reflection
I enjoyed today's workshop very much. Because we had to go to the library to find these books and fill their information on a sheet, which allowed us to gather some interesting data and gave me a chance to get in touch with some very good works. It‘s like an adventure in a library.
I should have found nine books on the 741.6092 List, but I only found seven. The two missing books were those of Stefan Sagmeister, the designer, who was probably so popular that his books were borrowed by other students. In fact, Sagmeister is the only designer that I know in these nine books, I heard him during my undergraduate study period.
I found that in two of the seven books the designer is female, and it's the same woman, Paula Scher. It means the proportion of Female:Male is 2:7 in my collected data. I'm curious about if my peers' data is the same as mine? What's the proportion of contemporary female and male designers? Maybe I can utilize the gender issue and the time to create a set of data.
I also found that these designers are all from Europe and the United States, and there are no designers from other regions. This makes me think if European and American design is a mainstream trend in design today, or if Chelsea is a western school that collects more books from western designers, or if westerners are more prominent in design?
Another important statistic is their careers. In the data I've collected, they started their careers as early as the 1960s, and some of them are still working today. In the 1960s, the world gradually moved towards stable development, and people's demand for design grew day by day, so more and more designers appeared.
By filling in the practice keywords, I found that more than half of these designers had been engaged in music album cover design, indicating that the design industry is closely related to the music industry. Album cover design is an area of great interest to me. Especially when I saw Peter Saville's work, I was so excited to find that he had designed many of the best album covers I had ever seen.
In Paula Scher's book, I found some of her creative ideas and work processes, which are worth noting and learning.
In Peter Saville's book, I found a lot of album covers that I had looked before, but I didn't know he had designed them. Then I found more excellent cover designs in his books and learned that he was also working as an art director while doing cover design, which was a creative field that I was very interested in.