The History of Visual Communication / Stella by GC Design Groms

THE HISTORY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

Mendes books

THE HISTORY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

BY STELLA MENDES

Content 1. INTRODUCTION 2. ROCKS AND CAVES 3. IDEOGRAMS 4. THE ALPHABET 5. THE ART OF THE BOOK 6. THE PRINTING PRESS 7. THE AGE OF THE COMPUTER

1. INTRODUCTION The original history of visual communication website was put together in 2005, as a sub site under my old website citrinitas.com. The site was built to hold the course material for a class called by the same name that I had just started to teach back then and that I continued to teach for several years. The idea was to collect the material that I thought was needed for the course in one place to make life easier for my own students. None of what is written on this site was written by me (the texts mostly originate from wikipedia and some other sites related to graphic design history), and all of the images shown are collected from internet resources (mostly from wikimedia commons, but from elsewhere as well). Thus, the site was (and continues to be) simply an aggregation of online material that was brought together solely to facilitate the teaching of my own class. It was therefore a huge surprise to me when the site took on a life of its own and became very popular internationally about a year after I had put it together, attracting huge crowds of graphic design history aficionados from all over the place. Today, the monthly visits still range in the hundreds of thousands. Which is why I thought that a design overhaul, as well as a dedicated domain is in order. I have decided to slowly retire my old personal site citrinitas, so this seems to be a good time to move this site as well.

2. ROCKS AND CAVES 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 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.

3. IDEOGRAMS

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. 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.

4. THE ALPHABET The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets (properly, â&#x20AC;&#x153;abjadsâ&#x20AC;?, mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery, or were directly inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet. The Proto-Canaanite alphabet, like its Egyptian prototype, only represented consonants, a system called an abjad. From it can be traced nearly all the alphabets ever used, most of which descend from the younger Phoenician version of the script. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia. The Phaistos Disc is a curious archaeological find, likely dating to the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. No object directly comparable to the Phaistos Disc has been found. There is, however, a small number of comparable symbols known from other Cretan inscriptions, known summarily as Cretan hieroglyphs. This unique object is now on display at the archaeological museum of Herakleion in Crete, Greece.

5. THE ART OF THE BOOK Medieval Europe. One of the darkest periods known to mankind: Pestilence and plague, darkness and fear, witch-hunts and illiteracy roam the land. It is a world where most people seldom leave their place of birth for any distance longer than 10 miles, where few people even live beyond the age of 30. In this inhospitable milieu, secluded in the scriptoria of cold monasteries, under the light of feeble oil lamps, mittened against the biting cold; some of the greatest book designers that ever lived, created some of the most beautiful books the world has ever seen. The colophons of the their creations are testimony to their short lives since most of the books that they worked upon were only completed in several of their brief lifetimes, one scribe replacing the other over decades. We call these beautiful books Illuminated Manuscripts. An illuminated manuscript is a manuscript in which the text is supplemented by the addition of decoration or illustration, such as decorated initials, borders and miniatures. In the strictest definition of the term, an illuminated manuscript only refers to manuscripts decorated with gold or silver. However, in both common usage and modern scholarship, the term is now used to refer to any decorated manuscript. The earliest surviving substantive illuminated manuscripts are from the period AD 400 to 600, primarily produced in Ireland, Italy and other locations on the European continent. The meaning of these works lies not only in their inherent art history value, but in the maintenance of a link of literacy. Had it not been for the (mostly monastic) scribes of late antiquity, the entire content of western heritage literature from Greece and Rome could have perished. The very existence of illuminated manuscripts as a way of giving stature and commemoration to ancient documents may have been largely responsible for their preservation in an era when barbarian hordes had overrun continental Europe. The majority of surviving manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, although many illuminated manuscripts survive from the 15th century Renaissance, along with a very limited number from late antiquity. The majority of these manuscripts are of a religious nature. However, especially from 13th century onward, an increasing number of secular texts were illuminated. Most illuminated manuscripts were created as codices, although many illuminated manuscripts were rolls or single sheets. A very few illuminated manuscript fragments survive on papyrus. Most medieval manuscripts, illuminated or not, were written on parchment (most commonly calf, sheep, or goat skin) or vellum (calf skin). Beginning in the late Middle Ages manuscripts began to be produced on paper.

6. THE PRINTING PRESS The original history of visual communication website was put together in 2005, as a sub site under my old website citrinitas.com. The site was built to hold the course material for a class called by the same name that I had just started to teach back then and that I continued to teach for several years. The idea was to collect the material that I thought was needed for the course in one place to make life easier for my own students. None of what is written on this site was written by me (the texts mostly originate from wikipedia and some other sites related to graphic design history), and all of the images shown are collected from internet resources (mostly from wikimedia commons, but from elsewhere as well). Thus, the site was (and continues to be) simply an aggregation of online material that was brought together solely to facilitate the teaching of my own class. It was therefore a huge surprise to me when the site took on a life of its own and became very popular internationally about a year after I had put it together, attracting huge crowds of graphic design history aficionados from all over the place. Today, the monthly visits still range in the hundreds of thousands. Which is why I thought that a design overhaul, as well as a dedicated domain is in order. I have decided to slowly retire my old personal site citrinitas, so this seems to be a good time to move this site as well. The text and images on the main pages are identical to what was on the old pages, but I have added extra pages to the topics in which I show artifacts from the broader cultures that have generated the calligraphic / typographic /graphic design systems that are of course the main discussions of this site. The old topic pages used to have downloadable slideshows, these new extra pages have replaced those. I hope you continue to enjoy the site. Please visit my new site elifayiter.com to get contact info and see my personal work. And also this: The images on this site are in the thousands. I have made a concerned effort to use creative commons images wherever I could, but with this kind of volume slippages will inevitably have occurred. It goes without saying that the site is strictly educational, there is no commercial gain involved whatsoever. Nevertheless, should you want an image belonging to you removed, I will of course do so immediately.

7. THE AGE OF THE COMPUTER The Age of the Computer In 1950 the British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing published a paper describing what would come to be called the Turing Test. The paper explored the nature and potential development of human and computer intelligence and communication, while the first commercially successful electronic computer, UNIVAC, was also the first general purpose computer - designed to handle both numeric and textual information was also designed the same year. The implementation of this machine marked the real beginning of the computer era. â&#x20AC;&#x2039; In the mid 1980s, just 30 years later, the arrival of desktop publishing and the introduction of software applications introduced a generation of designers to computer image manipulation and 3D image creation that had previously been unachievable. Computer graphic design enabled designers to instantly see the effects of layout or typography changes without using any ink in the process. not only did computers greatly speed up and facilitate the traditional design process, they also gave a completely new outlook to sketching and idea formation, enabling designers to virtually create endless generations of one work/concept. However, possibly one of the greatest additions of the new technology to graphic design were the unprecedented things that could now be done with typographic elements,