Class 1.27

Key points from today's class:

• Victorian Period featured type drawn by hand and illustrative

• Books were obliterated

• Scrap – trade cards issued in sets that were meant to be collected by children, piece by piece

• Chromolithography – using multiple lithographic stones to print component colors
  

• Ottmar Mergenthler – July 3rd 1886- invented first machine to compose typographic layouts with a keyboard (linotype)
  

• In England, the Arts and Craft movement emerges and takes us out of Victorian age – redirected role that the art/designer would play

• Art Nouveau – the brief initial phase of the modern movement in art & design

• Brand ID’s are born – J. Walter Thompson Advertising 1895

• Guild – groups of artists/artisans would get together and focus on production of beautiful objects i.e. printing, furnishings, architecture

• Kelmscott Press – by Will Morris – establishes an idyllic workshop paradise

• Modern art poster emerges with figures reduced to symbolic form

• The Beggarstaffs – English, name derived from sack of corn
  • James Pryde and William Nicholson
  • Rejected floral style of period

• Final phases of Art Nouveau – Jugendstil (functionalism - GERMANY) and Sezessionstil (AUSTRIA) – inspires the utopian artistic visions in the early 20th century

Tonight's lecture focused on graphic design starting in the Victorian period. We discussed choromolithography which is like the ancestor of our modern 4 color printing process. We also got into the rise of editorial design, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Art Nouveou. The Art Nouveou period is the period in history where we see the birth of graphic design. We then got into Art Nouveou periods in Austria and Germany and talked about deisgn up until the early 1900's.

It was interesting to see where the brand identity and graphic design actually started and these were some of the things discussed in tonight's lecture. I also found it quite interesting to see how the whole idea of Greeting Cards and Santa Claus actually stemmed from. Turns out Santa Claus is really just a piece of ephemera. Who knew?

Class 1.20

Evolution of Written Communication - key points

• Earliest forms of writing were cave drawings

• Petroglyphs/ideographs carved into stone gave the idea of shapes representing concepts

• Earliest alphabets: Egyptians, Sumerians, Minoans

• Sumerian people arrive in Mesopotamia in 3500 B.C. (words and pics put together)

• Hieroglyphics = sacred carving

• Asian contribution of printing, paper, and typography (esp. Chinese)
o First relief printing
o System for movable type
o Invention of paper in 105 AD

• Chinese invented printing

• Greeks brought geometric structure and order to the cockeyed Phoenician characters

• Latin alphabet came to Romans from Greece by way of ancient Etruscans

• Insular script – uncial and half-uncial brought to Ireland by missionaries then subtley redesigned (did not occur any place else!)

• Knowledge production (the creation and consensual standardization of human thought) becomes the main focus of printing books, instead of religious reasons

The main idea of tonight's lecture was the evolution of typography starting from the very beginning. I learned about how serifs were first introduced and then when they were taken away by Caslon. The main categories of type that we discussed were old style roman, italic/cursive, transitional, modern, slab serif, and sans serif.

Today's class was the first real lecture we have had this semester so it was good to get a feel for what the pace is like in the lecture. I recall learning about certain aspects of the history of type from last semester's typography class, though tonight we got into a lot more detail about the whole evolution of typography in general.