Brain on a treadmill

For the sake of time (and hopefully passing history) Im going to keep to the exercises for the blog project for the time being. So first on the agenda is ITS.

For those who arent familiar with the movement and believe my last sentence just had very bad grammer, ITS is the International Typographic Style, one of the last true Modernist movements. Back at the begining of the 20th century, Europe was quite fixed on the idea of the Perfect way of doing things, that there was some sort of adsolute truth that everyone should b trying to get to (Sounds good and noble and theory but taking all the humanity out of humanity tends to make people a little bit cruel, the Nazis for instance). So in Europe, decoration and prettiness was out, geometry and functionality were in, form following function and frankly f**k frivolous facades... and all that. Pretty much the opposite of the art Nouveau Movement of the previous century.

So ITS was born, a typographic style that focused on grids, clean/simple geometric layouts, plain bold colours, san-serif type faces that were aligned flush left and clear legibility. Heres an example:

Though Modernism had its draw backs in that it never actually found an absolute truth, it did have a few good, pioneering ideas. Some of which have permeated though to contemporary design, Eg:

And just for some context some very Not ITS contemporary design: