Designers work in a set of widely different fields, where common design principles might only exist in a small degree. Examples of different types of designers include: automotive designer, costume designer, fashion designer, game designer, graphic designer, industrial designer, interior designer, landscape designer, scenic designer, systems designer and web designer.
COSTUME DESIGNER
The costume designer is the person whose responsibility is to design costumes for a film or stage production. He or she is considered part of the ‘production team,’ alongside the director, scenic and lighting designers. The costume designer might also collaborate with a hair/wig master or a makeup designer, with the latter two operating on a subordinate level. In European theatre the role is somewhat different as the theatre designer will design both costume and scenic elements.
Costume designers will typically seek to enhance a character's person, within the framework of the director's vision, through the way that character is dressed. At the same time, the designer must ensure that the designs allow the actor to move in a manner consistent with the historical period and enables the actor to execute the director's blocking of the production without damage to the garments. Additional considerations include the durability and washability of garments, particularly in extended runs. The designer must work in consultation with not only the director, but the set and lighting designers to ensure that the overall design of the production works together. The designer needs to possess strong artistic capabilities as well as a thorough knowledge of pattern development, draping, drafting, textiles and costume/fashion history.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Graphic design is a form of communication using text and/or images to present information. The art of graphic design embraces a range of mental skills and crafts including typography, image development and page layout. Graphic design is applied in communication design and fine art. Like many forms of communication, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created, and the products (designs) such as creative solutions, imagery and multimedia compositions. The designs are applied to static media as well as electronic media, not always in the completed form. In commercial art, client edits, technical preparation and mass production are usually required, but usually not considered to be within the scope of graphic design.
Although the term 'graphic designer' was first coined in the 20th century, the story of graphic design spans the history of marks of humankind from the magic of the caves of Lascaux to the dazzling neons of Ginza. In both this lengthy history and in the relatively recent explosion of imaging in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is sometimes a blurring distinction and over-lapping of advertising art, graphic design and fine art. After all, they share the same elements, theories, principles, practices and languages, and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising art the ultimate objective is the sale of goods and services. In graphic design, ‘the essence is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that document human experience.’ ‘Fine art refers to arts that are 'concerned with beauty'...’
Design elements are the basic tools in every design discipline. The elements (including shape, form, texture, line, value, and colour) compose the basic vocabulary of visual design. Design principles, such as balance, rhythm, emphasis, and unity, constitute the broader structural aspects of the composition.
CHRISTIAN DIOR
Fashion Designer (1905-1957)
The most influential fashion designer of the late 1940s and 1950s, Christian Dior dominated in fashion after World War II with the hourglass silhouette of his voluptuous New Look. He also defined a new business model in the post-war fashion industry by establishing Dior as a global brand across a wide range of products.
“My mother says that when I was little my grandfather used to take me and my cousins on one side after dinner and ask us what we wanted to be when he grew up, and I’d say ‘Christian Dior’,” recalled the French fashion designer Christian Lacroix. “He was so famous in France at the time. It seemed as if he wasn’t a man, but an institution.”
When Lacroix was growing up in Arles during the 1950s, Christian Dior was indisputably the world’s most famous fashion designer. His name was known all over the world and his label accounted for half of France’s haute couture exports. The Dior client list ran from Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich to Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Windsor. A short, pear-shaped man, with a shiny bald pate and habitually nervous expression, he was courted by Parisian society: but so shy that he could barely bring himself to bow to his audience at the end of each couture show. Fastidious to a fault, Dior refused to receive any man who was not wearing a tie: yet was so superstitious that he consulted his clairvoyant before every major decision.
Christian Dior was born in 1905 in Granville, a lively seaside town on the Normandy coast. He was the second of the five children of Alexander Louis Maurice Dior, a wealthy fertiliser manufacturer. The family lived in a pretty grey and pink house perched high on a cliff with spectacular views over the sea. They moved to Paris in 1910 returning to Granville for holidays each summer. Dior longed to become an architect but, at his father’s insistence, he enrolled at the prestigious ‘Ecole des Sciences Politiques’ (nicknamed Sciences Po’) in Paris to take a degree in politics which, or so his parents hoped, would prepare him for a diplomatic career.
All Dior wanted was to work in the arts. In 1928, his father gave him enough money to open an art gallery on condition that the family name did not appear above the door. Galerie Jacques Bonjean soon became ‘an avant garde haunt’ with paintings by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob hanging on walls decorated by Christian Bérard. Disaster struck in 1931 when the death of Dior’s older brother was followed by that of his mother and the collapse of the family firm. The gallery closed. For the next few years Dior scraped a living by selling fashion sketches to haute couture houses. Finally he found a job as an assistant to the couturier, Robert Piquet.
When World War II war began in 1939, Dior served as an officer for the year until France’s surrender. He joined his father and a sister on a farm in Province until he was offered a job in Paris by the couturier Lucien Lelong, who was lobbying the Germans to revive the couture trade. Dior spent the rest of the War dressing the wives of officers and French collaborators. France emerged from World War II in ruins. Half a