Vibrant Chinese Propaganda Art – Part 2: Seven Intense Years

by Lars Hasvoll Bakke, CreStock

From the seven years between 1969-76, we are left with a vast heritage of marvelous propaganda material. In the second part of this series, we take a look at more carefully selected posters from that period.

In part 1, we finished off with a poster ordering the red guards of the cultural revolution to disperse into the countryside, or in other words, breaking them up to avoid turning the cultural revolution into a civil war. Mao was central in launching that revolution, and would be central in ending it, backed by the People’s Liberation Army, which was fed up with teenagers looting their armories.

With the demise of the red guards, the cultural revolution proper came to an end. While Mao remained in power, there were still people trying to climb the party ladders, either to gain supreme power themselves, or to get in line ahead of Mao’s eventual death. The power struggles in the Communist party thus carried on until a bit after Mao’s death in 1976.

1969 – The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong thought

2D3D Book

ABC 3D by Marion Bataille, embodies the spirit and potential of the book at its best a tactile beautiful surprising object. Now although an e-reader is a different sort of experience this embodies why the book as physical, printed object should and indeed will live on.

20 Book Covers

 

2D 3D book

ABC3D by Marion Bataille. Mindblowing!

Design Process for a Book

Cecilia Sorochin of SoroDesign is a graduate of the Universidad de Palermo and now teaches editorial design at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. she’s comfortable in both print and web design, her specialties include book design, magazine layout, and print production. Before turning to graphic design, she studied fashion design at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and worked in the fashion industry for many years.

The Design Process for a Book and more…

I find the design process really interesting, maybe more than the finished work.
Why? (just my point of view) Because during that collaborative process between designer & (ideally) author is where the visual personality of the book will be defined.

The Book Cover

We get the manuscript for the design of the book cover, layout & website for A Worthy Legacy by author Tomi Akinyanmi.

A Worthy Legacy is a story about life and the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next. The author combines the last wise words of her beloved grandfather together, along with a few of her own thoughts to create a compelling story about real life.

Read the manuscript

From just a glance, the overall feel of the book should come out.

Then look for the voice: my starting point for every book is the belief that authors write books because they have something to say.

By reading a manuscript, I need to find what it is that they had to say, who says it, how it is said, & from which point of view.

Sooner or later (usually very soon) some details are revealed, and often I find in those little details the key to the cover.

Reading A Worthy Legacy I learned that the author, originally from Nigeria now living in the U.S., tells many insights about the Yoruba Tribe, which totally fascinated me…  and gave the book the ‘unique’ factor.
So from the reading, I jump to images: and started my search for the graphic elements – images, textures, color palette, etc – that relate to the book:

Bookcover process 1

From there I get the first round of covers to send to the author, and since the first cover was my favorite, I’ve done also an option in a lighter color. Maybe I was trying to persuade?