When did humans first start using images as a way of storytelling and recording information?
35,000 years ago through the form of rock painting
What is a pictograph?
It is an easily understandable symbol that represents an object
What were pictographs made with?
Animal fats, with iron oxides, charcoal, and lime
Glyphs
A is a mark meant to communicate something. It can be a symbol like a pictograph, or a petroglyph, or an Egyptian hieroglyph. It can also be a letter of an alphabet, or even a piece of punctuation like a period.
the origins of writing
Early forms of writing were often scratched or pressed into surfaces such as clay tablets that were then dried or baked to set. Cuneiform was one of the earliest recorded forms of such a writing system used by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in the 4th century BCE.
Pictographs vs. Ideographs
Pictographs are literal representations of objects. Ideographs are symbols that represent ideas that are more complex.
What was an early combination of images and text together
The Blau Monuments
What are hieroglyphs?
Egyptian hieroglyphs use a mixture of pictograms, ideograms and phonograms, which are picture symbols that represent vowels and syllables (also known as Rebus).
What is a Rebus?
Pictorial symbols that represent sounds like letters or syllables.
The first use of signature
Cylinder seals in mesopotamia were used throughout mesopotamian and other civilisations as a form of signature.
The first expanse of Alphabets
The Phoenician alphabet contained 22 letters. It displays similarity to cuneiform but was informed by exposure to other cultures that the phonecians traded with as well including early cretan civilization and northwest semitic who travelled to phonecia from the north.
The first development of different type styles
The Romans developed several different styles of script, or ways of writing, almost like the different type styles we use today.
Where did the typeface Trajan come from?
An emperor of Rome whose military exploits were inscribed on a triumphal colum in the city of Rome. (Today it is a typeface often used for movies (think black swan)
What is Capiralis
A type of style the Romans used for less formal writing. It was quicker and more space efficient
Chinese written language is based on logograms. What are logograms?
Logograms are signs or characters representing words or phrases
What is Hanzi?
It is one of the most widely used written languages of the world and has been adopted and adapted in many other Asian scripts
Kanji
a Japanese alphabet that uses much of the simplified Chinese characters
Hiragana
is typically used to represent Japanese words
Katakana
is more often used for loan words that have been adopted from other languages
What is Papyrus?
Was created belying out plant pull in strips, this created material that would take and hold ink without bleeding or smudging
The origans of paper
Invented in China using Bamboo pulp
Lecture 2: The earliest examples of printing
Seals stamps and rubbings
What is Relief Painting?
Relief printing is were any raised areas will print.
The Diamond Sutra
The earliest surviving complete printed book
The invention of Parchment
It was made from either goat or cow skin and was more pliable then papyrus allowing scribes to write on both sides
Vellum
The highest quality parchment, it used for religious books and laws and remains the material used for printing of laws in the UK to this day.
What is an early bound book called
a codex (pearl codices), this term is used to describe any ancient manuscripts text in book form.
The difference between Codex and scrolls
When a document needed to be added to over time scroll was used, fixed documents used a book
What are Uncials?
A writing style developed in the Roman Empire. They were a hand written form of the capitals quadrate that more cursive or rounded. The name comes from the roman word for Inch
Illuminated Manuscripts
They were illustrated and/or decorated manuscripts often coloured with precious metals such as gold or silver
Half Uncials
Written between 4 pencil lines, they were easier to read, faster to write, and used less parchment (which was expensive). Created by Monks in medieval Christian Monasteries
What are Half Uncials' early versions of?
Half uncials are early innovations of what we call upper and lower case
Insular/Hiberno-Saxon Style
The letterforms in these manuscripts are Insular or Celtic style half-uncials and they had more rounded letterforms than their predecessors. The tasks of writing, illustrating and decorating manuscripts were shared between several monks. Scribes would write, while illuminators would add initials.The large "N" on this page is an extreme example of an INITIAL. (These initial letters that start a paragraph are now often called "drop caps") The Book of Durrow also features diminuendo (decreasing type size). What is the purpose of diminuendo?Introduces hierarchy and makes the page introduction more engaging. Previous to the monastic culture, hierarchy had not existed.
Gilded Letters
The Book of Kells is an interesting example of the use of gilded letters in both drop capitals and elsewhere.
Fore-edge painting
A rare form of illumination that is rarely seen on mediaeval books. Its were the edges of the page form a picture when the book is closed
Carolingian miniscule
Carolingian Miniscule introduced wordspacing, increased puncuation and the introduction of purpose based applications of lower-case and upper-case letters.
Gothic-style lettering
Scribes created a much more condensed style that was also easier to pen and used a quill nib cut at a 45 degree angle. It reduced both the time involved and the number of pages required to complete a book but was significantly harder to read than the Carolingian lettering it grew from.
Blackletter (Old English)
Gothic script lent itself to more calligraphic lettering and ornamentation which became known as Blackletter.
Movable Type
During the Song dynasty, a Chinese artisan and alchemist Bi Sheng made individual letters called blocks, or "types" from clay and glue.He baked them together until they hardened and attached them to a metal plate with wax. With this he was able to create text that could then be relief printed
Metal Movable Type
The oldest known surviving text ever printed with metal movable type is the Jikji, a collec-tion of Buddhist teachings.
Printing comes to Europe
Early printing in Europe was used to produce printed fabrics via carved wood block techniques.These same wood block printing was used to begin producing block printed playing cards.
Mass Printing and Ephemera
Unlike the purposes and logevity of Vellum manuscripts, wood block printing in Europe allowed for the growth of more mass market visual communication such as Broadsides.
A Pauper's Bible
Block books typically did not contain a lot of text. In examples such as the pauper's bible to the right, they serves as teaching tools for the less literate, in this case depicting condensed teachings from the bible written in local dialect and paired with illustration.
Movable type in Europe
The solution was found by Johann(es) Gutenberg.ca. 1440 in Mainz, Germany. While Gutenberg was not the only person working to develop movable type (there were others in the netherlands and france making similar efforts), Gutenberg was the first in Europe to succeed.
The Printing Press
Along with movable type, Gutenbergs other pivotal innovation was his printing press which mechanized the printing process.
Lecture 3: The Renaissance
it was an intellectual and artistic revolution. (This was the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.)
Punch Cutting
Punch cutters were the people who cut the metal prototype for each glyph. The original was used to make a mould to mass-produce the letters. Each copy from the mould then had to be carefully filed down by the punch cutter. The punch cutter might also be the type designer
Printing Spreads
In this spread the illustration continues from one page to the other to unite the pages. This is a technique some of you used intuitively in your yearbooks. It does a great job of drawing the reader into the content and keeping their attention. Small illustrations that appear alongside the text are called spot illustrations.The illustration on the right would be called a main illustration.
Typography Evolves
This is the first book printed in 'Roman' type. Most of the typefaces we use today can be described under the broad heading of Roman Type. This book is the collected works (known as an "Opera") of the third century Christian scholar Lucius Lactantius
Roman Type
Seeing the Italian manuscripts, Sweynheym and Pannartz abandoned Gothic scripts, in favour of the new 'Roman' letterforms. (So Roman is in fact an Italian derivation of Caroline or Caroligian script)Sweynheym and Pannartz developed a unique version of this Italian script and used their newly created typeface for this book
Nicolas Jenson
He worked as Master of the Mint in Paris.He was sent to Germany by the French King to learn about typography and printing and bring the expertise back to France. He never went back to France, instead he went to Italy.
Old Style Typefaces
Typefaces of this post-Gothic period are reffered to as Antique, Venetian or Old-Style typefaces.
Diagonal Stress
Moderate contrast between thick and thin
Bembo
Griffo's design survives today as the typeface Bembo. Bembo was rst used in Manutius's 1499 edition of a romantic novel called The Dream of Poliphilus or Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream.
Garamond
Another important French type designer, founder and punch cutter was Claude Garamond. He created the Garamond family of typefaces — one of the most famous and well used roman typefaces of all times. hese Old-Style typefaces excel at maintaining legibility when used for body copy in books. They are not ideally suited for online use, unless they have been specically redesigned for that purpose.
Copperplate Engraving and Intaglio
In the mid 1500's copperplate engravings began to appear. (Gutenberg may have been involved in the invention of copperplate engraving.) Intaglio is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image or text is incised into a surface and the sunken area holds the ink.
The Baroque Period
Like Renaissance type and architecture, baroque architecture looked back to Ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.This new take on architecture was designed to intimidate.
Gian Lorenzo Bernin
Though his work is of the baroque period Bernini is a quintessential example of the concept of the "renaissance man". An architect, designer, sculptor, and painter. Both of the pieces shown on the prior slides are Bernini works and much more can be found throughout rome.
William Caslon
A key inuencer in early English typography was William Caslon. He was an engraver of gunlocks and barrels, who went on to become a type founder.Caslon was not an innovator, he took what existed and made it better. Like Jenson, he is renowned for his type's evenness of colour, making it very comfortable to read."
The Romain du Roi
King Louis XIV commissioned four scientists to create a new typeface that would be known as The King's Roman (the Romain du Roi). It took them 10 years to complete the commission.
Whereas the previous roman typefaces we looked at developed naturally over time and were based on handwriting, The King's Roman used geometrically calculated forms. The letterforms were mapped on grids before being cut into metal.
Baskerville
English type styles in the 1700's were less decorated but were also becoming more geometric. They quietly evolve though thanks to the likes of John Baskerville. Baskerville designed a family of faces that combined some of the lightness of the transitional style while maintaining good legibility.this elegant transitional type style is still popular today.
Lecture 4: Revolution
Technological, scientific, ecomonic and social change often outstripped the capabilities of older organizations (churches, monarchies) to handle which led to periods of disruption and upheaval that removed church and fuedalism from its place of influence.Graphic communication may not have been the cause of these events but they did play their part.
Neoclassiscism
Tired of the excess and ornament of the Rococo, Neoclassicist printers, designers and artists took inspiration from the past and began working in a style that prioritized straight lines, recilinear forms, restrained ornamentation and elegant use of type and whitespace.
The frist designers to fall under the umbrella of -
The designers of the neoclassical movement were some of the rst instances of design and visual ideals that fall under the wide umbrella of the term Modern.
Giambattista Bodoni
Bodoni advocated extraordinary pages for exceptional readers. He achieved a purity of form with sparse pages, generous margins and line-spacing, and severe geometric types; this functional purity avoided any distractions from the act of reading
Modern Serif TypefacesBodoni and Didot
Bodoni
Didot
What are modern Serifs used for in the present?
Fashion and lifestyle magazines of the 50s and 60s embraced the modern typefaces for their elegance and refined forms. Harpers and Vogue continue to use them to this day.
Industrial Printing
Printers were becoming very busy as new products and oppor-tunities needed to be advertised. The printing industry transi-tioned from being a small group of dedicated people with great skill to a more commercial enterprise.Up until the late 1700's, printing had been an expensive and quality craft. As demand grew, cost and quality dropped. Hand-crafted, loving printed and bound books became a rarity.
Display Typefaces
Not to be used for paragraphs or small pieces of type.During this time fat-face type was developed. ese typefaces featured extreme contrasts between the thick and thin strokes of the serif typeface.
Slab Serifs
No contrast between thick and thin. A big, bold, thick geometric serif.
First Sans-Serifs
William Caslon the 4th. Descendant of the original Caslon designed the first sans serif but it was Vincent Figgins Seven Lines Grotesque that popularized sans-serif type in the 19th century.This is also the first instance of Grotesque being used as a descriptor for sans-serifs.
The start of Photography
1800's was the arrival of photography. This changed image making forever.French inventor, Nicéphore (Joseph) Niépce is usually credited as the true inventor of photography, using a technique he called heliogravure (sun engraving).
Daguerotype
ouis Daguerre creates the DaguerrotypeA few years later Niépce was dead and Daguerre created an image that must have seemed like magic. It was an image of a man and a shoe shine boy, taken on the streets of Paris
The Arts and Crafts Movement
Arts and Crafts championed a return to the care and attention to detail of the individual craftsperson.Like the neoclassicists, Arts and Crafts design looked to the past for some of its inspiration and blended those influences with clean, rectilinear lines and restrained ornamentation.
Gothic and Medieval InfluencesNature and pattern
Arts and Crafts took inspiration from the Gothic era of peaked and buttressed architecture and beautifully illuminated manuscripts.
Nature and Pattern
Arts and Crafts paired clean, restrained wood and metalwork with richly decorated textiles that evoked natural themes.
William Morris: The leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement
"To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce USE, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce MAKE, that is the other use of it"
The Century Guild
Two young men Arthur Mackmurdo and Selwyn Image—heard William Morris speak about the negative impact of industrialisation. It inspired them to form a new guild called The Century Guild.Together, Mackmurdo and Image set out to elevate design (what is often called the applied arts) to the same level as fine art.
Parisan Poster Boom
Poster printing changed during the 19th century. Colour lithography turned posters
from a tool to spread information
into a respected art form.
Colour
Lithography
Uses the principle that water and oil reject each other. Lithography is a simple way to produce prints using limestone, oil crayon, and an inking press.
Jules Cheret
King of the Poster"
Worked in Paris and London for 17 years
Created his own Lithographic Printing Firm
Henri Lautrec
He began sketching when he was 10 but fell in love with it after breaking both of his fremurs.
he put all of his pent up motion into his art creating art full of light and energy.
Art Nouveau
A decorative art style that was mostly used in architecture
Major themes were women, organic forms, and any unruly aspects of the natural world
Curves were used throughout all forms of art down in the style of the movement
Lecture 6: Louis Sullivan
And where new patterns, functions and roles of buildings and what goes on within them rose, something other than the conventions of the past was needed to guide how they were designed. This led to the idea of FFF or Form follows Function
To summarize Form follows Function..
a rationally designed structure may not necessarily be beautiful but no building can be beautiful that does not have a rationally designed structure
Frank Lloyd Wright
An assistant to Sullivan before starting his own firm. his work broke new ground in regards to design and form of houses that explored complex, interlocking rectilinear forms and simple materials contrasted against the natural landscape, airy, open plan interior spaces and curtain windows wrapping multiple sides of buildings and rooms.