DADA

Dadaism was a rebellious movement against the carnage of the WWI and was aimed at sort of challenging socio-economic principles of capitalist interests. Dada founders were angry young artists, claiming that they could discover the true reality by leaving behind traditional culture and accepted new forms. 

Dada's innovative approach to typography, photo montage, negative white space, layout, letter spacing and line spacing has played an important role in the development of communication design. Of course many of their styles, techniques and so on were borrowed and influenced from Futurists and Expressionists. Something in particular is that Dada adopted Futurists art of typography.

According to Tristan Tzara in the Dadaist manifesto: 
    "Every page should explode, either because of its deep seriousness, or because of its vortex, vertigo, newness, timelessness, crushing humor, enthusiasm of its principles, or the way it is printed."

It is funny because this was literally what the founder of Futurism, Marinetti's virulment sentiment when he wrote:
    "I undertake a typographical revolution directed especially against the idiotic and nauseous conception of old-fashioned books of verses ... Better still: my revolution is directed against what is called typographical harmony of the page ... I intend to redouble the expressive force of words." 


Dada photocollage and montage techniques

Dada artists like Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and so on, developed a unique method of reinterpreting and changing context photos to powerful socio-political effect. To create such works they would choose familiar looking press photographs, and reorganized them such that to radically alter their meanings.

These works were made of cuts or press, posters, catalogs, letters, tickets and anything in between of these type of materials. 



Dada artists decided to use a technique to disrupt the cultural influence of mass media on socio-political structure of reality. By mirroring on their photo montages the breakdown of society, Dadaists aimed at disturbing the viewers' sentience and causing a feeling of anxiety or dismay with something unexpected from facing the harsh reality of modern life.





Covers, Layouts and Illustrations

Although in fact, according to the Dadaists, Dada was not art, but "anti-art", the designs of book jackets, Layouts, and Illustrations in Dada had a strong artistic flavour to them. Dada's aim was to fight the stale design with bold and energetic design. Dada offered a new perspective, something to question the meaning of the meaning(if that makes sense). 
Dada however was not about warmth and fun, as Dadaists themselves explained it was  "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."