Analysing Avant-Garde

Avant-Garde

Avant-garde in graphic design is something new or innovatory exploring a range of different concepts and techniques to deliver a message to a specific audience, in order to create some thing new and/or original, the best examples I found to identify Avant-Gardism were those of ‘Adbusters’, Adbusters is a website creating new and interesting design, with an attention-grabbing feel to it.

With the definition of avant-garde referring to works that are experimental or innovative I felt Adbusters was the fitting source for this term, there were a few examples I found, I chose two poster from their site, one being an advert for Absolute Vodka, the message being that alcohol can cause unwanted tragedies the images, shows a photograph of a car crash crime scene band on the floor besides the crashed cars, the outline of an Absolute Vodka bottle, this image connotes that by drinking Absolute Vodka you could easily end up in a car crash, another detail I noticed with the image was the cars, both cars seem to be what is classed as a ‘boy racer’ car these are usually older model hatch back’s this also goes deeper to connote that it is younger drivers that are the cause for this problem, the main avant-garde feature of this particular piece of design is the shock factor, introducing real life consequences into design is a big part of avant-gardism by making the audience see what they don’t really want to therefore making them think more about their actions.

The second piece of design I found is one humoring men’s fragrance, another interesting image again from Adbusters, this piece goes completely in the opposite direction of any fragrance ad’s and instead of showing aftershave named ‘the one’ for instance, showing an image of a perfect man with a perfect body, they have cleverly titled the design ‘Reality’ and the image is nothing more than an average man with a hairy torso and slightly over weight, again another out of the ordinary way of creating new and exciting design, the humor grabs the audiences attention because its different and unheard of, the individuality and contradicting effect of this design makes it avant-garde.