I've noticed that Russian designer's during the Avant-Garde era loved playing around with their typography and imagery, to create weird and wacky designs. They wanted to create everything against the norm, and revolt against the communist design structures.
This piece by El Lissitzky plays around with grid structures, typefaces and simple shapes to create a really strange, yet structured design.
I quite like this poster, because it's humorous. They've placed a monkey-like figure holding a spear, attacking a LEF plane, which is throwing a pen back at the monkey. The pen looks like a bomb... It doesn't really make much sense, but I feel as though they were taking the p*** out of the war.
I find the grid structures used within Russian Avant-Garde really interesting and compelling. They make the designs, that originally seem a bit wacky and all over the place, actually seem structured and well thought out!
Research from the book "The Russian Avant-Garde Book", 1910-1934, by Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye...
Avant-garde Russian design seemed to be typographical, but in an expressionist and experimental manner - questioning rules of design and revolting against the communist ways of the time.
I noticed that most of Russian Avant-Garde design follow the same colour scheme - red, white and black. Sometimes blue or grey was also used for an extra colour within their designs.
Created in 1928, this letterpress design was featured within a book by Piet Zwart called "Nederlandsche Kabelfabriek Delft". The design itself was created by Jan Tschichold. I thought it was interesting to see how a lot of Russian Avant-Garde designers liked working with diagonals, and changing the structure in their designs.
I really love these designs by El Lissitzky in 1923. I think that the use of colour works really well - it looks particularly Russian, yet in a subtle use of the colours, rather than over the top blocks of colour. I love how he's literally messed around with the typography, placing it here and there in a seamless manner, yet it looks completely intentional!
Hand-rendered Russian designs seemed a lot less common, yet I found the way this book of little design pieces was put together really intriguing. Sergei Podgaevskii used all sorts of different methods of printing to create his "Futurist Sergei Podgaevskii's Easter Egg" in 1914 - from potato printing to letterpress. I think it's really effective, and even though it looks a bit like a scrap book, I really like the style of it and the character behind the design.
Top two lithograph prints: (left) Vladimir Mayakovsky's "Mystery Bouffe: A Heroical, Epical, and Satirical Portrayal of our Times" and (right) Grigorri Bershadskii's "The Flying Proletariat".
Bottom two Letterpress prints: (left) Boris Zemenkov's "A Multitude: Dialectical Poems Committed by a Nothingist" and (right) Natan Al'tman's "Swimming Voyagers".
These sketches were interesting, as I haven't really seen that many sketches by Russian designers documented, so it was nice to see a different design style.
As the book progressed through the years, the design styles became very socialist and war orientated, ending in examples of propaganda used in the war.
I find Russian Constructivism and Avant-Garde design styles really fascinating and aesthetically pleasing. I think that my book will definitely be designed around the styles that I've been looking at, particularly El Lissitzky's work.
- Leave your comment • Category: brief 1 (505), OUGD505
- Share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Reddit
