Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch was an influential editorial designer in the 50's, I particularly like the way in which he manipulates the form and shape between the image and text.

Alexey brodovitch was an artist, graphic designer and photographer. However, he was most famous for his art direction, primarily for the magazine Harpers Bazaar. He was a aesthetic entity whose permanent influence was perceived along the entire visual arts. His style of combining elegantly set typography with new and experimental trends in photography became widely popular in the 1940's and 50's, helping to keep the magazine at the forefront of its field in a swiftly changing world.


''Brodovitch was the first art director to integrate image and text. Most american magazines at that time used 
text and illustration seperately, dividing them by wide white margins. Brodovitch cropped his photograhps, often off-center, brought them to the edge of the page, integrated them in the whole. He used his images as a frozen moment in time and often worked with succeeding pages to create a nice flow trough the entire magazine. This brought a new dynamism in fashion layouts.


The typeface he preferred was Bodoni, but when needed he switched to Stencil, Typewriter or a script. He matched the typeface with the feeling or with the need for an appropiate effect. Legibility was not his primary concern.

His layouts are easily recognized by his generous use of white space. Colleagues at other magazines saw his sparse designs as truly elegant, but a waste of valuable space.''


AlexeyBrodovitch

This spread from 1935 shows the integration of all graphic elements. Brodovitch accentuates the fluidity and movement of the images by using repetition and diagonal and horizontal stress. He uses the contacts like frames from a film and creates the illusion of movement and spontaneity across the left-hand page. The strips of film overflow onto the opposing page, as if the dancers have twirled across the spine of the magazine. The enlargement on the right-hand page depicts the grand finale of this dance numer.

Following the idea I had about using the fitting technique of the garments and the facts that they accentuate the female figure could be adapt to the style of the cookbook e.g with the curve of the text:

 This idea could also work across typeface,  I used the hourglass curves of the female figure to came up with this typeface idea, this could be developed through changing weights.