Final graphic design history book

History of Graphic Design

by David Barrentine

Outline A The Birth of all Civilization N

obody knows the true origins of the human race as a species. It is best speculated through scientific gatherings of excavated D.N.A. that the best answer is evolution. What caused the initial onset of evolution? There are several contributing factors, but one of the most important developments, if not the most important, was the ability to communicate ideas from one being to another, otherwise known as speech and its visual counterpart, writing. The earliest examples of people leaving messages are purely representational and are left in the caves like Lascaux dating back to 15,000 – 10,000 B.C.E. It is thought that these images may be imbued with magical meaning imparted from shamanistic rituals such as worship to herds of beasts that people were following in hopes that they would be able to quell these animals and attain a source of sustenance.

There is no way to be certain if this is the true objective of these images, all that can be certain is that the people that left these images were a highly nomadic society that were inclined to follow the migratory patterns of these plains beasts in order to gain sustenance. At some point, these migratory patterns brought these ancient people between the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, otherwise known as the Fertile Crescent. This geographical location allowed for new forms of food to be produced in a more agricultural way, harvesting wild grains to cultivate a more readily available diet. These new fields needed to be tended to, which meant following herds became less of an option. The nomadic way of life gave way to a more stationary position of life allowing for the beginning of civilization to finally start developing.

In the beginning it was not massive groups of people settling but rather small bands of people sizing from 15-25 people. These small groups cultivated certain things which others did not and because of such trade routes were set up between these groups which set up an ancient economy. As the growth of these groups grew, so did the transactions between them. At some point there was a need to keep records regarding trade of goods which led to one of the first written scripts known to the world. The earliest written records come from the city of Uruk, which was written on clay that was then baked in the sun.

Eventually, through innovation of the writing implement and abstraction of this writing system, these pictographs became an abstracted sign writing known as Cuneiform Script.

As time went on, the need for this Cuneiform Script to represent more ideas became a necessity. “Adverbs, prepositions, and personal names often could not be adapted to pictographic representation.”1. The Rebus Principle started to weave its way into the Cuneiform Script transforming pictures and pictographs into representative words and syllables with similar sounds. The more that cuneiform was used, the more refined it became to the point that it helped to structure society setting laws in place and establishing a caste system where those that could read and write were destined for more important jobs. It makes sense that as this ancient culture became larger, there was a need to claim ownership for jobs done or for property such as cattle. “Mesopotamian cylinder seals provided

Cuneiform Tablet

Egyptian Papyrus and Script

Greek alphabets

Outline A a forgery-proof method for sealing documents and proving their authenticity.”2.

These became a very early form of a trademark designating ownership. Because of designating work and property with these visual symbols and the trade routes that had been set up and had spread to farther cultures, the cuneiform was spread throughout the then known world and was adopted by the Greeks while the idea of cylinder seals was taken as far west as Egyptian culture.

While the Egyptians were developing, the tools in which they used to write did as well. The most important change in their visual culture came with the development of papyrus created from by interweaving strands of the Cyperus papyrus plant into a scroll. The implement used for writing were horsehair brushes of different sizes and dried ocher cakes moistened to create the pigment used. The Greeks gave the alphabet itself an overhaul “…vastly improve[ing] the alphabet’s beauty and utility after adopting it.”3. It is believed that the Phoenicians brought their language to Greece around 1000 B.C.E. and, after slight alterations and introductions of new letters, it was adopted by Athens as the official language around 400 B.C.E. The Greek empire grew from the leadership of Alexandre the Great and with his death in 323 B.C.E. his kingdom was divided into separate Hellenistic kingdoms. This allowed regional growth of the Greek language allowing it to father several different languages including the Eutruscan, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets.

The biggest and most well-known civilization in history, Rome, started to take control of the world engulfing everything that was in its way warping the cultures that were assimilated to create a broader image of Roman cultural propaganda. It was with the sacking of the Eutruscan culture that Rome took its new alphabet repurposing it to suit the needs of the Romans. The Romans felt a pride for their culture and felt a need to create permanence with their writing creating the Capitalis Monumentalis which adorned their huge monuments. These writings told of victories of generals on the battlefield and the greatness of the Roman Empire. There were two separate writing styles that existed at the same time that was used for a more formal and a more vulgar uses.

The Capitalis Quadrata was the former used for important documents while the Capitalis Rustica was a quicker written form that was condensed for better information transference and to save time. There were more innovations to writing in this time period as well. The complexity of the scroll was cumbersome because the papyrus could not be folded and it took time to unroll and reroll texts in an attempt to gather information. The parchment, a writing material created from the skins of animals, was introduced to Roman society which led to the creation and spread of the Codex.

Etruscan alphabets

Roman alphabet (Latin)

Outline A The Asian Contribution T

he rise of a writing system in Western culture is the most important contribution to history without equal, but it was not the first time that a writing system had been put together or applied to parchment. Asia holds this claim as it seemed to be building a civilization in complete isolation from every other culture amassing in the Western sphere as early as 2,000 B.C.E. “The Chinese writing system is a purely visual language.”4 Unlike the alphabet that we know of that was developed around Ideographs and phonetic loans, the Chinese created a writing system where each character represented a whole idea. With over 44,000 different characters representing ideas, it was a sign of supreme mastery and wisdom is a scribe was able to memorize every single logogram. It is thought that the first time that the Chinese language was written was as far back as 1800 B.C.E. by Tsang Chieh who created it from observation and contemplation of the claw marks left by animals in the dirt. This earliest known Chinese written language is known as chiaku-wen, also called “bone and shell”, and was used between the times of 1800-1200 B.C.E. It was known as such because of the application to shells and bones. It was thought that there was a divine nature to words and if burned on these objects they would be able to tell the future or contact ancestors for guidance. The material used for inscribing changed from bones and shells to bronze after 1200 B.C.E. and began what is referred to as chin-wen, or “bronze” script. Chinese calligraphy was applied to several different metal surfaces in this time period consisting of food and water vessels, musical instruments, weapons, and more. Writing sub-styles started to develop in different regions until all calligraphy was unified under the rule of emperor Shih Huang Ti (c. 259-210 B.C.E.). The job of creating this new unified script was delegated to Prime minister Li Ssu which ushered in the third phase of calligraphic evolution called Hsiao chuan, or the “small seal” style.

Initially, all that was written was done upon bamboo shafts that were cut and stitched together, but this was not a reasonable means of containing information as bamboo could be brittle and was hard to transport because it took up so much space. The need to make records permanent brought about etching stone tablets to contain information but this brought with it the problem of weight and storage issues. It was with the invention of paper by the high governmental official Ts’ai Lun around 105 C.E. that these problems were rectified. Though it is not completely known if Ts’ai Lun was the actually creator or only had a hand in the creation, his process for making paper was not changed until the nineteenth century when England managed to mechanize paper production.

Asian Woodblock Print

Outline A

Calligraphy was used throughout China’s history but the invention of printing, which would not be around in Europe until the 1400’s, was invented and in use as early as the third century, with the first form taking a relief printing technique. The initial use for this was with seals where a block with an inscription would be inked using cinnabar and stamped upon a silk parchment which laid the groundwork for the basic woodblock technique. Another idea on the beginnings of this come from the idea of doing rubbings against stone surfaces. Thought the actual facts about who invented relief printing still remain a mystery. By the tenth century books were being stitched together and codex style books were starting to be put together. Around 1045 C.E. movable type was added to the mix of Chinese innovation but with the large number of different characters, it was not a very viable option as it was hard to keep up with pieces or find them when they were needed for use. A sort of lazy Susan was created to make type more accessible but still it was more cumbersome than helpful.

Asian typsetting

Outline A Illuminated Manuscripts D

uring the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, reading was not a part of life for the majority of the populace as one book could cost as much as an entire farm. Reasons for the expense were because of the time and cost of materials used to create these codices. It would take hours to prepare the materials and “…a large book might require the skins of three hundred sheep.”5 Books at this time were primarily commissioned by the wealthy as more of a status symbol than they were for educational purposes. Commissions were brought to monastic scriptorium, writing room, where the scrittori, lead “art director”, would lead the copisti, letterer, and the illuminator, illustrator, to create the desired illuminated manuscript to completion. The term “illuminated manuscript” comes from witnessing the gold leaf that was applied to the pages as the shimmer gave each page an illuminated feel. Because of the large amounts of commissions being brought to these monks, monasteries were becoming the cultural and intellectual centers of the Western world during this time period.

Most of the books that were produced were religious and were made small enough to allow to fit in saddlebags giving the religious text the ability to spread as monks travelled but it also caused ideas of page layouts, graphic forms, illustration and lettering styles, and techniques to spread as well, though some areas were hard to reach due to geographical reasons which caused regional isolation. This isolation allowed for a development of supplanted materials to take on a characteristic wholly unique to the region.

The Classical Style

Illuminated manuscripts are not an Abrahamic invention. Pagans created this kind of text when the Roman Empire was still in its heyday. The Greek library at Alexandria housed several scrolls and manuscripts until the fire that inevitably led to the destruction of most of these texts. One of the oldest surviving texts in this style is the Vatican Vergil, late 4th century, which contains the Aeneid and depictions of Laocoön and his sons being attacked and killed by a giant snake.

The method used to put this together, illustrations reminiscent of Roman paintings and the rustic capitals, is now defined as the classical style. The writing style during this time period took a step towards lowercase lettering as well. Known as semiuncial or half-uncial, this form of writing was created to speed up writing and created the first true ascenders and decenders.

The Celtic Style

It was not until the early 5th century that Saint Patrick and other missionaries brought Christianity to the Celts in Ireland. The introduction of this new religion created a unique hybrid in religious design that became known as the Celtic design. Celtic design consisted of “…geometric linear patterns…thick visual textures, and bright, pure colors…used in close juxtaposition.”6 and is the most intricate of the design patterns from this time period. Celtic ornament was primarily used as either frames for full page illustration, opening pages of gospel, or as full pages of ornament also referred to as “carpet pages” for the geometric

The Vatican Vergil 5th cent.

Chi-Rho Page from the Book of Kells 794-806

Outline A intricacy was reminiscent of Persian rugs. The best known examples of Celtic design come from the Lindisfarne Gospels, 698 C.E., and the Book of Kells, 800 C.E. With the amount of intricacy taking over the page there was a need to make sure that all information was represented on pages so there was a condensation of graphic information with decreasing scale which is referred to as diminuendo.

The writing style took on a new style when the half-uncial was introduced to Ireland. It became redesigned into the scriptura scottica or insular script. This was an important advance in script and it became the national letterform of Ireland and is still used for important writings to this day.

The Carolingian Style

As of the Christmas day in the year 800, Europe was unified under the rule of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire. As ruler, Charlemagne sought to foster a revival of learning by bringing the an English scholar, Alcuin of York, to his palace to help establish a school. While the Celtic style had been flourishing to this point, most other places had been creating manuscripts by undisciplined hands that were almost impossible to read. Charlemagne mandated a reform by royal edict in 789 C.E. which was an attempt to regulate a standardization of page layout, writing style, decoration, and reform alphabetic styling. It was the latter of these that actually succeeded creating the Caroline minuscule which is the forerunner of the modern day lowercase alphabet. There were many other innovations brought about because of the reform including the revision of sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation, numbers of ligatures were reduced, and characters were also set apart instead of being combined. The Coronation Gospels, late 8th century, display a mix of ancient styles including Roman monumental capitals, though rustic capitals are also included, and the text seems to be based on the insular script of Ireland.

The Spanish Pictorial Expressionism

One of the biggest regional stylistic differences comes from Spain. In 711 C.E Moorish invaders took over Spain bring with them “…Islamic design motifs with Christian traditions to create unique manuscript designs.”7 There was no hint of atmosphere or illusion of space, only an intensely colored, 2-dimensional space. The geographical location of Spain kept other people from reaching it keeping the ideas of other regions from spreading through the land at this time. It was not until the balance of power was lifted from the Moors and communications were improved that Carolingian influences reached the region and began to intermingle with the strong Islamic manuscripts that had previously been created.

Romanesque and Gothic Manuscripts

The Romanesque period, 1000-1150, and the Gothic period, 1150 until the beginnings of the Renaissance, were the first time that communications between regions allowed for the potential of a universal design structure. This style, just as the Spanish style, was less interested in the depiction of a 3-dimentional space and would put flattened images on gold leaf or textured backgrounds. With the rise of universities in the 1200’s, book production soared

Coronation Gospels opening page 800 C.E.

The Douce Apocalypse 1265 C.E.

Ormesby Psalter 1300’s C.E.

Outline A as there was a greater need for education. The writing styles started to change again to a more Gothic lettering known as textura which had a thickness to it that started to take up pages. In order to combat this, letters and the spaces between them were condensed to save space as parchment was still an expensive material to create for these codices. Printing had come to Europe at this time and woodblock printing is clearly used in the Douce Apocalypse, 1265 C.E., creating a “…new breed of picture book…”8 The origin of this style and layout is hard to nail down exactly which gives authority to the idea of an International Gothic Style which is “…characterized by elongated figures that rise upward in a vertical movement, often wearing elegant, fashionable costumes or flowing robes.”9

Judaic and Islamic Manuscripts

Because of constant political and religious turmoil and persecution, Jews were scattered throughout the countryside and because of such, manuscripts and documents from this time period are hard to find. Those that have been found tend to focus on the tribulations of the Jews, specifically the Exodus, and are known as Haggadot. The most famous is the Washington Haggadah. Islamic manuscripts had a bigger issue because their religion embraced the aniconism, religious opposition of representation of living things, for fear that they could become icons and worshipped. In the Safavid dynasty, 1502-1736 C.E., the finest Islamic texts were created. Though most Islamic texts refused to add anything more than ornamentation, there were some schools in Persia, now Iran, that allowed for depictions in their texts which were primarily painted illustrations.

Late Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

“The Gothic tendency toward abstraction and stylized presentation was reversed as they sought a convincing realism. Atmospheric perspective was used to push planes and volumes back in deep space, and a consistent effort toward achieving linear perspective was made.”10 This was brought on by a rebirth or Renaissance of human thought and knowledge. The mathematical principals of space had been reintroduced into art thanks to the help of people like Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. The idea of Humanism was spreading and with this a focus on bettering human life through education came with it. Though this did not replace the focus on the importance of religion, which caused some of the more popular books to be religious in subject. The most popular at this time was the Book of Hours which contained the texts for each hour of the day, prayers, and calendars with special events. The most famous of these Book of Hours was commissioned by Jean, duc de Berry and created by the Limbourg brothers, 1413-1416. This series was never completed though and it is assumed the cause to be a wave of plague sweeping across Europe at the time killing the brothers and the commissioner by 1416.

Washington Haggadah 1478 C.E.

Book of Hours 1413-16 C.E. Limbourge Brothers

Outline B Printing Comes to Europe “T

he invention of typography ranks near the creation of writing as one of the most important advances in civilization.”11 With the rising interest in schooling and education the demand for books was growing to a point that monasteries were having a hard time keeping up with the demand. It was truly basic supply and demand principles at play, but with the cost of parchment still being so high, it was not an economically sound way of producing codices. By this point in time paper production had made its trip across Asia and Northern Africa and finally arrived in Europe which quickly grew in popularity as shops were set up in Italy and France. As with Asian printing, the first printing in Europe was also woodblock printing with playing cards being some of the earliest forms of this kind of technique. These were the very first pieces to move into the sphere of the illiterate public making the games of kings also the games of peasants. The woodblock printing method moved on to a more communicative area creating what would evolve into a block book format with the earliest dated pieces coming from the Netherlands around 1460. Though it was never reasonable for the Chinese to produce independent, movable, reusable type because of their massive character library, it only made sense for Europeans with their alphabet of only a couple of dozen letters to be interested in this process. Though people such as Procopius Waldfoghel and Laurens Janszoon Coster were involved in figuring out this process, Johann Gensfleisch sum Gutenberg is credited with creating the means necessary to produce it. Due mostly in part to the fact that Gutenberg was a goldsmith, he managed to procure all the skills required to create metal type. Around 1450 Gutenberg had managed to gain all the material to create his font which he then applied to the mechanics of the wine and cheese presses at the time, creating the first printing press. His first work that he set out to produce was his 42 line bible, the Gutenberg Bible, which took roughly a year to complete. Stylistically, the type created to be used resembled the calligraphic styles at the time rivaling the skill and technique of the best calligraphers. The press that Gutenberg put together was used for hundreds of years with only minor changes until the Industrial Revolution. This increase of printed material brought an interest back to ancient texts from the Roman and Greek world becoming a “…catalyst for the creation of the modern world.”12 Though Gutenberg is accredited with typography, it is believed that he had his hand in other innovative functions of presswork at the time including copperplate engraving. Made by scratching a design into a surface, covering with ink, then wiping the surface clean, this could have changed ornamentation the same way the press did type. There is no definitive proof that Gutenberg was trying to corner the market in this means as well, though some of the people that worked with the forty-two line bible also created these engravings and there are several design motifs that relate to each other.

Playing Card 1400’s Woodblock Print

Ars Moriendi 1466

Letters created for Printing mid 1400’s

Outline B The German Illustrated Book P

rinting was the way of the future, but not everybody was incredibly willing to jump on board with the changes being made. Many contended that the new books were vulgar and could not compare to the craft of handmade codices.

Some monasteries even tried to counteract the growth of this trend stating that it was endangering the livelihood of those being paid to created manuscripts by hand, but with all the friction against it, by 1480 twenty-three northern European towns had set up print shops and started production. The production had lent its hand to drastically reducing the illiterate population and also was key in sparking several “…social, economic, and religious upheavals…”13 in the 14001500’s. Printing also helped to unify languages over the many regions and the press itself set into motion the gears that would lead Europe and the rest of the world into the Industrial Revolution of the 1800’s. Also, the various sub-denominations of religion is owed in part to the large scale proliferation of the bible allowing more people to read and interpret the word for themselves.

Several changes came upon the heels of Gutenberg’s invention on the massive scale to the miniscule.

Because of the enormous cost of such a project, Nuremberg, the town the first printer was set up in, was a viable choice. Anton Koberger, a talented printer, was chosen to lead the team of a hundred staffmen as it first set out.

During his work at this time, Koberger created three masterpieces: Schatzbehalter (1491), Liber Chronicarum (1493), and the illustrations of Michael Wolgemuth published in later versions of the Nuremberg Chronicles. Koberger worked for several years in this industry eventually recruiting his godson Albrecht Dürer into the field as an illustrator. Dürer’s work on The Apocalypse in 1498, published in both Latin and German, was a success and it showcased Dürer’s 15 large woodcut prints on opposite pages of Koberger’s print. By the age of twenty-seven, Dürer had already achieved renown for his work in the field and his broadside print of the Rhinoceros was said to have sold out eight times. Dürer’s ability to capture such expressionism in his prints made him famous, but, after his trips to Italy, he also became the bridge of two separate Renaissance styles, the Northern and Italian Renaissance. He came back with his own opinions of what made art great and sought to raise German artists to the pedestal of the Italians as he saw Germans producing inferior quality work. He tried correcting this problem with his publication Underweisung die Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler) in 1525. This book also helped to set measurements and instructions on producing proportioned Roman capitals and helped contribute to the evolution of alphabet design. Germans are a stubborn and proud people and did not want to move away from the design of textura and instead built upon their type with this foundation. Fraktur, designed by Vincenz Rockner, is one of these designs taking the Gothic style and replacing some of the rigid lines with flowing strokes in hopes to further the design quality and create a more in-depth effort at duplicating the gestural feel of a handwritten text. Text was not the only innovation during this period as broadsides slowly evolved into newspapers.

German printers spread out among other regions in Europe bringing the craft

Ex Libris 1450’s Johannes Knabensberg

Peregrinationes in Montem Syon 1486 Erhard Reuwich

Rhinoceros 1515 Albrecht Durer

Outline B with them. Cardinal Turrecremata invited Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz to Subiaco. They then proceeded to create a Roman-style type based on the letter forms that were currently being used in Italy. William Caxton left his home town to practice his craft and went on to print the first English language book in 1475 and open the first English print shop in Westminster. Ulrich Gering and Martin Kranz left for France to set up a shop in Sorbonne in 1470. Three printers came to Spain in 1473 worked the Spanish design patterns into their works there as well.

Broadside 1551 Lucas Cranach the Younger

Printer’s Trademark 1477 William Caxton

Outline B Renaissance Graphic Design The rebirth in the spirit of art and philosophy enveloped the entire

culture during the 1400’s. Though the majority of Renaissance innovation took place in the epicenter of Florence, the Medici family, who controlled most of the power in the region of Italy, disliked the word press causing the typographic book designs at the time to take place in Venice instead. Nicolas Jenson was sent

by King Charles VII to learn printing in this region and bring it back to France but Jenson decided to stay in the region instead of returning to France. Jenson actually set up Venice’s second press. During this time period as Jenson worked at this press, he created several new type designs which had a lasting influence due to their extreme legibility. With the designs causing such a high interest as Jenson’s books were being published, he, as with many print shops at the time, created a trademark to help show who created the books. Though the book as we know it was not yet here and several new innovations of layout still needed to be created, there were those that were working on these designs at this time period.

Erhard Ratdolt was busy trying to create new layouts and innovations during this time. Creating things like the first title page and new techniques using woodcut borders and initials were used as design elements. There were several subjects that permeated the texts because of outside influences. One of these was a focus on death as the Plague spread through the continent. Last Rights were beign laid out in such publications as the Ars Moriendi. Other big subjects consisted of ancient Greek and Roman writings that were being published at the time because of these texts’ focus on philosophy that mixed with the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. With the interest in the latter, Aldus Manutius created his own press, the Aldine Press, which he hoped to use to print and spread these texts. Manutius pulled in several people to help him with his work, one of which being Francesco da Bologna, surnamed Griffo. Griffo’s most famous typeface created at this time is still used today, a typeface created with the help of Pietro Bembo known by the same name, created in 1495. While Griffo was creating this font, he studied true Roman typefaces in hopes to replicate and even improve upon those fonts. An innovation to come out of Manutius’s workshop included the first ever italic.

The growth in literacy spurred a rise in the need of writing instructors. These instructors needed felt the need to lay out the instructions by which type was created one of these was Lodovico Arrighi when he published his La Operina da Imparare di Scrivere Littera Cancellaresca (The First Writing Manual of the Chancery Hand) in 1522. This publication helped to teach how to use type correctly but more importantly it “…sounded the death knell for the scriptorium as an exclusive domain for the few who could write;…”14. The Italians were not the only ones that were looking for these kinds of innovations and with the invasion of the French in 1494. This cultural mingling would start what would become known as “the Golden Age of French Typography”. Two of the most celebrated artists from this period, Geoffery Tory and Claude Garamond, were primed to create visual forms that would remain part of print’s most used typefaces for over 200 years. Because of their creativity and print vitality, King Francis I honored Tory by bestowing on him the title of imrimeur du roi (printer of the king) in 1530. Tory’s most influential and important work,

Society of Venetian Printers Trademark 1481 Nicolas Jenson

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 1499 Aldus Manutius

Opera 1501 Aldus Manutius

Outline B Champ Fleury, consisted of three books which covered things such as the history of Roman letters and their proportions, trying to order the French tongue with fixed rules, and instructions of geometric construction of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet. Garamond’s contributions include being the first punch cutter to work independently of a printing firm and his invention of the self-titled typeface Garamond which would replace the Gothic styles in cases throughout the European world, except for Germany. Because of a conflict between French troops and a reformed church congregation ending in a massacre in 1562, religious wars sprung up throughout the region effectively bringing a halt to the Golden Age of French Typography. During the sixteenth century there was another rush to publish works, this time more contemporary, with the growing fame of William Shakespeare and the poes and plays of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Printing finally came to the American colonies with the help of Stephen Daye and by 1775 there were about fifty printers in the thirteen colonies which helped to fuel the revolution.

Pat Casse Emblem 1524 Geoffroy Tory

Illustrissimae Galiaru Reginae Helianorae 1531 Robert Estienne

De Humani Corporis Fabrica 1543 Johann Oporinus

Outline B Typographic Genius A

fter several decades of stagnation with graphic design in the French region, the flames of creation started to lick again. With the interest taken by King Louis XIV in printing, he sought to create a new typeface, one that could be built upon “scientific” measures and made specifically for the Imprimerie Royale.

Headed by Nicolas Jaugeon, this new type, Romain du Roi (the King is Roman), was produced which was categorized as a transitional Roman. This typeface would also soon replace the calligrapher with the engineer as the typographic influence. The art world was changing at this time again and the years between 1720-1770 would come to be known as Rococo. The artwork had a tendency to reflect the decadent lifestyles of the upper class. Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune was the strongest graphic designer at the time standardizing type with the creation of the pouce, which was a French measurement slightly longer than an inch. Le Jeune’s variety of weightshelped to establish the idea of the “type family” and he worked on a series of four books which were titled the Manuel Typographique, though this series was never completed as he died before the work was finished.

England had looked to the Continent for typography and design since things like civil war, religious persecution, harsh censorship, and government control of printing had created a climate that was not conducive to graphic innovation. Type designs continued to be imported until the intervention of William Caslon. Though Caslon initially was not involved in the type world, upon the insistence of a friend he tried his hand at it and was accepted with much success. His typeface, Caslon, became incredibly popular and was used for several important documents such as the Declaration of Independence. Other artists helped to continue the tradition of using Old Style roman typographic design. One of the most influential of this mind of thought was John Baskerville. Baskerville had a hand in all of the aspects of his printing. He was a perfectionist that constantly recast his type and worked from the production of the paper to the ink that would be used for the printing. Though his work was not quite as well received as that of Caslon, it continues to be used with his name attached to it today. Another great leap in style came from the works of Bodoni who led the charge against the outmoded rococo style. He sought to push the evolution of typefaces and page layout at this time. “Critics hailed Bodoni’s volumes, including Veril’s Opera as the typographicexpression of neoclassicism and a return to “antique virtue.””15 Pierre Didot took on an important role as well by pushing the measurements set forth by le Jeune to create the measurement system still used today.

Caslon Roman and Italic 1734 William Caslon

Songs of Innocence 1789 William

Outline C The Industrial Revolution T

he brink of change was here starting in England around 1760. There was a mass change in the world with the invention of the steam powered engine which led to things such as the steam powered train and several other innovations that allowed for an easier life. This also came with a shift in power from the landowner to the manufacturer. People left the farms and rural communities moving to cities and taking jobs in factories in hopes of a better life.

This was the dawn of more typographic innovations both in the typefaces themselves and the machines that would be invented to create them. At some point this growth would cause the birth of mass communication. At the start of this, people started creating typefaces that helped to represent the subject matter they were trying to express. There were different varieties including fat face, Egyptian, Tuscan, and many others. Many of these innovations were brought on by Robert Thorne and Vincent Figgins starting around 1803. The biggest innovation in type during this time period was the sans-serif type, created

by William Caslon IV. It debuted in 1816 buried in the back of a font styling book. This sans-serif had an interest that took hold in Germany and by 1830 Schelter and Giesecke foundry issued the first sans-serif fonts with a lowercase alphabet. Most punchcutters worked in tin and other malleably metals that would hold up to the stress of multiple printing but because of the different printers trying to figure out every single permutation of type there was, it was a costly process. Thanks to the invention of a lateral router in 1827 by Darius Wells wood type had now become a more viable option in print giving a more desirable cost and having a significant impact on poster and broadsheet design. This also led to the raising of poster houses specializing in letter press display material as the demand for public posters was increasing. With all the information that was needed to be placed on the print for the design, everything had to become placed a lot tighter. This led to the press enforcing a horizontal and vertical stress on the design which became the basic organizing principle of the time. As processes changed and better forms of print were invented during this time period, as was want to do in the revolution, the poster houses eventually had to close there doors.

Gutenberg’s press had not been changed much for several hundred years but with the blossoming interest in machine development of this time period, it was inevitable that the printing machine would undergo changes as well. The first change being by Lord Stanhope creating a press out of all cast iron parts paled in comparison to the plans drawn up by Friedrich Koenig in 1807 for a steam powered printing press. The Koenig press managed to produce 400 sheets per hour, a marvelous feat at this time almost doubling the output of Stanhope’s press. On the heels of Koenig’s success, John Walter II commissioned him to take it further by commissioning a double-cylinder steam-powered press that put out 1,100 impressions an hour. In 1815 William Cowper of Times used curved stereotyped plates wrapped around a cyliunder to achieve a 2,400 impression output and Times once again made a commission which included a four-cylinder steam-powered press with an output of 4,000 impression an hour on both sides.

With the innovations happening in the world of print, the world of paper was

Steam Powered Train 1780

Fat Face 1821 Robert Thorne

Egyptian 1845 Robert Besley

Antique 1815 Vincent Figgins

Outline C trying to keep up as Nicolas-Louis Robert developed a prototype for a paper-making machine in 1798 which would not be patented until 1801 due to political turmoil in France.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, presses could produce up to 25,000 prints per hour. The only thing that was holding back a really quick production at this point was the fact that every letter still had to be placed by hand. Thanks to the tinkering of Ottmar Mergenthaler this would be overcome by 1886. Ottmar debuted a machine to Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the Tribune who exclaimed upon seeing the machine in work, “Ottmar, you’ve don’t it! A line o’ type!” and the name stuck. Ottmar’s invention became known as the Linotype and could essentially do the jobs of several highly skilled hand-typesetters. The ramifications of this were that thousands of hand-typesetters were put out of jobs and they revolted with strikes and violence though they were still replaced.

The speed and efficiency of producing type allowed for a global spread of type leading everybody to the age of mass communication.

The inventions did not stop with just type and print. An ability to capture a moment in time was being overtaken by Joseph Niepce in France during the early 1800’s. Experimenting with light sensitive material, Niepce took the very first photograph of a French landscape in 1826. Because of his interest in what was transpiring with Niepce’s experiments, Louis Jacques Daguerre contacted him hoping to help in the development of the experiments as he had been working on similar projects. Niepce agreed though died of a stroke by 1833 and Daguerre pushed these works on his own presenting a perfected process to the French Academy of Sciences in 1839 which he called daguerreotype prints. The process was not quite all the way there as the images were blurry and captured in reverse. Many people continued this work including William Henry Fox Talbot who created both photograms and calotypes. It was Talbot that set photography on the road to becoming what it is today when he figured out the problem of making the image appear correctly. By 1888 George Eastman managed to come up with the technology to put cameras into the hands of the public and the Kodak camera was born.

As this technology continued to become perfected and accessible, it moved into the realm of the print world. In 1871 John Calvin Moss created a photoengraving method that would translate line artwork into the metal letterpress plates. This cut the cost and time required to produce printing blocks and “…created a greater fidelity to the original.”16 There were those that still did wood cuts and it was preferred that they did their cuts based off a photograph.

It was thought that photographs themselves would be able to be printed as well instead of having to find different means in order to do it. Talbot once again went to work tweaking the technique using gauze to create differences in tones by breaking the image into dots to give the impression of different tones in the printed final image. The first photograph with a full tonal range was printed in the New York Daily Graphic on March 4, 1880 changing the print game. One more big breakthrough came with tampering with photography when trying to win a $25,000 bet. Eadweard Muybridge was asked to prove that a galloping horse took all four feet off the ground and he did so by stringing up several different cameras to go off when a horse ran past proving that the horse did in

3-D type 1815 Vincent Figgins

Tuscan 1815 Robert Besley

Reversed Egyptian 1828 William Thorowgood

Sans-serif 1816 William Caslon IV

Outline C fact lift all four legs. These multiple images being viewed sequentially as light passed through them led to the first moving images.

Through the years of Victoria’s reign, A.W.N. Pugin introduced a new design philosophy that defined design as “…a moral act that achieved the status of art through the designer’s ideals and attitudes.”17 Pugin was under the idea that a civilization’s integrity and character were linked to the design that was being produced contemporarily throughout the region. In 1849 Prince Albert conceived the idea to bring in artists from all industrial nations and have them display their art to the masses. This exhibition became known as the Great Exhibition of 1851 and had several thousand exhibitors and participants that ranged into the millions. By 1850 the word Victorian was used throughout to describe the artwork at the time and the graphic design both captured and conveyed the values of the era.

The only thing during this time period that combated the popularity of the printed photograph was chromolithography. Created from the same technique as lithography from the idea that oil and water do not mix, chromolithography had one thing going for it that the photograph did not. It was able to print in color. The productions coming from this time period ranged in color and the more it had the better. It held true to the Victorian ideas of nostalgia and the subject matter including children and various other things. The images in most instances did not have any real organization to the display and continued to be thrown at the viewer in an attempt to grab their attention. With everything that was being introduced, the pictorial magazine in 1850 brought a new kind of information distribution. First put out by Harper and Brothers, the book layout contained 144 pages and became Harper’s new Monthly Magazine with serialized English fiction and numerous woodcut illustrations.

Steam Powered Press 1814 Friedrich Koenig

Lynotype Machine 1825 Ottmar Mergenthaler

First Photograph 1826 Joseph Niepce

The Great Exhibition 1851

Outline C Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement flourished in England during the last

decades of the nineteenth century. This movement was a way to transact the industry that had been taking over the rest of the world. It seemed to the people in this movement that the artist and the society were starting to develop a dichotomy or disconnect. There was no more pride being taken in art and the object of mass production started to take on a cheap and sloppy design to it. It was a means to counteract the social, moral, and artistic confusion of the Industrial Revolution. William Morris was the leader of this movement. Morris’s main concern for this movement was that it would call for “…a fitness of purpose, truth to the nature of materials and methods of production, and individual expression by both designer and worker.”18 There was an idea about art at this time period being heralded by John Ruskin that beautiful things were valuable and useful precisely because they were beautiful. Morris was one to jump around in his ideas and what he was working on at the time, a product of the wealth that his family already had. Upon buying a house, Morris was trying to furnish the interior and found that he had a disdain for the design of the Victorian product. He designed the furniture himself over the next few years and decided that he would open an art-decorating firm because of the experience he had gained executing his own designs for his house. Morris tried to implement Ruskin’s ideas and reunite the artist with the craft within his firm.

The idea of having pride in the everyday caused several people to stop and look back at the printing world as well. Many people wanted to take the philosophy of the artist getting back into touch with the product and apply it to the entire printing process. This became known as the Private Press Movement and was initiated when Arthur H. Mackmurdo met with William Morris. This meeting inspired Mackmurdo to return to England and Open the Century Guild in 1882. The group of young workers got together to work on a publication featuring the original work of the guild members called The Century Guild Hobby Horse which began its run in 1884. Because of the interest in handmade paper, careful layout and typesetting, and intricate woodblock illustrations, Hobby Horse became a harbinger of the growing Arts and Crafts interest inspiring several others to buy into the idea of owning their own print shop and creating what they thought were necessary publication.

Charles R. Ashbee was another to believe in the ideas that were coming from this movement, but also sought to return to the experience of the apprenticeship as he thought the subdivision of labor had caused work to suffer. He opened both a school and a guild of Handicraft, though the school was closed. The Guild of Handicraft flourished. Upon the death of Morris, Ashbee sought to purchase the Kelmscott Press, Morris’s own press, and relocate it to Essex House in London. Monetary issues bugged Ashbee’s group and by 1907 the guild had to file for voluntary bankruptcy.

The effects of Morris echoed throughout the works of the 19th and early 20th century typography and book designs. His ideas touched on areas around the world including in the Netherlands. Sjoerd H. De Roos was a leading contributor to the typographic design of this region when it occurred

Cleveland Hendricks Campaigne Poster 1884 Frizzall

Wren’s City Chruches 1883 Arthur H. Mackmurdo

Outline C to him that the low level of contemporary Dutch typography and book design could be fixed. It became his lifelong passion to overcome these problems. Roos did several things to help spread the ideas put forth by Morris by designing the publication of the complete works of Morris in 1903. His type designs focused on extreme legibility and geometric construction.

The legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement lies less with the works of the time period and more in the attitudes that permeated the culture. The ideas of perfection of the craft that so many bought into back then is still alive today in the ones reviving the typefaces of earlier designs and those that allow the private press movement to survive even to this day.

The Century Guild Hobby Horse 1884 Selwyn Image

Booklet cover 1911 Frederic Goudy

Outline C Art Nouveau B

ecause of the ban finally being lifted from the East against trade with the Western world, communications increased between Asian and European countries which led to a culminating mix of cultural influences. Prints in the Ukiyo-e style were showing up in trades as wrapping papers, but what was an already an old style to Asian culture was considered new and fresh to the European world. Ukiyo-e was an art movement of Japan’s Tokugawa period which lasted from 1603 to 1867. Early works in the style usually depicted the entertainment districts, Kabuki plays, and erotica. Ando Hiroshige was the last great master of this style and his death in 1858 came right as the trade restrictions were starting to be alleviated. As the art and objects started coming into Europe, a fascination blossomed with the foreign culture which resulted in what is now known as Japanisme. The resulting fascination soon started to trickle into the design pallet of the time which led to the art movement known as Art Nouveau.

Art nouveau thrived for an incredibly short period between the decades of 1890 and 1910 and had a highly decorative style which came to be internationally accepted. Its influence was not restricted to the world of graphic design. Its most obvious identifying quality is an organic, plantlike line which seems much like the Rococo but focused less on the decadence and more of representation of visual cues taken from nature. The term art nouveau came from a Paris Gallery run by Samueal Bing known as the Salon de l’Art Nouveau.

Bing sold several of the prints that were being brought into the country from his shop which caused several artists at the time to be introduced to the style.

Art Nouveau heralded in the initial phase of the modern movement. The historicism of the previous century no longer held sway on the art and instead it looked more toward nature instead of the past. Artists and designers of the period put forth an effort to make art become a part of the everyday scene instead of limiting it to the constructs that it was being held in previously. The transition from Victorian to art nouveau was a gradual process and was helped along by Jules Cheret and Eugene Grasset.

In 1881, bans on artistic placement of material were lifted from French law and allowed posters to be placed everywhere except churches, polls, and in places deemed for official notices. Because of this, many saw the streets of Paris as the new museum. No longer was art something that was housed away behind doors, it could now be interacted with every day. As time went on, Cheret came to the conclusion that “…pictorial lithographic posters would replace the typographic letterpress posters that filled the urban environment,…”19 Cheret’s work became incredibly popular on the streets with his swirls of color and bold lettering. Most of the works Cheret created focused on a woman that seemed to have ideal proportions of beauty. These archetypes of women were also somewhat seen as liberated as they were neither prudes of the Victorian age nor were they prostitute. They were women enjoying themselves and the world they lived in. These women in Cheret’s works became known as “Cherettes”. The first true competition against Cheret came from the Swiss-born Grasset. England art nouveau was focused with graphic design and illustration and less with other aspects of the artistic sphere. Because of the growth of communications, the

Portrait of a Courtesan Late 1700’s Kitagawa Utamaro

Orphee aux Enfers 1879 Jules Cheret

Salome 1894 Aubrey Beardsley

Outline C issuing of The Studio in 1893 helped to usher in an international style. The Studio presented artworks from people such as Aubrey Beardsley, Jan Toorop, and others like Walter Crane. Graphic artwork produced by Beardsley in this magazine infuriated Morris as he saw his wart, such as Morte d’Arthur as a perversion of everything he had been trying to produce and legal was pursued.

Beardsley’s leading rival was Charles Ricketts

Many of the artists during this time period were mingling with one another. It was not just several bunches of isolated artistic movements growing separately as it had been during the medieval era. One of the key places to meet in France was Rodolphe Salis’s Le Chat Noir nightclub. It was here that Grasset shared his Ernst for color printing with artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and others. Lautrec, a common sight at the night scene, helped to push poster design into new areas with works like La Goulue au Moulin Rouge where he made stark contrast between colors along with a push toward abstraction. Lautrec did not get many clients for his poster production and the majority of the ones that he did culminate came from the seedy nightclubs he was prone to visit.

Another artist helped push the art nouveau styling into the media world harder as Alphonse Mucha used the organic tendril qualities on the hair of the women that he used. Mucha’s work was wonderfully accepted as it had the quality to showcase an ideal quality that did not seem to hold to any nationality. Mucha’s work was so pervasive in the culture of the time that by 1900 le style Mucha was used interchangeably with art nouveau. His works remained a major influence in the world of graphics until Germany partitioned Czechoslovakia in 1939.

American art nouveau was heralded in as artists came from across the seas and spread their influence through the states. Rhead and William H. Bradley, American, were the two leading practitioners of the brand of graphic design. Other regions of the world, such as Belgium, were introduced through the contemporary artworks of the time, in this case the paintings by Gauguin and Van Gogh. Henri Van de Velde, a prolific artist, came out of this region pushing the art nouveau style into further abstraction with works like the poster made for Tropon food concentrate. The poster looks nothing like the food it is trying to convince the buyer to purchase and instead relies on a graphic style to capture the attention of the viewer. Van de Velde was an innovator in world of page layout as well breaking creative ground with his dynamic linear forms that “…embrace their surrounding space and the intervals between them.”20 The grand duke of Saxe Weimar reorganized the Weimar Arts and Crafts Institute in 1902 after getting help from Van de Velde as an art and design adviser, coming one step closer toward Walter Gropius’s formation of the Bauhaus in 1919. In Germany, the art nouveau style was called Jugendstil after a new magazine, Jugend.

Germany had strong influences form French and British art nouveau but clung tightly to the tradtion of the academic arts of the past. The Jugend editorial was the major push for the style in this region and the masthead and cover art was allowed to be reimagined with every publication. Though it was a major influence on the culture, it was not the primary contribution as that right lies with the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on the architects, such as Peter Behrens. Art Nouveau continued throughout the region until right before the Great War where the aesthetic of joie de vie became irrelevant.

Job Cigarettes 1898 Alphonse Mucha

Tropon Poster 1899 Henri van de Velde

The Kiss 1898 Peter Behrens

Outline C Twentieth Centurey Design T

he final years of the nineteenth century brought attention to the works of Frank Lloyd Wright whose architectural style rejected historicism and instead worked with an organic design that focused on the interior of the living space instead of the façade of the build. His works during this time period put him at the forefront of the emerging modern movement that was about to burst onto the scene. Wright’s early work at a printing press helped him gain a better understanding of white space and his gathered knowledge of this was applied to his architecture with general acceptance. As the Studio ran its reproductions of Beardsley’s work, it inspired a group of young Scottish artists and friends, Charles and Margaret Mackintosh, J. Herbert McNair, and Frances Macdonald, at the Glasgow School of Art. Known as the Glasgow School or simply the Four, developed a lyrical originality and symbolic complexity that was unique to them alone. Many of the observers of their work were outraged at the strong abstraction of human forms that were present in works like Mackintosh’s Scottish Musical Review poster. Articles were written about the group that were spread and read by German and Austrian artists which learned of their countermovement to the mainstream art. Their work inspired Talwin Morris who, while working for the London Times, applied their geometric spatial division and lyrical organic forms to mass communications.

In Austria, Sezessionstil was created when a group of younger members of die Kunstlerhaus resigned in a stormy protest. The major problem that caused this protest was the prohibition of foreign artists being allowed to exhibit their works. It boiled down primarily to the fact that the artists wanted to exhibit more and they wanted to show works based on the incoming styles of France, England, and Germany. Gustav Klimt led the revolt and Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser were its key contributing members. When the Vienna Secession style reached its maturity, it had a strong display of the Glasgow School’s influence. The artwork coming from the V.S. was plastered everywhere and the Vienna plice were outraged, but this only served to fuel the public interest in the revolt. The art nouveau was centered in this region after the turn of the century and was focused in the production of the magazine Ver Sacrum which achieved an original visual elegance due to the white space in the page layout, sleek-coated stock, and the unusual production methods. As the design of the Vienna Secession evolved, the unique linear and geometric elements in these pages became an important design resource. Works by Adolf Loos were published in this magazine as well and spoke to his ideals that all art should avoid using useless decoration in any form and the idea of “organic” not meaning curvilinear but the use of human needs as a standard for measuring utilitarian form, or the idea that form follows function. The influence led to a stronger geometric form in the Secession style relying on flat shapes and greater simplicity. Moser’s poster work for the thirteenth Vienna Secession exhibition reflects this style change and shows a great example of the mature phase of the group. By the end of the century both Moser and Hoffmann had been appointed to the Vienna School for Applied Art where they quickly reformed the curriculum to suit their ideas about clean, geometric design.

The Glasgow School of Arts Poster 1895 Margaret and Frances Macdonald, J. Herbert McNair

Outline C

In the first decade of the new century, one of the leading contributors toward evolutionary design was German artist, architect, and designer Peter Behrens. Behrens was under the belief that, after architecture, typography provided, “the most characteristic picture of a period, and the strongest testimonial of the spiritual progress [and] development of a people.�21 Behrens was a strong advocate for the use of the sans-serif during this period using it as a running book text for the first time. Others were interested in furthering the sans-serif as the Berthold Foundry designed a family of ten sansserifs called Akzidenz Grotesk which would later go on to have a major influence on twentieth-century typography. Behrens was interested in several facets of design including typographic reform using geometry as an underlying system for a visual organization. In 1907 Munich founded the Deutsce Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) which furthered the idea of marrying art with technology. Though the group, led by several people including Hermann Muthesius, Henri Van de Velde, and Behrens, were influenced by the work done

by William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, they did not reject the machine made product in art. Soon after the forming of the group, it broke into two factions, one led by Muthesius which focused on the maximum use of mechanical standardization of design and the other led by Van de Veld who argued for the individual artistic expression of the creator. Both of these sought to advance the idea of Gesamkultur, or the idea of a new universal culture existing in a reformed man-made environment. Between these two extremes was Behrens who tried to be the bridge from one to the other, though in 1914 it was ruled in favor of Muthesius’s approach.

Vienna Secession 1902 Koloman Moser

Outline D A Modern Art Influence A

s the 20th century proceeded, it became increasingly more driven to war. Both World Wars caught life up in a terrible upheaval. This turbulent shift became a catalyst within the art community for people to question the role that art needed to play in society and how that artwork was to be organized. “Elemental ideas about color and form, social protest, and the expression of Freudian theories and deeply personal emotional states occupied many artists.�22 Several different design techniques came about from the growth of this period including cubism, surrealism, the Dada, and more.

Once again design and contemporary art go hand in hand as artists of the era helped to herald in what would be taken up by the graphic artists.

Cubism was derived from the elements in the paintings of Pablo Picasso.

Picasson incorporated element of African tribal art into his works and he depicted these in ways that challenged the Renaissance tradition of pictorial art. Artwork in this manner was not meant to be viewed in a illusionistic, 3-dimentional way rather it was a shifting of the space viewed from several different perspectives and laid in upon a strong 2-dimentional layout. This became known as Analytical cubism. Later, with the works of Picasso and Georges Braque, a new form of cubism emerged from using collage so as to free the composition of subject matter and bring the attention to the fact that the painting is a two-dimensional object. This evolved into Synthetic cubism in 1913 as cubists started to invent forms that were symbolic of subject matter rather than representational.

Many new art movements came as new manifestos in art were being published and as Filippo Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism in the Paris newspaper in1909, he ushered in the futurist style. Marinetti believed that all arts should test their forms against the scientific and industrial societal realities.

A big focus for this movement was movement, or speed. Everything was moving so fast, both in thought and design, science and politics, and the futurists were caught up in how they were to reflect this in their artwork. It was more destructive in ideal claiming that it would destroy the museums and libraries and fight against moralism, feminism, and utilitarian cowardice, or the fear of art being used. Futurists cast the constraints of the past off and looked toward the future as they constructed their new works. When creating these works, they sought to attach intense emotion or expressions which would lead to thought provoking ideas. This is what Stephane Mallarme did with the layout in his poem Un Coup de Des (A Throw of the Dice) as he strung his sentences together linearly like beads. The techniques of futurism were felt in other art movement, specifically Dada, Constructionist, and De Stijl, as these other forms tended to take up ideas of violent, revolutionary techniques.

One of the art movements of the time, which reacted to the carnage of WWI claimed not to be an art movement at all and instead parodied art and what it meant to be considered as such. The Dadaist held a strong negative and destructive element to their works as they rebelled against the war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes. Chance placement and

Man with Violin 1911-12 Pablo Picasso

Mountains + Valleys + Streets x Joffre 1912 Filippo Marinetti

Fountain 1917 Marcel Duchamp

Outline D absurd titles characterized their graphic work. The most famous of the artists from within this movement was Marcel Duchamp who pushed the idea that artistic acts became matters of individual decision and selection to allow an absolute freedom in ready-made works. One of the biggest graphic accomplishments of this group came with the invention of the photomontage where found photographic images were manipulated in a way to create strong, jarring juxtapositions and chance associations. John Heartfield used this as a propaganda weapon where he targeted the growing power of the Nazi party and the posters they were producing. With many art forms, they may evolve from the people working within and the same can be said with the Dada as well as Andre Breton became the new leader with the idea that the movement had lost its way and needed new directions.

Breton used this as the jumping point for the new movement Surrealism which he heralded in in 1924 after the official disbanding of the previous style in 1922. Surrealism focused on the world behind the scenes, the subconscious as they thought there to be more truth in the realm of the subconscious. They were obsessed with the works of Freud. They tried to find new truths in their work that would help reveal the language of the soul by doing experiments with stream-of-consciousness writing known as automatism. Giorgio de Chirico became the first painter declared surrealist but he was not the most famous. The Spanish painter Salvador Dali remains to this day the most well-known of these figures and helped spur two different graphic design influences with his deep perspectives, causing designers to return to a depth to the flatness, and his naturalistic approach to simultaneity.

A movement in Germany around this period became focused wholly on the subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events. This was the Expressionist movement. Symbolic content became very important and it was displayed along with strong colors, distorted or exaggerated proportions, and drawings. The German Expressionist split into two different groups, Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter. Die Brucke claimed to transform their subject matter hoping to showcase their own unexpressed feelings, while Der Blaue Reiter was focused more on the definition of art as they saw it as an object without subject matter, only properties that had the ability to convey feelings. The founding members of the Der Blaue Reiter were Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They no longer wanted art to express the agony of the human condition and instead explored problems of form and color. Another branch of this movement sprung up in France, known as the Fauves. They were led by Henri Matisse but his work was more focused on color and structural relationships and not the spiritual crisis that had sprung up with the German movements.

Blank Signature 1965 Rene Margrite

Improv 29 1912 Wassily Kandinsky

Gun with Alphabet Squares 1924 Man Ray

Outline D Pictorial Modernism P

oster designs that had been holding to the design aspects of the previous century were running their course as the new styles of art were starting to bleed into the works after the first decade of the 20th century. The poster did not completely turn to the abstractions that were being produced by the cubists and the constructivists, though they were heavily being influenced by the movements, as people that made them understood the need for them to maintain a pictorial reference to communicate with the general public. They did, however, simplify images sometimes excluding parts of the image in the illustration as it would cause the viewer to participate with the subject matter while trying to decipher it. This would leave a lasting influence on the viewer which is what the creator wanted.

The Plakatstil used a reductive, flat-color design and oftentimes simplified posters to the bare message that needed to be applied in order to maintain what was being expressed. One of the earliest works by Lucian Bernhard, Priester Matches, was almost lost until Ernst Growald rescued it from the trashcan. Bernhard went on to create several works with this simplicity including his own trademark. In Switzerland the design for posters was affected

by German, French, and Italian cultures and a lot of it was influenced by the work of the Plakatstil.

War was a prime office for producing poster as propaganda means. The works of the Central Powers were radically different than those that were being produced by the Allied Forces. The Central Powers followed the works of the Vienna Secession and the works done by Bernhard in the Plakatstil. The Allies used a more illustrative subject relying more on symbolic imagery to address propaganda objectives.

After WWI, there was an urge to return to normalcy. Faith in the machine was reaching its zenith and it was being represented in art and design.

Cubist ideas of spatial organization and synthetic imagery took hold and led the idea of the pictorial image in posters in a new direction. This new direction became known as art deco and it used a highly popular geometric technique. It lasted through the 20’s and 30’s. Between the two World Wars, advanced ideas flowed across borders in the European countries, all of which seeming to pass through Germany causing it to become a cultural hub of artistic ideas.

Kassama Corn Flour 1894 Beggarstaffs

Priester Matches 1905 Lucien Bernhard

Military Recruit Poster 1917 James Montgomery Flagg

Outline D A New Language of Form D

uring the postwar years artists in places like Holland and Russia started to think that, with the use of cubism, pictorial imagery could move into the realm of pure form. After WWI, Russian was in a state of political turmoil and civil war. The Red Army of the Bolsheviks won the conflict in 1920.

During the revolution, Russian artists absorbed cubism and futurism moving past these forms quickly into a new Russian avant-garde known as cubo-futurism as it blended elements from both styles. Kasimir Malevich used basic forms and pure color in his painting which he referred to as suprematism in his paintings. He rejected the utilitarian function and pictorial representation in hopes of expressing the feeling of the piece without searching for some grand cause.

Malevich, as well as Kandinsky, argued against art being used for utilitarian needs in society as they thought it should reflect perceptions of the world by inventing forms in time and space. Even with this thought, the Russian art movement was accelerated by the government at the time who used it within a social role. This spurred artists to demand a stop of art to stop producing useless things as paintings and instead turn to the poster. This helped create the movement known as Constructivism and was best defined by Aleksei Gan when he wrote that “… tectonics, texture, and construction were the three principles of constructivism.”22 During the 1920’s, the soviet government sought to publicize this new Russian art in a hopes to show encouragement for it.

In the Netherlands during 1917, the De Stijl movement, with its founder Theo van Doesburg, was joined by Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszar, and others.

It was Mondrian’s paintings that helped establish the philosophy for the visual forms in this movement. Mondrian purged his art of all representative elements and moved cubism toward a pure, geometric abstraction. The artists of the De Stijl were concerned with the representation of the visual vocabulary and sought to express the mathematical structure of the universe and its harmony with nature. The De Stijl had a scientific idea on art and wanted to express the universal laws that governed the visible reality. They also hoped to purify art by focusing on the most simplistic form of what art was, disregarding the naturalistic representation, external values, and subjective expressions that were being used previously. As works were published in the De Stijl magazine from 1917 until van Doesburg’s death in 1931, the ideas of the movement were spread to a larger audience. It was van Doesburg who hoped to raise the everyday object to the level of art and not have art lowered to the everyday level. He saw the Dadaist movement razing the ground with its destructive impulses and the De Stijl movement coming in afterwards to build a new order in the artistic postwar world. The style died out after the death of van Doesburg as he was the contributing driving force allowing it stay alive. As movements like these spread throughout the European countryside, Karel Teige believed that the untrained practitioner could contribute a fresh and innovative approach to design which seems almost prophetic to what would happen later in the century. The prototype for this “new order” from these movements was best expressed through the pure line, shape and color in Malevich and Mondrian’s work, and what began as a quest for pure art remained a major influence through the twentieth century.

Supremist Composition 1915 Kasimir Malevich

Exhibition Poster 1929 El Lissitxky

Book Cover 1925 Theo van Doesburg, Laszlo MoholyNagy

Outline D The Bauhaus and America E

very idea that was culminating across the European cultural atmosphere was gathered and studied at the German design school, the Bauhaus.

As Henri van de Velde stepped down, it was Walter Gropius that replaced him at the Weimar Arts and Crafts School. Gropius as permitted to change the name of the school to Das Staatliche Bauhaus and I opened on 1919. The school opened during a time of much strife for the Germans and the interest in constructing a new social order pervaded the aspects of life in the region and it was applied to the manifesto of the Bauhaus as well. It was expressed that a skilled artist should be able to breathe life in the dead product of the machine. The school had a hard history as it was greeted with animosity from the German government as it was seen to be trying to push things away from the traditional landscape of German culture and therefore was thought of as “un-German”. Because of this, there were many different regions in Germany that the Bauhaus set up as in hopes of continuing its teachings. The first area it was opened in was Weimar.

The years spent in Weimar showed a school that drew inspiration from expressionism. The interest in creating this new order saw many artists and craftsmen trying to build a unity amongst them that would lead to this. The original teaching plan was based on the ideas presented by Morris and held to the class medieval lines of master, journeyman, and apprentice. The main idea of the Bauhaus at this period was to seek to “…release each student’s creative abilities, to develop an understanding of the physical nature of materials, and to teach the fundamental principles of design underlying all visual art.”24 The Bauhaus was constantly evolving with its style and started to move away from the medievalism and the handicraft and started to design more for the machine. The growth of the Bauhaus and the conflict between it and the Thuringian government led to the insistence that it hold a major exhibition. The government hoped it would fail and then would have to close its doors. Instead it became a success and had 15,000 people attend it.

Though it had a wonderful involvement from the exhibition, it still was ushered out from Weimar by the political forces. It was during this time that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy took control of the preliminary course, replacing the former Itten. Moholy-Nagy contributed the idea of typography being a tool of communication. He was concerned by the legibility of the communication world and though the word should never be impaired by “priori esthetics.” MoholyNagy’s passion for typography and photography inspired the Bauhaus to take an interest in the world of visual communications which would push the design ideas of the graphics at the time. He did this enough that it led to the creation of the typophoto which is shown through his experimental use of typography in Pnumatik in 1923. It was in 1924 that the school uprooted and moved to Dessau.

The tension between the Bauhaus and the Government intensified when a conservative regime took power trying to impose on the school. Because of the interference, the school staff signed a letter of resignation and left with the students following after. It was during the Dessau period that Bauhaus identity came to full fruition. The masters became the professors during this period as well and the medieval apprenticeship was wholly dropped. It was in Dessau that

Bauhaus Magazine cover 1928 Herbert Bayer

Swiss Tourism Poster 1934 Herbert matter

Outline D the Bauhaus changed its name to Hochschule fur Gestaltung and started the influential Bauhaus magazine. Kandinsky, Klee, Gropius, Mondrian, MoholyNagy, and Van Doesburg worked as the editors and authors of the magazine and the fourteen Bauhausbucher trying to spread advanced art theory and application ideas through its publication. In 1928 Gropius resigned his post and others left as well. In 1932 the Nazi party canceled the Bauhaus faculty contracts and any continuance to teach was made untenable as the Nazi part also harassed the professors left behind. The faculty decided to dissolve the Bauhaus and closed its doors in 1933. This caused many people to move away in an exodus of artistic talent that landed many in America including people like Moholy-Nagy who opened the Chicago Art Institute of Design.

The growth of people in America with an interest helped to finally bring the Modern movement to the forefront of the culture. Prior to this, Americans did not appreciate the movements that were going on in the European countries and while it had been spreading since 1900 in Europe, America had not really touched the different design principles. Now it was like an awakening to the new art forms but with a few changes. While Europe’s Modernism was socialist and intellectual, America’s was more pragmatic capitalist.

Folder 1924 Piet Zwart

Museum Journaal voor Moderne Kunst 1963 Willem Sandberg

Outline E An International Style T

he American Modernism really starts in Europe. As Modernism was introduced in Paris, it spread to different people that were intermingling at the time. Some of these people went on to create schools where students could come and learn and express their creativity. The most well-known of these schools was the Bauhaus. Opened in Weimar on 1919, the Bauhaus created an atmosphere of tension within the German government. The growing of the Nazi party brought about by the economic, cultural, and political strife at the time would soon become problematic for the group. This would cause them to shut down and move on a few different occasions. By 1933 the doors had been closed by the Nazis and the artists that had been running the place moved out of Germany, some even packing up for America. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy helped to found the Chicago School of Art. It was this spread of artists that helped to bring the style of modernism to America, though it was changed to suit the needs of the corporation and the underlying principles were different.

The International style, also known as the Swiss style for its origination in Switzerland, was started when two people, Max Miedinger and Ed Hoffmann, decided to redesign the Haas Grotesk into something more modern. It had a sleek san-serif design, though it was not the first san-serif to be used in Europe as modernists had been using san-serifs since the mid-20th century. It does however contain an uncanny ability to clean up any layout when it was applied and, upon its introduction, was a breath of fresh air to the design community.

When introduced to Europe in 1957, Hoffman and Miedinger knew they wanted to market it to America as well based on its success but had to change the name to Helvetica. When it was brought to America, it was quickly picked up by the business world as it was clean, neutral, and had a timeless quality that things, ads and logos, feel fresh and relatable no matter what the age group. With this love of the typeface also came oversaturation and many think that the poignant quality of Helvetica was cheapened or lessened because of its overuse. Either way corporate America was in love with it and to this day still uses it in ad campaigns.

Graphic art in the American corporate world was evolving thanks primarily to Paul Rand. Had he not had his chance happening of running into a magazine with European Modernism, we may never have caught up in time to contribute to the style. His works contained more space and appropriated images to help share the message. Rand helped develop America’s style of Modernism and while it looked a lot like what was happening in Europe, it was less theoretical and more pragmatic, intuitive, and less formal at organizing space than its counterpart. The idea of the art director was changing as well thanks to companies trying new things such as having the copywriter and designer work together and a means of corporate identity was starting to permeate the atmosphere as well.

Rural Electric Admin.

1937 Lester Beall

Harper’s Bazaar 1934 Alexey Brodovitch, Man Ray

Harper’s Bazaar 1939 A.M. Cassandre

Ad for CCA 1943 Herbert matter

Outline E

Giselle 1959 Armin Hofmann

Direction Magazine 1940 Paul Rand

Exodus Poster 1960 Saul Bass

Logo Designs Herb Lubalin

Outline F Postmoderism D

uring the mid to late 60’s in America, Herb Lubalin was producing works that were already tending to lean towards a postmodern feel. Lubalin, who is still considered to be a modernist, left the strict ideas of legibility of the type for a more important and meaningful impact in his work. The idea that you have to compromise legibility to achieve this impact has an eerily similar philosophy to layout design in the American magazine media that Daniel Carson puts forth with his warning not to mistake legibility with communication. It was Charles Jencks who established the idea of what postmodernism is in the world of architecture.

He felt that postmodernism represented the demise of the modern extremism and a partial return to tradition. It was Wolfgang Weingart that made ushered in this “new style” in the graphic design world. Weingart was determined not to be constrained by the strict rules of the Swiss style in an attempt to remind people that typography was art. He felt that the Swiss style view had “…hardened into orthodoxy and formula.”25 And he was correct.

American graphic design was wholly designed for the corporate sphere using the Swiss style. It had become formulaic in approach because it was something that worked. It no longer held the value of the artist as a high regard and had started to hold the corporation up instead. Though art style can be perfected, it is this perfection that stagnates it as it becomes overused, much as the font Helvetica had become, and pushes people to transcend the restraints to push the boundaries to find out not what is art, but what art can become.

Weingart’s work had a significant influence on American design. It was not just the work coming from him and those that were already tied to the world of art that contributed, though. In this era, outside influences were just as apt to take a hold in the graphic world as was those creating from within.

Early in the creation of this new style, Jamie Reid of the Sex Pistols created an anti-design which came to define the punk genre of music that was taking hold in London. Reid’s involvement with the Sex Pistols comes after his work in the graphic world where he would take articles and cut them apart to turn them back on themselves. He was a master of the deconstruction aspect in the world of postmodernism. His work was more focused in the political sphere, as most punk image-makers were, and his work used graphic techniques which he improvised with due to his lack of formal training. This design was not wholly accepted and produced more than for albums until the 1980’s where publications started to take hold of the style and spread the ideas that were springing up with the postmodern movement. With magazines like Hard Werken, the functionalist traditions were avoided in an attempt to design a more adventurous layout. Though the deconstruction style within the postmodern whole is still largely debated as the style was not based on any philosophical underpinning, rather it was a means to communicate with society as a whole; it does have a strong significance. The idea was to change the structure of design and rearrange them to make them function differently and not just to destroy the system.

Other design aspects of postmodernism include appropriation, the questioning of authorship, and techno. Most of the postmodern work

Kunstkredit 1976-77 Wolfgang Weingart

God Save the Queen 1977 Jamie Reid

Outline F appropriated imagery from prior design to the point of borderline plagiarism.

The idea was not to steal an image but to re-appropriate the meaning that is being applied to it. The philosophical aspects of this movement were opposite the modern movement. Where Modernism found a triumph in the machine, postmodernism found this to be overly optimistic and questioned the potential danger of the machine. The idea of the author started to loose meaning during this time as well as each piece of work took on the meaning of the viewer instead of having meaning be applied to by the creator. As the style continues to evole past the constraints of history, new styles will emerge many of which are happening now which makes it hard to be aware of them.

The problem with history is that it is like driving while looking through the rearview mirror. History is used to define the past as, while living in the moment, many things can seem overreaching and too fluid to help with the definition of style. This is the problem here. Many believe that postmodernism has officially run its course and there is a new era of art waiting to take its place. That era is now. There are those that believe that post-postmodernism, or metamodernism, is a compromising philosophy seeking to merge the design aspects of the postmodern with the balance and structure of the modern. Those that agree with this see philosophically that the movement consists of those that would hold hope for the future though approach it with trepidation, kind of cautious optimism. This may just be crap as people are lost in what art is right now, without having parameters to define where art is going.

But that is how art survives, not by recognizing the structures of what style is, but by existing on the fringes of what it can be.

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