Daniel Friedman

Working in a similar space to April Greiman, Daniel Friedman was also part of the whole new wave style that was started by Wolfgang Weingart. While April Greiman showed us how colourful and interesting New Wave design could be with interesting use of shape texture and photomontage, Friedman will show us some other characteristics of New Wave with his own style.

 

Jumping straight into looking at some of his work, here we can see a poster done by Daniel Friedman. The first comparison we can make between Greiman and Friedman’s work is the use of colour. As opposed to Greimans use of the Californian colour pallet, friedman’s work here is using a solely grayscale. I believe that he takes some inspiration from Weingarts initial typographic experiments with this piece in a very subtle way.  In this poster we can see the the use of type in a very unusual way. The type seems to be placed sporadically and with different sizes and forms. This concept seems to harken back to Weingarts typographic experiments since they both challenge the legibility of words, or even further back to the Dadaists where they would throw type onto their page without much care for structure or legibility. Dan Friedman doesn't take it as far as either of those two styles as the longer you look at the poster, we can see that the word starts to make sense as your eyes jump from letter to letter to try form a cohesive word.

Another thing about this poster is the interesting use of juxtaposition of two elements. The juxtaposition is seen throughout the haphazard placement of text placed over, or in front of in some cases, the city scene in the background. So you've got these two very different elements that don’t quite compliment each other in a physical way yet they are placed on the same plane of existence.

This is another example of Dan Friedman’s work with a heavier use of photomontage that seems to take influence from a different era entirely. Through the use of photomontage, Friedman has manage to create an almost dream like image where reality seems to be distorted. To me, this is very reminiscent of the surrealist works by Salvador Dali. While this is obviously a more modern take on the style, we can still see some similar elements like the way physical objects seems to bend and move as if they were made from a different material we perceive them to be and how aspects of the image just seem to be out of place or in a strange context.

As a personal summary, I feel that New Wave Design has been one of the more interesting design styles that we have tackled as a class, this is probably due to the use of digital media which I am personally very fond of and also possibly due to how reminiscent these designs are to some of the designs we see today very often.

References: Daniel Friedman-eyemagazine.com-2014 [http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-dan-friedman][last accessed on 29/01/2015]

Uartsgd-uartsgd.com-2014 [http://www.uartsgd.com/GD40/Friedman/DanFriedman.html][last accessed on 20/01/2014]