Lucian Bernhard vs. Shigeo Fukuda
Both Lucian Bernhard and Shigeo Fukuda created designs with a very similar minimal, and bold look to them. Fukuda and Bernhard’s simplistic approach made a great impact on how design can communicate ideas and be strong at the same time without having any unneeded decretive aspects involved. These two famous designers, may not have been designing to communicate the same things, but the way they presented their work was.
Lucian Bernhard was born in Germany in 1883 and past away in 1972. Lucian was one of the biggest impacts on modern day minimalism. Bernhard created the style in which he called “poster style”, which is what all his famous designs are created in. Poster style is when all imagery is solid shapes, and uses as little information as possible to advertise/ promote the idea. So most all Bernhard’s designs are the brand name and a very simplistic almost paper cut-out looking image of the product, for example in his most famous design for Priester, which is a match company, so the only information on the advertisement is an image of two matches, with Priester presented rather large at the top.
Shiego Fukuda was born in Tokyo in 1932 and past away in 2009. Fukudas designs were very simplistic and logo like, much like Bernhards, yet Fukuda tried to convey his on personal beliefs and views into his work, intend of just representing something for what it is, he liked to make the viewer think more.
The two designs I chose to compare from Fukuda and Bernhard are, Fukudas 1982 Happy Earth Day Poster, and Bernhards 1910 Manoli cigarette poster advertisement. Both Posters have that simple solid shape style with very muted, small color selection with essentially one major image being portrayed. Obviously that simplistic approach done by Bernhard in 1910 was so effective at communicating, that the style was still being worked with in 1982, a whole 72 years later. The Manoli Cigarette poster and the Earth Day poster, physically appear similar, but their difference is what they are saying. Bernhards is what you see, a pack of cigarettes, there is no more meaning behind it. Fukudas is still minimal, but the imagery of a axe sprouting a leaf, with the headline “Happy Earth Day”, is speaking more towards an opinion.
