Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

juxtapositions of realities in the service of polemics—could the magazine
continue to convey strong messages.
The last issue of AIZto be published in Berlin was dated March 5,
1933 ; Münzenberg then moved the operation to Prague. But AIZwent from
a circulation of 500,000copies in Germany to around 12,000in Prague.
Attempts to circulate a smuggled miniature version into Germany were
unsuccessful. In 1936 AIZwas renamed Volks Illustriete; two years later,
when German occupation of Czechoslovakia was imminent, the magazine
was moved to France, where it published only one issue. Until AIZceased
publication in 1938 , it was a satiric thorn in the side of the Nazi régime.
Most of the picture stories are now forgotten, but Heartfield’s
photomontages are celebrated today as prime documents of agitation and
protest.
AIZinfluenced USSR in Construction, which published monthly
between 1930 and 1940. Founded by Maxim Gorky, its declared editorial
mission was to “reflect in photography the whole scope and variety of the
construction work now going on in the USSR.” Toward this aim USSR
in Constructionwas published in editions of five different languages—
German, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. As rotogravure magazines
go, with its multiple die-cuts, inserts, and gatefolds, it was exceedingly
more lush and inventive than others of its genre. The magazine employed
the leading Soviet documentary photographers, including Max Alpert and
Georgy Petrusive, and the most prominent graphic designers, notably Lazar
El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko (with Varvara Stepanova). Con-
structivist typographer Solomon Telingater was also brought in on occasion
to design the type.
Early issues contained unremarkable pictorial sequences with
expanded captions. But by 1931 , when John Heartfield arrived in Moscow for
an extended visit, he was invited to design an issue on the Soviet petroleum
industry. His photographic cover showing oil derricks cropped on a dynamic
incline was a stunning departure from the previous, somewhat bland,
typographic treatments. The magazine’s nameplate (or title) was composed
in a dynamic manner using sans serif letters thrusting, like a gusher of oil
itself, toward the sky. Heartfield showed that a graphic designer was capable
of transforming the most common photographs into dramatic tableaux.
Nevertheless, another two years passed before the editors allowed Lissitzky
the freedom to make radical changes in layout and typography.
Both Heartfield and Lissitzky contributed something that had
been missing: a sense of narrative. Lissitzky, who had been practicing book
design, seamlessly integrated pictures and text and allowed generous space
for mammoth blowups of documentary photos and heroic photomontages