Module 4

The Industrial Revolution was a time of radical sweeping change in human history. The power of steam and new mechanical innovations gave rise to a new culture and society. The predominate source of power shifted from humans and animals, to mechanical and steam. This had a marked impact on Graphic Design of the time period. Type faces became bolder and more pronounced as mass communications became the norm and a bigger impact was needed. The speed of printing increased with several innovations to the printing press.

Antique Tuscan

The linotype machine was a dramatic innovation to the printing process, it was quite literally the mechanization of typography. One of the problems slowing the production of prints was the need to set each letter of each word in every single printed document had to be set by hand. The linotype automated this process and created an explosion of printed material.

The invention of photography also had a dramatic effect on communication in this era. Joseph Niepce was the first to produce a photographic image.

The change from a handicraft to the mechanical production of items reminds me of my own personal experience with screen printing. I have over the past year have learned how to screen print by hand and have had some reasonable success with it. My rate of production though, is limited by my mechanical aids or printing press. Manual printing takes a lot more human energy and precision then a fully automated press such as the one below.

Module 3

These chapters focused on the printing of the written word and the explosion and exploration of the mechanization of printing and the development of fonts and typography. The greatest advance made in the area of human communication until our current culture of electronic mass communication was the development of the printing press, which increased the rate of production of books and printed material exponentially.

Prior to the development of the printing press by Johannes Gensfleisch zum Guttenburg, books were all written by hand. In fact a production line style of book making controlled by the clergy and the wealthy had been in place for years. A single book before the printing press possessed the same value as a farm or vinyard! 

The name Incubala has been adapted for the period of time and the books printed after the creation of Johannes' press. This was a time in which not only the printed word spread rapidly, but the process of printing itself. As it states in Meggs History of Graphic Design, "By 1480 twenty-three northern European towns, thirty-one Italian towns, seven French towns, six Spanish and Portuguese towns and one English town had presses. By 1500 Printing was practiced in over 140 towns. It is estimated that over thirty-five thousand editions for a total of nine million books were produced."

Just 50 years earlier, the monasteries and libraries of Europe had only contained around fifty thousand volumes. That MASSIVE increase in literature made the literacy rates around Europe leap to a previously unheard of high. The mass production of books and their effect on literacy was two-fold. The increased supply of books greatly brought down their monetary value to a fraction of what it had been previously and the mere fact that there were more books in circulation gave more people access to physical copies.

The rise of literacy also gave rise to the many social and political upheavals that took place in Europe in the last couple of centuries. The fact that so many could now read and the ease with which mass copies of written material could now be created led to an intellectual revolution as new ideas and values could be spread to the masses. This led to the destabilization of the European religious authority's power base as so much of it depended on controlling the flow of information, much like the scribes of Sumeria and Egypt. This weakening of the Clergy's informational authority led to the spread of Humanism and Individualism, a hallmark of our current society.

The study of this great upheaval and social change 500 years ago, gives me pause as I can see parallels between it and the current change that we are going through as a culture and as a species. The flow and spread of information, once limited to books and print, now lives in the chips and drives of our computers. Instead of movable type, we now have word processing programs, e-mail, and blogs. Instead of illuminated manuscripts we now have photoshop and jpegs. In place of paper we have light projected directly into our eyes from our screens. Information is now free to those with an internet connection and a power source, in fact, one can view computer literacy as the new literacy. The rise of the internet and personal computing has done as much for the spread and exchange of information and ideas as the printing press did and more.

It's interesting to note though, that the printing press led to learning being a more individual and personal act leading to individualism and the spread of different ideas. In the current trend, information is more open and with the rise of social networking sites it is instantly share-able and spreadable much like a virus, from person to person. I wonder though, if this will lead to more of a homogeneity of ideas and information as we all begin to draw from the same sources, such as the front pages of sites like Yahoo, or Youtube. Hopefully not as variety is what makes life so interesting. 

With the rise of cloud computing, I also wonder if the preservation of information will be a personal thing any longer as more and more documents, videos, and other information are saved on the servers of other more powerful computers that are owned by corporations.  But like the Europeans of the past half millennium I can only speculate on what changes this new technology will bring and I look forward to finding out.

Module 2

Graphic Design is the art of communicating with visual images. It has at its very core the desire to connect to and inform another human being. When looked at in this sense it’s easy to see how it could have developed from our more primitive ancestors.  It’s having a conversation in another language, the visual one. Before, history began being recorded in a physical sense there was an oral history. Legends and stories would be passed down from village elder to the younger generation. 

And for a time, this was good. It passed down knowledge from one generation to the next allowing the tribes base of knowledge to grow and expand, but there are some problems with trying to preserve information this way. Being passed from one person to another leaves room for change and human error in the retelling of it. There is also the issue of the mortality of the teller; to make it to the present the information would have needed to be passed down an unbroken chain of successors for thousands of years. With our current knowledge of the human lifespan this is highly unlikely. One can only imagine the countless things lost to the sands of time in this method.

The quantum leap came when these original people began to use a more visual language. There are examples of this first step in the cave paintings and petroglyphs discovered in caves around the world.

 This small step may not seem like it has the same richness to it that an oral story would, but this graphic representation is a moment frozen in time. A painting on the wall that has lasted to the present is a marvel in that it is unchanged and provides us with a glimpse into the world of our ancient ancestors. Instead of hearing a change and diluted tale of the hunt, we can SEE it. This would have been very powerful to the paleolithic people. Pictographic communication is not without it limits though. The details of the events can be lost and the images that depict those events are dependent upon the skill of the artists and the interpretation of the viewer. As time moved on, there was a movement towards the simplification of these images and historians theorize that this led to the emergence of written language.

The ancient Mesopotamians are often credited with the creation of many advances in human culture and technology such as agriculture, animal domestication and the development of metal tools. The Sumarians, who settled in the land of Mesopotamia are believed by archaeologists to be one of the first civilizations to create a writing system. This advance had a dramatic effect on human culture. As the village culture moved into one of a city, many accounting problems for the distribution of resources to maintain a large amount of people living together arose. Many historians theorize that the writing system arose due to this desperate need by temple scribes to account for all of this information.

Example of Sumarian Cuneiform

The development of this system of communicating information made those that could understand and write it VERY powerful in their societies. In fact, being a scribe was a prerequisite to priesthood, estate management, accounting, medicine  and government. The power of the writing system among the select was repeated in the Egyptian society, with their famed hieroglyphics. 

Scribes in Egyptian society had immense power, in fact their writing had a large religious aspect to it. The Egyptians had an extremely superstitious culture centered around the afterlife. There was a belief that one could predict what would happen after one died through the use of a scribe writing down the story. These came to be know in popular culture as Books of the Dead, and were in fact some of the first examples of illuminated manuscripts.

This discrepancy in knowledge and power began to equalize only later with introduction of several advances in both language and technology. Alphabets, or writing systems that use phonographs in which the basic speech sounds of a language are represented, began to form, making literacy more accessible to the common person. "The Northwestern Semitic peoples -Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phonecians- are widely believed to have been the source [of the alphabet] (Meggs 19).

The most famous users of the alphabet, the Greeks, used it to develop science, philosophy and democracy.

The other advance that greatly evened the scales was the development of printing and paper. Both of these leaps forward in human development were invented by the Chinese. The printing process is actually quite simple, the space around an image on a flat surface is cut away, and the remaining raised areas are inked and a piece of paper is place over the surface and rubbed to transfer the image to paper.

The Chinese used this technology to create a paper currency which was widely distributed and many of the populus were exposed to printing and the word. This aspect of Chinese history led to an Eastern Intellectual Renaissance of science, art, medicine and poetry. This is comparable to what Guttenburg's press did for the West hundreds of years later.

These chapters have really opened my eyes to the grow of human culture and how closely the visual language has been tied to it. One might even say that all of our current advances have come from the compiling of this information over hundreds of thousands of years, slowly building upon those that have come before us.

Module 1

Initial thoughts and observations
Going through the book and simply looking at all the images is a novel way to approach a textbook for the sake of learning. As a primarily visual learner I recognize it as a great way to really engage my curiosity and desire to learn more.

What really caught my eye while going through this book was the evolution of the way that visuals were used to communicate. From the beginning with the simple cave paintings of our prehistoric ancestors to our modern advertisements, you can quite literally see the language evolve over the course of hundreds of years by turning these pages. What I found fascinating is that the images shown in this book have similar subjects and layouts. They mainly focus on the combination between the written word and illustrations depicting human figures; a way of sharing ideas that I now realize has been with humankind since it's inception, but the sophistication of the images greatly increases as timeline of the images closes in on the modern age.

Another thing that really stuck out at me was that as time progressed and printing technology evolved, the use of images began to overtake the use of text in regards to how ideas were communicated. Whether this comes from a kind of visual collective unconscious or simply that the technology had restricted artists in this regard before, I can only postulate, but I am eager to delve more into these concepts as the quarter progresses.