Journal 7: A intro to Ruben Pater's "The Politics of Design"

There's quite a range of different topic that Ruben talks about within the book were assigned to have in this class. Some topics im a bit familiar with, a lot that i am not. Regardless, this book is definitely a very interesting read, and a useful one when going into graphic design. Today i want to got over what i learned from the book and what i knew going into it.

Color is no doubt something that is incredibly important as a graphic designer, as obvious as that may be. Many of the desicions i come to when involving a new project how it should look often involves the colors I decide to use. Color is also something that is described and analyzed within Rubens book, mostly in ways i never would have thought about, even over the most basic concepts. For example, colors are often associated with certain genders, the most widely accepted being boy for boys and pink for girl. Though I already understood that these are the colors that play a role in gender, I didn't understand why specifically blue and pink, until i read a bit in Rubens book. Its interesting to not first that children, regardless of gender, were simple dressed in white. However, during World War 1, producers of baby products deduced that they were able to make more money by selling their stuff in specific gender colors. It was decided at the time that pink was for boys and blue was for girls, but was swapped with one another during the 40s Another very eye opening chapter is "The History of Colour in Black and White", which goes in depth about racism, and how we as people may see and associate certain attributes with white and black, or as it's sometimes stated in the chapter, light and dark.

I've had this book for about a year, and one thing that I've been able to study a lot, without the need for the book, is typography. Not only about technical parts of type anatomy like aperture, but also the cultural significance of different type styles, like what caused the switch from black lettering to Roman type, and the difference they may have. One of the many benefits of taking typography and advanced typography as classes at ISU. One specific piece of information that i though was interesting that i already knew comes to us from the chapter "The Story of the Broken Script" on page 41. Going back to Roman and Black Lettering, when hitler initially took power over Germany during World War 2, he didn't like black lettering type and wanted the something more similar to the Roman typeface, something that's universal and able to be ledgable for other countries. Whats interesting to note is that the roman type isn't the only thing that they took inspiration from the Roman empire. As it turns out, the "Third Reich" is a nod towards the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire, which the Nazis saw themselves as the successors of.