eight-team-blog

[eight-team-blog]

CH 11 & 12, Cindy, Coby, Heidi, Thao

Chapter 11

Public Interest and Education

Public safety and personal hygiene had been a feature of earlier 20th century campaigns

Those graphics often attempted to regulate individual behavior by promoting social norms as common sense

Many posters were produced by hand in the early years

Silkscreen printing was adopted later and is cheaper than photographs

Style is often American Regionalist motif, themes are often public safety, upcoming events, and opportunity

Poster graphics were different in the Western and the Soviet.

Western celebrate workers and heroic individual v the Soviet portrayed them as a part of a larger social system.

Photojournalism and documentary

Documentary approaches established a tone of direct engagement and an imagery of fact

Printing for photographic reproduction became much cheaper

The concept of a document is a neutral record of observed reality using black and white photographs

Wartime propaganda

Posters were used to mobilize sentiment and action on all sides of the political conflict during ww2

Women were idealized as tough but feminine in need for the labor force.

Wartime images were portrayed on posters to encourage people to contribute

Those images suggested immediate action

Wartime information

The task of presenting dense amounts of info. In an economical and well organized form, challenged designers.

Designers had to adapt to the following aesthetic meanings: identifying insignia, war planes, and bombs, and preparing for emergencies by familiarizing viewers with scenarios.

Graphic information was under development as war time as wartime engineers worked on developing machines capable of processing data, for the purpose of cryptography.

Code analysis laid the foundations for codes, ciphers, and symbols to be recognized without reference to specific languages which led to the development of pictographic systems.

Commercial and technical uses of information design

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the development of the first electronic computer changed the relationship between graphics and statistics.

Systems theory, cybernetics and computer science influenced the graphic forms through which data or statistical information were expressed.

Information analysis and design process

Information analysis affected the way graphic design saw itself.

Rather than focusing on the display of objects and communication of messages, it was set on as a system in which all elements operated as integral parts of a network of flows and exchanges.

·   The analysis of info. Into content types, according to their classifications, that sorted and structured images, text. And their relationship within a publication, all of which added to graphic presentation.

Chapter 12

Image and identity systems

In the 1950s, graphic design entered a new stage to change in the character of businesses

Vertical integration- (the incorporation of all facets of an industrial process from raw materials to final product marketing, distribution, and service) meant that many corporations had employees and offices worldwide.

Marketing

careful construction and management of corporate identity

unified image = distinctive logo and corporate identity system functioned with clear, rational effectiveness in strategic communications.

work involved large-scale, coordinated communication campaigns that  maintained the identity of a corporation & added value to its products through symbolic investments in this identity

Slogans, catch phrases, logotypes, and other compact messages made the corporation seem like an individual entity with a voice and personality

Graphic designer

role was to convey the essence of an organization’s identity

In-house personnel who handled communications both within and outside the company maintained style conformity

This conformity often governed the dress and decorum of individual employees, as well as the consistency of product and image design

Keeping all elements of a corporation’s graphic identity unified was a challenge,

Immediate recognition

Graphic identity extended from letterheads and logos to packaging, trucks and shipping containers, point-of-purchase displays, and architectural signage

Universal symbols

Immediate recognition relied on clear and distinctive symbols rather than substantive texts or images

Style, system, and graphic design concepts

·       The 1950s and 1960s was a time period that provided designers with a variety of source materials and production methods.

·       Some graphic designers did not find a place within this universal model and developed their own contemporary styles.

Ex: illustrations, wood type, decorative faces, and photographically manipulated letterforms.

·        In regards to corporate environment, there had been many programmatic approaches to graphic design.

·       Corporate visionaries saw the opportunity to gain prestige in the market place by commissioning artistic and humanistic graphic campaigns rather than providing the sells of goods or services.

·       The results led to a separation between sign value and its identity from specific products.

·       Systematic branding and design were vital in the style driven world of consumerism.

·       Graphic designers provided the public with images of products, and slogan campaigns, both of which contributed to mass style production.

Technology:

Use of technological advancement became synonymous with the popular international-design paradigm. The apparent “human hand” fell out of style due to the mechanical processes that became standards.

The landscape of design would see a shift from static, to dynamic. Not in design so much as presentation; the new media driven atmosphere created new needs for advertising and design.

-The ease at which media was digested became the new metric for quality

New innovations in the realm of graphic design included Transfer Type, Screen Patterns, Phototype, and Electronic Type.

-These new techniques had myriad improvements over the old hot-type methods, mostly in ease of use and production.

Standardization and unity of design in the era became apparent in type design as well. Typefaces would come in families containing multiple styles which allowed for cogent compositions.

-Popular culture became saturated by imagery, most often in full color.

The Profession:

Graphic design became tied to the image of success that seemed to exude from powerful organizations. Designers found themselves with a larger scope of responsibilities.

Art directors shared this increased responsibility too. Publications often relied on unique elements in order to sell copies, brand recognition and demographics became the Art Director’s main focus.

Eventually, the profession and work of graphic designers became more elevated, instead of purely commercial in nature to that of fine art.

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CH 10 & 11, Cindy, Coby, Heidi, Thao

Chapter 10

Designing the Modern Lifestyle:

Graphic design was heralded as a new device capable of increasing consumption, this was particularly useful in the early 1920’s.

The boost in luxury created new industry focused on leisure, with graphic design as its leader.

Streamlined and sleek, new and modern designs equated success and accomplishment with excess. Experiences and other day-to-day things became commodities to be bought and sold

-This culture of excess was essentially sold to the American people by designers

Modern Style in Graphic Design:

European styles saw noted differences between their American counterparts.

-Strong and abstract designs were used and written works and layouts found themselves embracing a more standard style of cleanliness and mathematic precision.

-Russian style also began to develop. Feeling a necessity for a “new paradigm” of design to couple with their new ideas, Russian designers placed an extra enthusiastic focus on communicating their political ideologies.

In america, the term graphic design was coined by William Addison Dwiggins. Through this he helped connect design elements to systems of creating designs.

-Designers immigrating to america to escape persecution during the looming threat of WWII helped spread the aesthetic of avant-garde designs to the United States, under the term “Art Deco.”

Commercial design and contemporary artwork began to blend. This blending, although visually impressive, lost most of its impact socially.

Consumer Culture

-“Mass consumption,”

-“the great democratizing force in modern America.”

-Graphic design was both an expression and an instrument of this ideology,

-Advertising imagery sold goods by association with cultural values and class identities

-American advertising presented products as solutions to problems that might have emotional sources or social dimensions

Illustration

-1920s and 1930s, most of this American imagery was still rendered by hand

-Illustration, hand-drawn logotypes, and serif display faces persisted.

-Poster production declined, but billboards introduced a new scale of graphic design

Branding

-Logos and brand names had worked to distinguish products in competitive markets WITH mottos and claims that promoted these names.

-Pictured products in fantastic contexts to which their purchase seemed to promise access

-Brand image production operated through visual codes in packaging, ad copy formulas, rendering style, and typographic reference.

-Market analyst— statistical methods and survey techniques, market analysts produced serious studies, proving that white evoked hygiene, black was sophisticated, sleek shapes were modern, stolid ones were old-fashioned,

-Graphic designers were described as “product stylists” and “consumer engineers”

-The promotion of lifestyles as realms of self-realization and expression produced a curious side-effect—conformity

-Industrial consumer was an engineered concept, a generic figure who followed trends with a personal interest

Trademarks

-corporate identity systems

-transportation and communication systems expanded, the idea of coordinated signage design followed, echoing the business sector’s branding schemes and enforcing visual unity

The Profession

-In the American context, the Bauhaus aim of teaching students to think beyond immediate pragmatic or conventional considerations was meant to counter narrow professionalism and Beaux Arts traditionalism.

-In the American context, the Bauhaus aim of teaching students to think beyond immediate pragmatic or conventional considerations was meant to counter narrow professionalism and Beaux Arts traditionalism.

-graphic design in the 1920s was seen as an aid to reaching economic and political goals.

-President Calvin Coolidge praised the advertising industry for “ministering to the spiritual side of trade”

-1920s, art directors began to assume editorial and aesthetic responsibility for shaping campaigns that assessed a client’s identity and communication needs in a systems

-Shaping, layering, highlighting, reversing, and otherwise altering artwork became readily possible. Photomontage, a provocative technique in avant-garde artistic circles, became an eye-catching staple of commercial design

-More significantly, graphic designers began to make sophisticated use of photolithographic methods and to think in terms of color separations, spot colors, metallic inks, and varnishes

-Display faces for advertising and commercial work featured geometric designs, streamlined shapes, and names that encapsulated the era by reference to fashion, stylish entertainment, luxury settings, tourism, or technological innovations

Chapter 11

Public Interest and Education

Public safety and personal hygiene had been a feature of earlier 20th century campaigns

Those graphics often attempted to regulate individual behavior by promoting social norms as common sense

Many posters were produced by hand in the early years

Silkscreen printing was adopted later and is cheaper than photographs

Style is often American Regionalist motif, themes are often public safety, upcoming events, and opportunity

Poster graphics were different in the Western and the Soviet.

Western celebrate workers and heroic individual v the Soviet portrayed them as a part of a larger social system.

Photojournalism and documentary

Documentary approaches established a tone of direct engagement and an imagery of fact

Printing for photographic reproduction became much cheaper

The concept of a document is a neutral record of observed reality using black and white photographs

Wartime propaganda

Posters were used to mobilize sentiment and action on all sides of the political conflict during ww2

Women were idealized as tough but feminine in need for the labor force.

Wartime images were portrayed on posters to encourage people to contribute

Those images suggested immediate action

Wartime information

The task of presenting dense amounts of info. In an economical and well organized form, challenged designers.

Designers had to adapt to the following aesthetic meanings: identifying insignia, war planes, and bombs, and preparing for emergencies by familiarizing viewers with scenarios.

Graphic information was under development as war time as wartime engineers worked on developing machines capable of processing data, for the purpose of cryptography.

Code analysis laid the foundations for codes, ciphers, and symbols to be recognized without reference to specific languages which led to the development of pictographic systems.

Commercial and technical uses of information design

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, the development of the first electronic computer changed the relationship between graphics and statistics.

Systems theory, cybernetics and computer science influenced the graphic forms through which data or statistical information were expressed.

Information analysis and design process

Information analysis affected the way graphic design saw itself.

Rather than focusing on the display of objects and communication of messages, it was set on as a system in which all elements operated as integral parts of a network of flows and exchanges.

·   The analysis of info. Into content types, according to their classifications, that sorted and structured images, text. And their relationship within a publication, all of which added to graphic presentation.

[eight-team-blog]

CH 9 Cindy, Heidi, Coby

Modernism and Key Elements:

* Modern designers embraced functionalism, geometric formalism and machine aesthetics, even as more traditional approaches persisted in commercial context.

* Modernism was the embrace of the new that required a break with the past.

* Commercial designers relied on having a sense of comfort and familiarity with what they already knew. They were not comfortable with change.

* Modernism approach came from the influence of avant garde Artist.

* Artist began to commit to formal and conceptual experimentation.

* This Artistic movement that combined radical political agendas, had gained popularity when leading into WWI.

* Many active graphic designers had transferred their skills in favor of this 

“aesthetic revolution.”

* Ex: supporting the war by adding to propaganda and commercial art.

Visual culture and Avant Garde design * Beginning 20th century, a variety of typographic and visual materials were available.

* Photographic images became more common.

* Illustration has become more enhanced with color and printing techniques.

* Mechanical production techniques gave designers enormous freedom.

* Artist who identified with the most adventurous visual experiments are known as the scant Garde.

* They didn’t have rely on radical changes in technology.

* They tried to find a visual language that would translate the social meanings of these changes.

* They adopted the functionalist and anti historical approach.

* Challenged traditional methods of art. The graphic impact of Futurism and Dada * Fillippo Marinetti published “Futurist Manifesto”

* Manifesto called for: An innovation that banished the last of the late 19th century stylistic sensibility. The excitement to principles * 20th century adoption of geometric abstraction and flat, hard edges forms as signs.

* Constructivism- the idea The artist should seize the tools of industry and become engineers of a new sensibility established a powerful foundations for both applied art and graphic design.

Propaganda and mass communication studies * Avant- Garde was the one reason as to why the violent political, economic, and technological changes in western cultures occurred.

* Promoted anarchism and revolutions.

* Artist lent their skills to promote propaganda for readiness, recruitment and war advertisement

Graphic Persuasion and its effects:

Propaganda and other attempts to persuade public opinion were integral to the war efforts. By utilizing “information graphics,” (posters mainly), designers hoped to create public knowledge of enemy forces. These utilitarian designs were straightforward and hoped to greater prepare citizens.

“New Women”:

As men were otherwise occupied by the war effort, women stood in to fill the job void. Working typically male dominated jobs created a new view of women in politics; this pushed towards the acceptance of suffrage. As these women became more economically independent, marketing realized the need to advertise towards this growing demographic.

Propaganda and its developmen

Piggybacking off developments in advertising science, greater, more effective, methods of graphically persuading individuals arose during this time. Use of polling and surveys to analyze effectiveness of subjective response to propaganda and advertisement began seeing use. Further developments saw the use of “unconscious motivation” strategies, to much success.

Post- Revolutionary Russia > established in 1920s - InkHuk (the Institute for Artistic Culture) - VKhUTEMAS (the design school in Moscow) - Popular Art Institute (in Vitebsk) - to synthesize art, culture, and technical knowledge for the application of design to industry. - trained young designers according to Constructivist principles - teaching design effectively The Bauhaus > established in 1919, weimar republic of Germany > founded by Walter Gropius - Weimar government was progressive enough to support a proposal for a radical experiment in design education, a visionary project that was allowed to establish a firm base of operations - call for a return to craft and the integration of art and architecture Bauhaus Proclamation - established a concept of design as a discipline that meaningfully closed the gap between formal ideas and material conditions. - development of foundation courses in principles of composition, construction, and appreciation of materials - Design became a highly elastic term, extending to include everyday objects and their industrial production 1923 - marked a shift from Arts and Crafts to art and industry: “Art and technology—a new unity!” —belief in the universal nature of graphic forms the Bauhaus composition based on principles absorbed by graphic design - dynamism - balance - harmony - asymmetry Circle of New Advertising Designers > founded in 1927 by Dadaist Kurt Schwitters - His 1928 outline for a “new typography” - demanded typography that was as strictly functional as the engineered structures that defined modernity

- encompass visual expression of the logic and thrust of content. 

- did approaches to corporate identity and branding campaigns

- invented the graphic designer as a figure both formally and conceptually skilled, for whom style was the expression of a point of view on the world, not merely an expression of individual taste or disposition

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CH 7 & 8

Chapter 7: Mass Mediation 1850-1900s

Technology advances in electricity and automation offered energy the printing press and paper manufacturers.

Commercial artist began to develop their professional identities as Graphic skills became in demand and were seen as value.

Printed Mass Media:

Graphic Art and printed media were active participants in the new communication system.

Commercial art became a distinctive feature in mass culture through the usage of shared images, shared customs, and through meanings and aspirations.

Mass Media was becoming a part of everyday life.

Ex: News, entertainment, advertisement, and information. (images were saturating culture)

Images shaped opinions about style and form, behavior and docurm and social priorities and prohibitions.

Advertisement Campaigns were another rising form of communication.

Changes in Print Technology:

There were improvements in the speed of printing presses, and a new source of paper fiber was introduced.

The Lino type and Monotype casters were introduced in the 19th century. New faces could be designed and casted in metal. All of this was done in a fraction of the time in which the traditional method would have required.

Photographic transfer techniques were popular in the 1860s. Images could be transferred onto litho stone and printed.

Photographic codes offered a realistic view of the world.

Photography in modernism:

Ex: Post cards

     Portraits

     Travel Albums

     Advertisements

     News, and journals

Photography played a role in type design, illustration, and Fine Art. Influenced the ways tobal values were rendered and line techniques.

Graphic designs and advertisement

Rise of advertisement grows along with capitalism in the 19th century

Variation in type size for different company

Advertisement artwork became a professional service

Mass media became more complex as graphic skills became more specialized

Ads industry is a way for graphic art to reach consumers

Brands became important

Buying and selling of space in journals and walls on billboards

Training for illustration artists began to institutionalized

Graphic skills separate from typesetting

Poster and public space

Graphic artists made poster design a new form of art

It can express political and personal views on posters

Also reflect life

Raised a question of who owned visual public space as graphic designs appear everywhere in the city

The need for regulation and censorship began

Chap 8

Private press movement and modern design

What and look were affected by modern graphic trends

New type faces were invented to suit contemporary graphic needs

Vienna and Berlin approached highly legible and elegant in texts

Integration of design and industry

Art Nouveau had been banalized by popular consumption

Graphic design took industrial methods to formal account

Peter Behren was the first to use san serif for body copy

He did typographic reforms, fascinated with geometric composition, AEG advisor, industrial designer

He designed for London Underground such as posters, maps, and signs.

Jugendstil:

Graphic designers popularized the patterns,models and layouts from architecture.

Jugendstil and Art Nouveau were characterized by expressions of sensual freedom, signaled by female forms, floral and organic motifs.

Viennese Design:

Vienna Secession Formed in 1898.

They were a group that rejected academic constraints.

This group was founded by Gustav klimt, who wanted to forge a link between Fine art and applied Art.

Secessionist style leaned towards an elegant and sensual aspect of geometry that found expression in almost all applied arts, from type design to interior decoration.

Changing patterns in the use of graphic media

A new social order was established

rapid industrialization that had transformed manufacturing in the United States and Europe created a new social order

A paper trail

assisted the manufacture, shipping, tracking, ordering, and selling of products.

White-Collar Worker

in universal education turned out an increasingly literate workforce in the nineteenth century, while office work produced a new labor profile: the white-collar worker.

Business became its own industry

Business became its own industry with its own products, equipment, and services.

Administration and Management

Organizations had to be managed, and printed graphics helped with every administrative task.

Industrial Expansion

began to change the demographics and society

suburbs, urban areas

inclusive markets for all social classes

Pollution and Inhumane

became a feature of the industrial urban landscapes

working and living conditions were inhumane and unregulated

exposed to toxins, no health care, filth, dehumanized all to make profit

Class Divisions

the lower class were exposed to new risks and forms of exploitation

Mass-circulation Magazines set the Social Standards

The Saturday Evening Post, A Boy’s Own Paper, Vanity Fair, and Cosmopolitan were all launched by the 1880s.

they changed and set new demographics of readership

fashion, entertainment, and the passing scene.

Serious-looking pages set in regular columns of small print appealed to men of business,

celebrity-studded pages of gossip sheets broke their text columns into readable, liberally illustrated bits.

Books and newspapers were printed in larger editions because there was a high demand for them

Cultural Shifts

increase in the appetite for printed ephemera

things that exist or are used/ enjoyed for only a short time

this print ephemera is still relevant today even though there is a shift in the way we purchase items, For Example Amazon and Red it

Ch. 8

Key Movements in Design

The Industrial Revolution 1750-1850

Victorian Style (1837-1901)

Industrial Revolution

first trend in industrial time period

graphic design emerged as self-conscious responses to the structural changes produced by industrialization.

brought the gap between aesthetics (form and surface) and production methods (means and materials) into focus.

addressing broad social and cultural issues through deliberate principles of design practice

rain of queen victoria

fashion was influenced by this style

development of new tech, mass goods, typefaces

Arts and Crafts Style

enormous impact on the design of fine press and trade books and independent artists’ journals

linked to the economic force and cultural reach of the British Empire.

journals helped internationalize aesthetic movements.

Artists and writers took control of every practical aspect of these publications, seeking handmade paper and collaborating with printers through every phase of production.

simple forms inspired by natural floura and flan

1850-1914

these designs are not copyrighted so you can use them

founded in Great Movement focus on mass production

motifs taken from nature

hand made—that had evidence of human hand

Morris became interested in reviving blackletter typefaces that would invoke the broad-edged quill-based letters of the Gothic period.

Mass Production has lacked taste and and morality

Art Nouveau

artists and designers in the 1890s and 1900s.

curved lines and organic shapes

fluid non geometric organic shapes

lines and edges taken from japanese cultures

ex. The budapest Museum of Applied Arts

The Peacock Skirt

La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge

converted attempt national style…inspired by Japanases culture and  style…welcomed new styles and technique, materials, technology, construction

there is no universal classification system type

mages of women with flowing hair, soft curves, and streamlined forms in positions of flight introduced a mildly erotic undertone t

Suggestive without causing offense, this indulgent style became a great favorite among upper-middle-class consumers

- Cindy, Heidi, Tao

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CH. 6 Cindy, Coby, Thao, Heidi

1. In the nineteenth century, the industrialization of print production expanded graphic and typographic styles.

This change marked a shift in public opinion about visual arts in industrial contexts

The first papermaking machines increased paper production.

The speed and efficiency of mechanized punch cutting and typecasting generated decorative display types in abundance

It increased the literacy rate and create new jobs, compositor and layout artists

Specifically catered to common people and working individuals

Stimulate mass media culture

2. Rise to Advertising Industry

production and distribution of goods, in turn, gave rise to a modern advertising industry that met manufacturers’ need to compete in expanded markets.

Promotional uses of printed images helped produce mass markets and, incidentally, a new visual culture.

3. Cast iron was introduced in 1803 and used for decorative display types

Sped the process in punch cutting and typecasting

Helped literacy rates and mass production

The speed and efficiency of mechanized punch cutting and typecasting generated decorative display types in abundance

It increased the literacy rate and create new jobs, compositor and layout artists

Specifically catered to common people and working individuals

Stimulate mass media culture

4. Electrotyping: produced multiple casts of original blocks

Increased print runs

5. Lithography or stone printing

Brought flexibility to image production

Invented in 1796

6. Photography brought new codes of realism

Invented in 1820’s

Photographic methods were not adapted to mass production until the 19th century

7. Industrialization and visual culture

The graphic effects of mass-media production involved changes in print technology and the publishing industry and their impact on the look and kinds of materials available to consumers.

Shifts standards of beauty and reinforces stylization

Introduced as result of romanticism in the 18th century

Nature passion and imagination prevail as main themes

Printing becomes synonymous with business

Print culture was both an industrial product and an instrument through which markets and opinions were mediated

8. Illustrated papers: one of the most radical developments in the media landscape

Illustrational techniques appealed to readers, industrialism had brought with it the goal of universalism

Newspapers played a role in pursuing mass education, they provided a major cultural force shaping opinions and identities

Ex. the penny magazine

9. Book design for mass production

Literacy rates increased in the 19th century as novels, poems and written works became more popular.

Publications served to mediate social values across readerships and classes to an unprecedented degree, as literacy rates grew within an increasingly mobile workforce.

10. Printed images.

The first half of the 19th century focused on steel engravings, wood engravings, and lithography

Lithography and photography altered the aesthetic and conceptual codes of imagery, and printed images assumed social and practical functions in education, entertainment, politics, and science.

Industrialization had a direct impact on image reproduction techniques

Illustration brought fame to many artists whose work helped make romanticism a popular concept

The ranks of printers and engravers were filled with apprenticeship rather than formal schooling

Distinction between fine art and trades

11. Advertising design:

Consideration in designing print layouts was not important until the advertisement industry grew and printers began to invest efforts in design

Competition increased

Fine artists received a different status in comparison to graphic workers in the printing industry

12. Critical issues

Newspaper prints and journals were being used for political action

Mass-produced graphic media became objects of consumption in their own right, and the line between commercial art and fine art defined the status of graphic design in modern visual culture.

The role of design cannot be reduced to manipulation but designers and their work took part in this complex cultural system

changing social structure, but they also contributed to that change, regulating and challenging notions of class and status

[eight-team-blog]

Chapters 1 & 2

CHAPTER 1

Chapter one discusses the origins of type and design by starting with communications through visual means. These early visual communications began in Prehistoric Times. 35,00 BCE sees some of the earliest figural-symbolic representations by man. These ancient depictions are argued to describe events and spiritual concepts.

Lascaux cave, circa 15-10,000 BCE

Although approached naturalistically, the images are symbolic and simplified.

From this, comes early writing. Proto-writing begins as systems of pictographic symbols which facilitated trade and commerce by serving as a record of events and transactions. From proto-writing, early writing emerges as an efficient and more easily adapted replacement for older pictogram systems.

Cuneiform is considered the first of the early written systems and introduces the highly influential concept of schematic signs. This schematic sign system quickly spreads and eventually evolves into the even more efficient Alphabet system. Alphabetic script proved useful in not only efficiency, but also in its ability to stand for word sounds, perfect for facilitating understanding between languages.

CHAPTER 2

This chapter touches the significance and process on how and why graphic design becomes a component of literacy.  As cultures begin to develop the leaders and the people need some kind of source of communication where word of mouth is no longer efficient. Many areas of public and private life require Communication.

It is quite interesting how their variations were a cultural equivalent to individual handwriting.

Political power used design to show off power and conquest.  For example “Military conquests took the Roman alphabet into new territories as an instrument of imperial administration and cultural domination”. The increase in graphic literacy changed educational patterns, politics, and business of everyday life. Cultural understanding became evident in visual forms and their alphabet. Eventually graphic literacy lead to  “legal and literary texts, business records and accounts, official decrees and documents, maps, ritual prayers, and expressive graffiti had all been developed.”

Materials and contexts become a significant aspect and magnifier for communication, design and efficiency. The design, materials, production, and contexts embodied power.  

[eight-team-blog]

Chapters 3 & 4:

Ch. 3: Medieval Letter forms and Formats 

The letter forms in the middle age are still in use and contain information about their History.

The Codex book developed as the result of changes in the uses of texts.

Graphic features can distinguish different types of doctrines, and cultural value.

Illustrations Spread certain kinds of knowledge.

Publishing became an industry.

Medieval Lettering was linked to Specific Geographical Locations

The Codex  was developed in the third and fourth Centuries, it had replaced other formats.

The codex books were made with vellum from animal skins.

Books acquired chapter headers and other navigational devices.

These features remain as a part of graphic templates.

Printing had arrived at the end of The Classical Period.

Roman Letter forms Provide models for new forms of hand writing. 

Iconography was a common practice in a copying period.

Images Contain a great deal of information about medieval life, but they were also used to spread knowledge about mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and other science.

Graphic Media and Context

Parchment had the advantage of flexibility and could be made smooth for writing on both sides.

Palimpsests were produced due to a parchment shortage in the 8th Century.

paper was invented in the first or second century of china, and spread to the near East, Egypt, and Morocco.

Chinese Wood blocks were carried west to the Arab world.

Technology of the Codex replaced the scroll.

Many Classical texts have been written without word Separations, they are simply long passages of broken text.

Knowledge was not only transmitted but also shaped graphically.

The Legacy of the medieval period is the enduring influence in the forms of letters.

Ch.4: Renaissance Design Standardization and Modularization in Print

Graphic design in the renaissance was bound to the development of  letter press printing.

Late medieval letter forms laid out conventions, established norms for written composition, and visual representation.

The impact of printing expanded a role for graphic design, in shaping and circulating knowledge.

Multiple copies of printed text and images fostered the development of science and exploration.

Print Technology

Brought major changes to production and publishing.

It standardized letter forms, new writing styles, and page designs.

Print technology had promoted the revival of renaissance and humanistic sensibility. 

Modularization

Printing techniques were based on the break down of a complex process into smaller units.

Technological innovations had placed graphic design within political, religious, and economical life.

Ex: The church had used print as a source of control, and the protestants had used print as a tool of reform.

In Early print Design, Graphic design had became an integral part of printing.

Print technology centered on two innovations

Invention of the movable type (Means of casting).

It was a Reliable method of reproducing images.

Graphic Communication in Renaissance Culture

Medieval Guilds adopted to the new printing trade.

Printing trade was an exclusive trade, you had to be a master worker and capable of opening shop.

The invention of perspective was introduced in the 15th century, perspective had encoded rational conventions that brought the visual world into an organized system.

Printed artifacts served as a powerful effect through both form and content.