designer who had a large influence on American designers throughout the 20th century (Meggs, 1989, p.69). His influence was clearly visible in the work of George Lois (1991): "Cassandre created haunting visual images that were forerunners of modern graphic communications" (Lois and Pitts, 1991, p.6). This poster artist was concerned with conveying a message clearly, powerfully, and precisely (Mason, 1981/2, p.460). His compositions integrated text and imagery without loosing their graphic unity and purity (Mason, 1982, p.460). Cassandre's posters simplified a message to one compelling idea (Mason, 1982, p.460). Says Mason (1981/1982) of Cassandre's work: "the statement is given the form of an image-- one image only-- and is married to the text so closely that image and lettering form an indivisible whole" (p.460). This designer's work during the 1920s and 1930s testify to this.
His Normandie, shown below, (1935) creates a dramatic effect in the foreshortening of an ocean liner (Brown and Reinhold, 1979, p.18). The ship's elongated bow and compressed top deck seem to jump out of the composition and towards the viewer (Brown and Reinhold, 1979, p.18). Adding to the ship's grandeur is the gradation of the sky and the hull (Brown and Reinhold, 1979, p.18). Lois himself recognized the power of this image: "(Cassandre's) monumental head-on rendering of the great transatlantic ocean liner set a new standard for graphic drama" (Lois and Pitts, 1991, p.13). The text is seamlessly integrated with the imagery as the bottom of the stern was aligned with the starting and ending points of the word Normandie (Brown and Reinhold, 1979, p.18-19). To prevent the text from interfering with the image, it has been kept to a small scale and below the image (Brown and Reinhold, 1979, p.18-19). While Cassandre formed part of the first generation of designers to blend text with images, Paul Rand later took this a step further (Lois and Pitts, 1991, p.13). Lois credits Rand with being a leading pioneer in advertising (Lois and Pitts, 1991, p.13).
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