GDG431 History of

Graphic Communication
Name: Siti Nuratiqah Abdul Jalil
Student ID: 2017903579
Programme: AD241/ NADG1A
Lecturer: Abdul Rahman Ahamad
Acknowledgement
First of all thanks to Allah S.W.T for his mercy and guidance in
giving me full strength to complete this project. A special gratitude
I give to our History of Graphic Communication lecturer, Mr. Abdul
Rahman Ahamad, whose contribution in stimulating suggestions
and encouragement, helped me to coordinate my project.

To my beloved family, friends, and others who in one way or

another shared their support, either morally, financially and
physically, thank you so much for being there for me.
Mental health awareness
& stigma in Malaysia
 Issues
In Malaysia, mental illness is frequently taboo. Despite the unwillingness to confront or address this, however, its prevalence is rising.

According to the Health Ministry’s 2015 National Health Morbidity Survey (NHMS), up to 4.2 million Malaysians over 16 years’ old — around 30 percent
of the segment — experience some form of mental illness.In 2006, it was just 11.2 per cent. This means about 1 in 3 people suffer from a mental health
problem.

The survey also reported a steady rise in prevalence of psychiatric morbidity: 10.6% in 1996, 11.2% in 2006 and 29.2% in 2015 for those in the 16 years’
age group. In the five to 15 years’ age group, psychiatric morbidity was 12.1% in 2015. The recent increase in the number of reported cases of youth
depression and suicides is proof that measures need to be taken to address mental health issues.
Issues
 Issues
Individuals with mental illness often struggle a double edged sword battle. Coping with the symptoms of the condition itself is already difficult enough
whilst misperceptions of the condition create further complications such as suffering negative connotations - ‘stigma’ - and discrimination.

By 2020, mental illness is expected to be the second biggest health problem affecting Malaysians after heart disease. Unfortunately, there is still a lack
of understanding on the disease especially in terms of common mental disorders, the causes and possible consequences as well as recognising the early
signs of major mental problems.

There is also a strong social stigma associated with mental illness, from a cultural standpoint shaped by superstitious belief and misconception. This
negative perception often leads patients with mental illness to suffer in silence, preventing them from seeking the help and treatment they may need
and often ostracised by society with little hope of acceptance let alone recovery.

Malaysians need to tackle mental health issues head on and overcome

the stigma that is attached to the illness.
What is mental health?
Mental health is your emotional, psychological and social well-being. It is how you think, feel and act. Just as we take care of our physical health,
we have to take care of our mental health too.

Many factors contribute to your mental health such as:

◈ Biological factors such as genetics or brain chemistry

◈ Life experience such as abuse or a stressful life event
◈ Family history of mental health problems
◈ Thinking patterns

Many of us fall ill and are affected physically, emotionally and mentally particularly when we are under stress. Mental illness is something that
affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood. This often affects the person's ability to relate to others and function every day. Mental health
problems are common but help is available and many people do recover. No one factor causes mental illness. It is the combination and dynamics
of all factors working together that results in the breakdown of normal functioning and a struggle to cope with life’s challenges and
responsibilities.
 Why get help?
While you may be tempted to believe things will just get better if you hang out long and hard enough, it probably won’t. You deserve to get help.

Here are some consequences of an untreated mental illness.

Worsening Mental Health Problems

The most obvious effect of untreated mental illness is a steady—and often rapid—decline in mental health. Mental illness will not go away on its
own, and the longer it persists, the harder it is to treat. People with depression, for instance, might only experience a handful of symptoms at
first. Left untreated, they may begin to experience the full range of depression symptoms, necessitating more intensive treatment and a more
uncertain recovery journey.

Unexplained Aches and Pains

When mental illness becomes too challenging to deal with, sometimes the body bears some of the burden. You might involuntarily tense your
muscles, leading to headaches and muscle pain. Or maybe chronic stress will lead to gastrointestinal distress. It's common for people with
underlying mental health problems to complain of aches and pains that have no physical source. But over time, these aches and pains can
become real health problems. If you tense your shoulder in response to stress, for example, you might eventually develop a painful or debilitating
shoulder injury that worsens both your physical and mental health.

Chronic Physical Health Problems

Mental illness is not all in your head. It's the product of brain chemistry changes. Mental illness can undermine your physical health in at least
two ways. First, chronic mental health issues may cause you to neglect your health, as when a diabetic is too depressed to monitor her blood
sugar levels. And second, mental illness can cause health problems all its own. Chronic stress is associated with a risk of heart attacks, stroke,
obesity, and premature death, and many other symptoms associated with mental illness can also lead to serious health issues.
 Why get help?
Homelessness and Job Stability Issues

Mental illness makes it difficult to cope with the demands of daily life. Whether it's struggling to get out of bed for work because of depression,
or experiencing communication difficulties due to schizophrenia, the longer mental illness is left untreated, the more likely it is to interfere with
your ability to do your job and effectively interact with others. This can lead to financial troubles, job loss, and potentially even homelessness.
And all of these challenges, of course, can further complicate your mental illness, making it increasingly difficult to pull yourself out of a
challenging situation. More than a third of homeless people have a serious mental illness.

Incarceration

First, it's important to clear up a myth: mental illness does not cause violence. It does make it more difficult to conform to society's norms. For
instance, a woman with PTSD pulled over by the police may enter a flashback, causing her to behave in an apparently non-compliant manner. A
man with depression may feel so sad he's unable to muster the energy to pay a traffic ticket, eventually leading to the issuance of a warrant.
Seventy-three percent of female state prison inmates, and 55% of men, have a serious mental illness.

Victimization and Trauma

When your brain undermines your ability to react, feel happy, or think clearly, you're more vulnerable to victimization. This can set off a chain
reaction of victimization, followed by PTSD, followed by unusual behavior that leads to even more victimization. People with mental illnesses are
significantly more likely to be victimized than those in the general population.

Suicide

Mental illness isn't a lack of coping skills or a personal failure. It's a serious, and potentially life-threatening, illness. Left untreated, mental illness
can make life so intolerable—and cloud your judgment so thoroughly—that you see no way out and no hope. Life with mental illness is hard, and
for some, it's unbearable. More than 90% of suicides are directly attributable to untreated mental illness.
Stigma of mental illness in Malaysia
In ancient Greece, the word stigma referred to a mark that was cut or burned into the skin of a slave or criminal. This brand served to visibly
identify this individual to society as unworthy or a risk to society. It was to warn the people this individual was to be avoided or shunned.

Although we no longer physically brand individuals anymore, we continue to socially shun certain classes of individuals. We avoid those we don’t
understand or those who are not like us, even when they have done nothing wrong. In particular, one of the most discriminated against are
individuals who have a mental health condition. They are labelled as different and associated with negative stereotypes. This leads to the
stigmatized individual to suffer status loss and be actively discriminated against.

Discrimination could happen on a system/societal level such as the refusal to hire someone suffering from a mental illness, or refusing to
provide insurance coverage to someone with a mental illness, to personal discrimination such as name-calling individuals suffering from a
mental illness derogatory names like “crazy”, “gila”, “nuts”, “psycho” and “cacat”.

In Malaysia, a recent study found that the people most likely to discriminate against those who are mentally ill are in fact are family and friends.
The very people who are suppose to care and support those who are ill, reject them instead. This could be due to ignorance (knowledge),
prejudice (attitudes), or discrimination (behaviour).

“There have been cases when a patient is discharged (from hospital), no family members came to pick them up. So, we get the ambulance to send them
back. But when they (family) see the patient coming home, they lock the doors and windows. Pretending like they are not home”.

“They believe that if something is wrong with the patient, there’s something wrong with their genes so that is why they feel the need to ‘expel’ the
patient from the family. So who is to care for them when their own family won’t?”

The consequences of social stigma are costly. The negative attitudes of society are internalized such that people with mental illness themselves
start to advocate and believe these negative views. They start to see themselves as undeserving of care, responsible for their illness and unable
to recover. The belief that they are unable to recover debilitates them and decreases help-seeking behaviour, which further worsens their
mental illness. In Malaysia, social stigma is compounded by the systemic discrimination against people with mental illness leading them to deny
or hide their problems. Untreated mental illness ends up costing the society in billions in lost earning potential, homelessness, increased
physical health problems. There are no winners in social stigma, only escalating cost on individuals, families and society.

All of us in the mental health community need to raise our voices against stigma. Every day, in every possible way, we need to stand up to stigma.
How to fight stigma
Mental health awareness campaign
Key messages:

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH

Talking about mental health helps to reduce stigma and discrimination. Hearing what it’s like to have a mental health problem from people who
have experienced the issues first hand can help break down the negative stereotypes that exist around mental illness. When people with mental
health problems feel more able to be open and honest about their experiences, it becomes easier for them to seek help when they are feeling
unwell.

MENTAL HEALTH SHOULDN'T BE A TABOO

People could say those things such as, "They're are not real...", or they could say, “You’re possessed by a Jinn, you don't have an actual illness,", or
"The more you pray, the more you read Quran, the more you strengthen your faith, the less likely you will have illness,". These misconception are
based on stigma, fear, discrimination, shame and not understanding what it's all about.

CREATING A CULTURE OF ACCEPTANCE

What can we do as a community to encourage and create a culture if acceptance & support? Well, that just it, it's to create a space of safety of
non-judgement and having people come and talk about our mental illnesses. Why is it that if somebody breaks their legs, or catches a cold, or
finds out that they have diabetes, we talk about it normally- it's not an issues, it's fine - we even go out of our way to support and help the
person with the broken leg. We need to normalize mental illnesses and mental health just like we would for our physical health and our physical
illnesses. Like physical illness, mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. IT IS NOT ANYONE’s FAULT. IT IS OKAY TO GET HELP.
 Campaign objectives
◈ To encourage help-seeking attitudes for mental health problems and to enhance mental health literacy in Malaysia.
◈ Understand the impact of stigma on people with mental health problems and the people that care for them.
◈ To de- mystify and de-stigmatise the issue of mental health problems
◈ Understand that changeable levels of mental wellbeing are a normal part of our life experience.
◈ To feel more confident to talk about mental health
◈ Be more aware of who to talk to/where to go for help if they are concerned about themselves or someone they know.

Target
audience
All genders

Main - High school students, College

students (age 13 and above)

Secondary - Parents, teachers and

guardians

Where- Schools, campuses,

universities, public transport area.

Medium- Posters, Banner, Billboard,

Leaflets, Pamphlet, Social Media
Target audience
 Era in history of
Graphic communication
(Avant garde)
What is avant garde?
Avant-garde in French means front guard, advance guard, or vanguard. People often use the term in French and English to refer to people or works that
are experimental or novel, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics. According to its champions, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of
what is accepted as the norm within definitions of art/culture/reality. The origin of the application of this French term to art can be fixed at May 17,
1863, the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, organised by painters whose work was rejected for the annual Paris Salon of officially sanctioned
academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1874, 1875, and 1886.

The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow.
This concept is applied to the work done by small bands of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for
society to follow. Due to implied meanings stemming from the military terminology, some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially when
used to describe cultural movements. The term may also refer to the promotion of radical social reforms, the aims of its various movements presented
in public declarations called manifestos.

Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with art for art's sake, focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic
experience, rather than with wider social reform. In our context the avantgarde will cover the avantgardeist movements of the early 20th century that
specifically focused on visual communication design and/or implemented it as a modus operandi: The Constructivists, Futurism, Dada, Bauhaus and
De Stijl.
Visual analysis of
avant garde era
Avant garde movement
Constructivism
Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1914 onward, and a term often used in modern art today, which dismissed
"pure" art in favour of art used as an instrument for social purposes, namely, the construction of the socialist system. The term Construction Art was
first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in
Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Kazimir Malevich also worked in the constructivist style, though he is better known for his earlier
suprematism and ran his own competing group in Vitebsk. The movement was an important influence on new graphic design techniques championed
by El Lissitzky. As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the Constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material
activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create art that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them
an active viewer of the artwork. Most of the designs were a fusion of art and political commitment, and reflected the revolutionary times.
Constructivism
Constructivism
Avant garde movement
Futurism
One of the most important avant-garde art movements of the 20th century, Futurism developed in Italy between 1909 and continued into the early
1920s, although many of the movements most celebrated artists perished during World War 1 - an irony in and of itself since the movement celebrated
war, violence, speed, advanced technology and urban modernity. Committed to the new, its members wished to destroy older forms of culture and to
demonstrate the beauty of modern life - the beauty of the machine, speed, violence and change. The Futurists were fascinated by the problems of
representing modern experience, and through this interest they explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music,
architecture and even gastronomy.

Futurism influenced many other twentieth century art movements, including Constructivism, Art Deco, Surrealism and Dada. Futurism as a coherent
and organized artistic movement is now regarded as extinct, having died out in the 1944 with the death of his leader Marinetti, and Futurism was, like
science fiction, in part overtaken by 'the future.' Nonetheless the ideals of futurism remain as significant components of modern Western culture; the
emphasis on youth, speed, power and technology finding expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture.
Futurism
Futurism
Avant garde movement
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement
primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestos, art theory), theater, and graphic design, which concentrated its anti war politic through
a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

Given their strong conceptual underpinnings and their interest in conveying messages that attacked the bourgeois establishment and the State systems
that had brought forth the catastrophe of World War 1, the Dadaists were very interested in the power and influence of the written word. To this end
they produced a series of magazines, that were also influenced by Marinetti's thoughts on the usage of typography as a discrete tool for conveying
strong messages and that held mixtures of text and image which can be said to be precursors of the poetry school called "concrete poetry" that came
into full force during the second half of the 20th century. (Concrete poems are objects composed of words, letters, colors, and typefaces, in which
graphic space plays a central role in both design and meaning. Concrete poets experimented boldly with language, incorporating visual, verbal, kinetic,
and sonic elements.)

According to its proponents, Dada was not art — it was "anti-art". Dada sought to fight art with art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to
represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message,
Dada strove to have no meaning — interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. It is
perhaps then ironic that Dada became an influential movement in modern art. Dada became a commentary on order and the carnage they believed it
wreaked. Through this rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics. Art historians have
described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide.
Dada
Dada
Avant garde movement
Bauhaus
Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933 and briefly in the
United States from 1937-1938 and for the approach to design that it developed and taught. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the
German verb for "build") is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture. The foundation of
the Bauhaus occurred at a time of crisis and turmoil in Europe as a whole and particularly in Germany. Its establishment resulted from a confluence of a
diverse set of political, social, educational and artistic shifts in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Art nouveau had broken the
preoccupation with revivalist historical styles that had characterized the 19th century. In the first decade of the new century however, the movement
was receiving criticism; impelled by rationalist ideas requiring practical justification for formal effects. Nonetheless, the movement had opened up a
language of abstraction which was to have a profound importance during the 20th century.

One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore
industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs ("initial course") was taught; this is the modern day Basic Design course that has
become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because
everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.

The Bauhaus school had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States and Israel in the decades following its
demise, as many of the artists involved fled or were exiled by the Nazi regime. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School
of Design and worked together before their professional split in 1941. The Harvard School was enormously influential in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

While very active in areas of design such as interior design, textiles, ceramics, glassware, metal-ware and furniture design, it has to be acknowledged
that the Bauhaus school produced relatively few graphic designers. However, those that did come out of the movement were fundamental in setting the
principles of 20th century graphic design, especially after some of them moved to the USA during the 1930s, where they quickly became key figures in
editorial and advertising design.
Bauhaus
Bauhaus
Avant garde movement
De Stijl
De Stijl also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement, founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of
work created by a group of Dutch artists, from 1917 to 1931. De Stijl is also the name of a journal which was published by the painter and critic Theo van
Doesburg, propagating the group's theories. Next to Van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian and Bart van der
Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J.J.P. Oud. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism — the
new plastic art. Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and
universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used
only primary colors along with black and white.
De Stijl
De Stijl
Typeface in avant garde
Russian Constructivists: Used a variety of sans serif type in posters
Futurists: Often used text that had no meaning, influenced by cubists. The free use of
typography in which the compositor moves over the page vertically, horizontally and
diagonally. jumbles typefaces and makes liberal use of pictorial blocks.
Dada: Visual impact became a vital part of their posters and every page had to explode
since they wanted it to “yell” at the viewers. They achieved this with extreme hierarchy,
very heavy use of capital- lowercase, condensed, and light-semi-bold type.
De Stijl Movement: Stripped away the decoration, used geometric shapes and blocky sans
serif fonts.
The Bauhaus School: Form follows function. Type is stripped of decorative elements;
lowercase lettering is favored and asymmetrical balance becomes a central feature in
design composition.
Typeface in avant garde
 Campaign
development
Implementing the elements in avant garde era into
the visualisation of campaign
Elements and concept
Exploration of font
Thumbnail
sketches
Comprehensive
sketches
Final digitalize
Poster
Banner/Billboard
Message Poster
Pamphlet

Outside Spread
Pamphlet

Inside Spread
Flyers

Front Back