New Wave Design and Wolfgang Weingart.

Influenced by past movements such as punk and modernsim, specifically swiss typography, New Wave Design is arguably created by Wolfgang Weingart and his typographic experiments done with Swiss typography. What Weingart did as a catalyst to the New Wave movement was that he took the Swiss typography and cut it up and ‘exploded’ it to a point where words were no longer legible but you could still make out the individual letters of of the chaos.

In this work here we can see an example of one of his typographic experiments. Here we can clearly see chaotic nature of his experiments where type has been given a whole new use here. This is something that Weingart was particularly focused on. He wanted to challenge the need for legibility of type and try use it in a new way. This concept is very reminicent of the Dadaist movement. The Dadaists very very fond of using type in a non conventional way by having letters floating in empty space or having words that were just gibberish. Weingart took some of these elements and used them in his design but he did not go as far as the Dadaists did. This could be considered a more tame or refined version of Dada. On further inspection of this example we can see how individual letters are still very much visible and somewhat structured if not a bit disjointed.

This next example by Weingart highlights some of the other characteristics that New Wave design is known for . Instantly we can see the use of textures and gradients which is different from his first initial experiments. He moved from black text on a flat colour to gradients that created a smooth transition of shades and textures that give a more interesting aesthetic too look at as opposed to flat colour. We can also start to see juxtaposition of various elements within this poster, a characteristic that was very popular throughout New Wave Design. The Juxtaposition here is seen when you look at the structure of the text in relation to what's happening in the background. The text appears to be somewhat structured in nature and looks like it follows the use of a grid to keep everything in clean and aligned lines, while the background has the complete opposite. The background has elements interwoven with each other with the appearance of elements that are being torn out of the page, a characteristic that is reminiscent of Punk design and Jamie Reids work. When these two elements are put together, the structured type and the chaotic background, they create a juxtaposition with each other as these two elements are in stark contrast with each other.

Weingart was a very important figure to the New Wave movement as his experiments were basically what initiated the New wave movement and even though he tried not to influence his students too much, some of the characteristics in his work are seen across New Wave design.

References:

Designhistory-designhistory.org-2014 [http://www.designhistory.org/PostModern_pages/NewWave.html][last accessed on 28/01/2015]