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history of visu al commu nication
history of visual communication
Copyright © 2010 by Bill Shakespeare All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below. Imaginary Press 1233 Pennsylvania Avenue San Francisco, CA 94909 www.imaginarypress.com Ordering Information: Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address above. Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Big Distribution: Tel: (800) 800-8000; Fax: (800) 800-8001 or visit www.bigbooks.com. Printed in the United States of America
history of visual communication eduado knoch
contents
09 introduction 11 rocks and caves 13 ideograms encyclopedias, 15 maps, ect 17 credits
introduction Imagine that you’re on vacation in a foreign city, and you get lost while driving. If you were at home, you could stop and ask someone for directions. But here, you don’t speak the language very well, so asking directions won’t do much good. Instead, you can rely on a map, using landmarks, routes, and familiar signs, which successfully lead you back to your hotel. In this scenario, you have found your way back almost entirely through visual communication. Visual communication is the transmission of information and ideas using symbols and imagery. It is one of three main types of communication, along with verbal communication (speaking) and non-verbal communication (tone, body language, etc.). Visual communication is believed to be the type that people rely on most, and it includes signs, graphic designs, films, typography, and countless other examples.
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rocks and caves
The Cro-Magnons form the earliest known European examples of Homo sapiens, from ca. 40,000 years ago, chromosomally descending from populations of the Middle East. CroMagnons lived from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period of the Pleistocene epoch. For all intents and purposes these people were anatomically modern, only differing from their modern day descendants in Europe by their slightly more robust physiology and brains larger capacity than that of modern humans. When they arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago, they brought with them sculpture, engraving, painting, body ornamentation, music and the painstaking decoration of utilitarian objects. Cave or rock paintings are images painted on cave or rock walls and ceilings, usually dating to prehistoric times. Rock paintings are made since the Upper Paleolithic, 40,000 years ago. It is widely believed that the paintings are the work of respected elders or shamans. The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called Macaroni by Breuil. Drawings of humans are rare and are usually schematic rather than the more naturalistic animal subjects. Cave art may have begun in the Aurignacian period (Hohle Fels, Germany), but reached its apogee in the late Magdalenian (Lascaux, France). The paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the
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animal was incised in the rock first. Stone lamps provided some light. AbbĂŠ Breuil interpreted the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number of animals. As there are some clay sculptures that seem to have been the targets of spears, this may partly be true, but does not explain the pictures of beasts of prey such as the lion or the bear. Petroglyphs are images incised in rock, usually by prehistoric, especially Neolithic, peoples. They were an important form of pre-writing symbols, used in communication from approximately 10,000 B.C. to modern times, depending on culture and location. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully understood symbolic or ritual language. Petroglyphs are images incised in rock, usually by prehistoric, especially Neolithic, peoples. They were an important form of pre-writing symbols, used in communication from approximately 10,000 B.C. to modern times, depending on culture and location. Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully understood symbolic or ritual language. The oldest petroglyphs are dated to approximately 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, other writing systems such as pictographs and ideograms began to appear. Petroglyphs were still common though, and tribal societies continued using them much longer, even until contact with Western culture was made in the 20th century. These images probably had deep cultural and religious significance for the societies that created them; in many cases this significance remains for their descendants.
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A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures. An ideogram or ideograph is a graphical symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters arranged according to the phonemes of a spoken language, as is done in alphabetic languages. Examples of ideograms include wayfinding signage, such as in airports and other environments where many people may not be familiar with the language of the place they are in, as well as Arabic numerals and mathematical notation, which are used worldwide regardless of how they are pronounced in different languages. The term “ideogram” is commonly used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters. However, symbols in logographic systems generally represent words or morphemes rather than pure ideas.
ideograms 13
A logogram, or logograph, is a single grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language). This stands in contrast to other writing systems, such as alphabets, where each symbol (letter) primarily represents a sound or a combination of sounds. A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese and Korean . Its possible precursors appeared as early as 8000 years ago, and a complete writing system in Chinese characters was developed
3500 years ago in China, making it perhaps the oldest surviving writing system. Chinese characters are derived directly from individual pictograms or combinations of pictograms and phonetic signs. The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035, although a large number of these are rarely-used variants accumulated throughout history. In China, literacy for the working citizen is defined as knowledge of 4,000 5,000 characters. Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters occupy a more or less square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes use the term “Square-Block Characters.” The actual shape of many Chinese characters varies in different cultures. Mainland China adopted simplified characters in 1956, but traditional Chinese characters are still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Japan has used its own less drastically simplified characters since 1946, while Korea has limited the use of Chinese characters, and Vietnam completely abolished their use in favour of romanized Vietnamese. According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zi, Chinese characters.
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Scientific illustration represents aspects of science through visual means, particularly through observations and subsequent renderings of the natural world. The emphasis in scientific illustration is on accuracy and utility, rather than on aesthetics, although scientific illustrators are skilled artists and often known for aesthetic values. Their main areas of work are biological and anatomical illustrations and technical drawing for the engineering fields. In order to accomplish a good survey of visual communication design in this field, samples from cartography (which is not held to be a field of scientific illustration in the strict sense of the word) and pages from 18th century Encyclopedias have also been included into the contents of this page. Scientific illustration was an important part of scientific communication prior to photography, but has retained its importance through selective renderings rather than lifelike accuracy, such as illustrations of stellar phenomena that are not visible to the human eye, or medical illustrations, which highlight particular parts of a system.
encyclopedias, maps, ect
Historically, biological illustrations have been in use since the beginning of man’s exploration and attempts to understand the world around him. In the Alexandrian era (356 – 323 BC), the Greek physician Herophilus performed public dissections and recorded his findings. In the 1st century AD, Pedanius Dioscorides compiled the De Materia Medica, a collection of medicinal information and recipes, containing illustrations of about 600 plants in all. During the Renaissance, artist and scientist Leonardo DaVinci famously sketched his observations from human dissections, as well as his studies of plants and the flight of birds. In the mid-16th century, the physician Andreas Vesalius compiled and published the De humani corporis fabrica, a collection of textbooks on human anatomy superior to any illustrations that had been produced until that point. In the early 1600s, the explorer Étienne de Flacourt documented his travels to Madagascar, and illustrated the unique fauna there, setting a precedent for future explorers as world travel became a more feasible reality. Going back to earlier periods in history, Egyptian frescoes seem to point at scientific depictions. There are, of course, many herbariums and medicinal books in Medieval Europe that were illustrated with drawings; but it is with the onset of the renaissance and especially the baroque and the age of the enlightenment, bringing about the spirit of scientific accuracy and of research that scientific illustrations really came into their own.
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credits
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2010 by Road Runner Cover design by Augustus Smith, BookFondlers, Inc. Book design and production by John Do, www.dobookdesigns.com Editing by EditGnome Chapter opening illustrations © 2010 Joanne Sargeant Author photograph by Eliza Emulsion Poetry of Dev Nadev used by permission of the Dev Nadev Foundation.