Graphic design holds a marginal position in the Italian design historiography in relation to industrial design. Often written by and for graphic designers, histories have tended to concentrate on changes in graphic styles as exemplified in works by prominent designers or the visual communication strategies of major companies. By contrast, this thesis addresses the organisation of the graphic design profession in Milan, from the interwar period to the mid-1960s. Key aspects explored include: graphic design’s mutable meanings and practices; formal and informal educational practices; graphic designers’self-identification with a new profession; and the structures they created to organise and make their practice visible. A focus on dialogue and negotiation between different interest groups stresses the relational and contingent nature of design professions. The thesis asks whether Milan’s graphic practitioners capitalised on modernist ideas such as standardisation, universalism, objectivity and functionalism to distance themselves from graphic arts and advertising, and enable re-categorisation within design. Thus, it problematises the relationship between professionalisation and international modernism, within the specific context of industrial structures in Milan and the hierarchy of design practice in twentieth-century Italy more broadly. The thesis provides an original retelling of stories often taken for granted, and looks behind individual designers and big companies to uncover overlooked narratives. Five chapters addressing the Scuola del Libro and the Cooperativa Rinascita in Milan, the ISIA in Monza, the Milan Triennale, the Studio Boggeri and the associations AIAP and ADI draw attention to educational issues, design practice, professional organisations, networks and mediating channels that have defined, legitimised, represented, advanced, contrasted, and articulated the graphic design profession in Milan. The argument is built on close scrutiny of archival material and other primary sources, including extensive visual material and oral interviews. Methodologies derive principally from history of design and visual culture, and place great emphasis on visual analysis. Visual artefacts are approached both as visual expressions of design methodologies and aesthetic principles and, drawing on actor-network-theory, as three-dimensional actors that interact with people and other artefacts. Despite focusing on the local, the thesis draws on global design history as a methodology by taking into account the dynamic and multi-directional movement of people, ideas, and artefacts within transnational circuits. Building on sociological stances, it approaches professions as socially constructed concepts and argues that professional identities are constantly in formation and require continual adaptation to shifting environments, agendas and design discourses. The thesis aims to offer neither a comprehensive history of Italian graphic design nor a final assessment of its professionalisation. Rather, it prioritises the process of professionalisation, by stressing tensions and contradictions, and by following practitioners’ struggle to articulate what graphic design is. The originality and potential impact of the thesis lie in its endeavour to present a closely-articulated history of the graphic design profession in Milan that draws attention to economic, industrial, political, social and technological contexts, and to propose this as a template for the writing of graphic design history. Furthermore, it provides a historically-integrated, archive-based, outward-looking model for graphic design history as an integral part of the history of design.

In this study I aim to see if writing can enhance visual arts practice. Much UK Quality Assurance Agency and Higher Education visual arts documentation recommends risk, as do many practitioners. I hypothesise that very short, tightly-structured essays will foster risk by combining radical format, content demand and writing’s esteem. I experimented with essays by Foundation visual arts students at Coventry University in 2011. Half the group was assigned a short essay as above, the other half a 1,000-word, conventional essay. Both groups had the same essay topic choices; both were taught in the same way as far as possible; both assignments were individual. Practice-based presentations took place shortly after the essays, and students were advised of potential connections between the tasks. Quantitative data was taken from all essay and presentation grades; qualitative data from essay drafts, questionnaires and interviews with selected 128-word essay students. The grades show the 128-word essay students slightly outperforming the others. Four themes emerged from the qualitative data: provisional meaning, risk, practice parallels and project process. Drafts and questionnaires showed improvisation and keen engagement; interviews (loosely following Bryman’s ‘unstructured’ model) considered content, form, convention, risk and transferability of writing to practice. The main problems students faced when writing the short essays were how to say enough and how to mix tradition with innovation. There was evidence that some students connected the short essay with their practice – but to connect is not necessarily to enhance. The short essays were very diverse, some radically inventive, others less so – yet the study recommends caution when rethinking traditional writing assignments because some students respect traditional writing, and may find the extreme form of the very short essay patronising unless it can promise more. The study’s contribution to knowledge is to promise more by making writing a metaphor for practice and evaluated as such, taking writing beyond mimicking or analysing practice. The study also induced a supporting theory that absolutes and variables need careful balance, extending the bisociative notion of mixing tradition with innovation. The study showed that these short essays could enhance practice by fostering risk, but also that risk is very variable. This questions how such risks are evaluated, and even whether an enforced risk is a risk at all, and not just ingenuity. The thesis has six chapters: Introduction; Literature review; The short story in visual arts practice; The short essay in action; Student responses; Conclusion. Appendices contain three associated papers and all drafts with comments, questionnaires with responses, and full interview transcripts annotated to demonstrate emerging themes and connections to research questions. The study draws on reader-response as a theoretical framework, and is informed by the study of visual arts academic writing, risk-taking in visual arts practice, Koestler’s bisociative understanding of creativity, provisional meaning and the short story.

Critical Design is a specific type of design activity that has emerged from within the field of product design. Based on the supposition that design is an ideological activity, it can either be critical or affirmative of the status quo and categorised as Critical Design or Affirmative Design. The intention of this study is to create Critical Design within the practice of graphic design. Critical Design was defined by identifying its key characteristics and then visualised into a diagram that maps the pathways, processes and consequences which distinguish Critical Design from Affirmative Design. The characteristics were used to generate criteria of Critical Design, which were then used to analyse case studies. The findings from this analysis suggested that both case study projects could be defined as Critical Design and served as a way of testing the appropriateness of the criteria. The practical component of this study used the characteristics of Critical Design to create a range of graphic design artefacts and then analysed them in relation to the criteria of Critical Design. The findings from this analysis determined the practical component as Critical [Graphic] Design and suggested that graphic design can be an appropriate medium for critique of its own role within society.

M.Sc. / The aim of this thesis is to investigate the topic of edge-colourings of graphs in the context of hereditary graph properties. We particularly aim to investigate analogues of reducibility, unique factorization and some related concepts. Chapter 1 gives the basic definitions and terminology. A few useful general results are also stated. In Chapter 2 we define and investigate decomposability, the analogue of reducibility. Some general results are first proved, such as that the indecomposability of an additive induced-hereditary property in the lattice of such properties implies that it is indecomposable in a general sense. The decomposability of various specific properties is then investigated in the rest of the chapter. In Chapter 3 we investigate unique decomposability, the analogue of unique factorization. We give examples showing that not every additive hereditary property is uniquely decomposable, and we obtain some results on homomorphism properties which lead to the unique decomposability of Ok. We also consider some related questions, such as cancellation and preservation of strict inclusions. Chapter 4 deals with Ramsey properties. We obtain some general results and, using the so-called partite construction, we obtain a few restricted Ramsey-graph results. As a corollary, we obtain two more unique decomposability results. In Chapter 5 we obtain various bounds involving the property Vk of k-degeneracy. We also investigate the sharpness of these bounds and prove that Vk is indecomposable for every k. Chapter 6 deals with the connection between colourings of infinite graphs and properties of finite graphs. We obtain some extensions of the Compactness Principle and give an example showing that the Compactness Principle can be useful in studying finite graphs.

Ph.D. (Mathematics) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This study comprises a broad-based consideration of contemporary graphic design. It was undertaken in response to observations and perceptions that graphic design is in a vulnerable position unless it is able to articulate and sys¬tematically clarify its role and ability to address issues of significance in the social, economic and cultural arenas. Although the importance of design for development in South Africa is acknowledged, the study is sited within the parameters of design development with a concomitant focus on the profes¬sional and theoretical dimensions of graphic design. The study has sought to contribute to the debate about the future of graphic design in South Africa by offering some perspectives on the opportunities, directions and choices avail¬able to graphic design in this country. The primary aim of the study has been to explore and demonstrate the nature and value of conceptual frameworks and interpretive strategies in graphic design within the spectrum of the developing theoretical basis of the disci¬pline. It considers graphic design as visual language in order to elucidate the fundamental thinking and guiding principles that enable the production and analysis of design solutions. It examines semiotic approaches and poststruc¬turalist deconstruction and their theoretical application to graphic design. It also looks at graphic design through the lens of visual rhetoric. Systematic analysis necessitating the intense, detailed and multidimensional examination of graphic design outcomes and visual semantics, tends to reflect an evolving but powerful resource and tool, open to flexibility in accommodating a range of objectives, and a diversity of interpretive perspectives and theoretical val¬ues. Analytical consideration reveals design meaning to be multilayered and complex, moving from universal meaning to a variety of other emphases in a network of interrelationships and contexts which include internal organisa¬tion, intertextuality, social interaction, cultural dimensions and the domains of creators, analysts and viewers. The adoption of a broad approach has allowed the nascent graphic design dis¬course to emerge and enabled several of the dominant ideas and impulses, that inform creative production and analytic interpretation, to be probed. The study identifies and elucidates some of the fundamental design dilemmas of identi¬ty, place, role and values in the contemporary world and traces the shifts from modern to postmodern thinking, sensibility and expression; to considerations of post-colonialism and the current confluence and interaction of South Africa/Western world. It reinforces perceptions of transition in design think¬ing and practice, but suggests that these are not comprehensively understood or uniformly accepted within the design arena. A number of multifaceted, interlinked and overlapping tributaries or features can be assigned to contem¬porary graphic design, allowing it to be viewed in terms of communication, context, transformation, convergence, pluralism, complexity and digital tech¬nology. These salient characteristics provided a useful means to position graphic design within the context of the challenges facing corporate organisations in South Africa. The study suggests a more inclusive, knowledge-based form of graphic design practice which presupposes an holistic understanding and use of design within the functional and cultural parameters of the corporate envi¬ronment; and as a response to the impact of both information technology and contemporary management processes. It proposes that an encompassing vision of graphic design, which accommodates broader theoretical and practi¬cal dimensions, must be encouraged in South Africa. / Thesis (DPhil (Fine Arts))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

As a reaction to the demand for women’s suffrage and equal rights in the late-1800s, American antifeminism emerged. In the article by Janet Saltzman Chafetz and Anthony Gary Dworkin, “In the Face of Threat: Organized Antifeminism in Comparative Perspective,” the authors concluded that the growth of a countermovement is contingent upon the success and size of the movement it opposes.1 This conclusion is applied to the actions, counter-actions and subsequent growth of both antifeminism and feminism. However, as feminism succeeds with small advancements in equality, antifeminism escalates its oppositional strength by creating accusations against women, using labels based on gender stereotypes and initiatives that incite divisive discourse in the pursuit of equal rights for all human beings. Graphic design is a catalyst for both antifeminism and feminism visual language. To find inspiration for my exhibition, I examined one-hundred years of design used by both movements. Based by my research, the exhibition, “5th Wave: The Fault of Women,” navigates through the growth and history of antifeminism and visually examines antifeminist labels and initiatives and the culmination of these techniques used during the fifth wave of antifeminism. The exhibition, “5th Wave: The Fault of Women,” exposes and challenges the efforts of the fifth wave of antifeminism in an effort to evoke an understanding of the importance of feminism’s fight for equality and the betterment of all human beings. Using research and design to expose antifeminism’s growing labels and initiative, feminism can combat the techniques used to punish those who challenge patriarchy and heteronormativity. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Helpless is a creative thesis featuring a series of illustrations that metaphorically represent instances of abuse and trauma through the use of mythological and supernatural creatures.

A comprehensive study in the processes of animation in various forms, from concept to simple layout animation to complex overlapping action and splining, and even lighting and texturing, I will be using a popular podcast musical as a basis to study the pipeline that’s used to create an industry animation.

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