Blog Post Task 3 Individual Work

German newspapers printed between 1700 -1900

Movements:

Gothic Art Movement This art movement is most commonly associated with religious art pieces and scriptures, elements that helped inspire the print on these newspapers is the fonts that were used as they are a lot fancier than most other styles. (Fonts)

Insular Art Movement (Framing of the text and images on the front page decorating the page) illuminated scripts were a type of books that were highly decorated with precious metals like gold and lapis lazuli this was used especially for religious books, another property from this type of art was the first letter of each page as it was drawn much larger than the rest and decorated to indicate the start of the text in the page.

Printing Technique: Movable type (this method used metal matrices with letter on them they were moved around to create the text needed) used with a printing press (machinery used to apply pressure on paper with inked moving type this enabled printers to increase the amount of material they could print) Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and developed the moving type cast based on a matrix and hand mold.

Material: paper material heavy in cotton while the newspaper from 1767 has a heavier hemp concentration in the mixture of the pulp

Grid System: it is the way an editor is able to create pagination in a print document like newspapers, using mostly 2 column grid sometimes 3 and even only 1 column to present text articles stacked one after the other starting from the left 

·         Title is framed with fancy designs to bring more attention to it.

·         Page is divided into a grid of 2 columns with the content starting from the left side.

·         Front page decorate with illustrations like a crest or a scene from everyday life for special events like Christmas celebrations (inspired by illuminated scripts).

·         Text fonts inspired by the Gothic art movement

Credit: Daniel Cassar, Group B

1884 Holy Bible

 

This is the Family Holy Bible published in 1884 around that time when Arts and Crafts Movement was around.  There are a lot of valid points that proves that this Bible was inspired by this movement. Arts and Crafts Movement is all about creating art by hand and less production. The leading member of Arts and Crafts Movement William Morris encouraged all artists to go back in the art history and get some ideas from there and make everything original and by hand. This movement had traditional movements like, Victorian, Gothic styles.

This bible has very thick and black leather cover which is protected with metal clasps to show the important of the Bible. The actual book cover has golden floral ornaments at the spine of the book and a big 3D looking cross with golden ornaments. William Morris was inspired from nature and would always try and show that the nature is the one of the best God’s creations and that it would help to forget all Industrial Revolutions caused problems.  I guess William Morris got inspired by the Victorian book cover styles. Victorian style books had delicate decay, eye-catching ornament with some gold elements.

 

Inside the Bible there are a lot of different fonts and different type of layouts. One of the most noticeable fonts was based on gothic revival and it has its characteristics like, tall, narrow letters, formed in sharp, straight, angular lines.

 

 

The Bible has three types of images, black and white picture, picture with colour, and hand painted images. Hand painted images have very bright colours and the most popular and common colour is gold. All hand painted pictures has small gold ornament which reminds illuminated scripts. Illuminated scripts usually have gold written on it which gives that illuminated script illusion. They also use to have embellished initial capital letters like you can see in the image.

		The Bible has couple types of layouts. It usually has couple pages of pictures and then the text. In one of the pages image could be in the middle of the page and text would go around it. The rest of the text is very small font and “squished” together.

 

Because it’s a family Bible there were some separate pages left out for the personal information like births/deaths/weddings in the family. In general Bible was very important book, because at that time they use to look at the religion in the more serious way and Bible was very well respected.

This Bible has a lot of different styles which requires different type of printing method. For the simple text they used moveable type printing press. Individual letter were collected into the word or text and tight together to make one big image form. Then this type of form was placed on the printing press and thin coating of viscous ink would be applied and it would make a mark.

Because Bible had images without any colour it required another type of printing which used etchings and was called photographic etching and later renamed to rotogravure. Etched copper plate with acid was used for this printing. In the place where resist would stay the copper would remain raised, but where there was no resist the copper would be eaten away and that’s how physical peaks were made in order for ink to reside.

For the colourful images lithography was used. I order to be able to print colour, multiple stones for each colour went through print press as many times as there were stones. The most difficult part printers had was to keep image in the same place that the colour would be in the same place. If artists wanted more accurate image they had to hand colour it on top of it.

Credit:  Joana Nummelin, Group B

Books

• ·         During the period of Arts and Crafts Movement, drawings were done by hand.
• ·         Medieval Art was the model for much Arts and Crafts design and medieval life.
• ·         The patterns used were inspired by the flora and fauna of the British countryside.
• ·         Simple decorations used for patterns and illustrations.
• ·         Preserving and emphasising the natural qualities of the materials used was one of the most important principles of Arts and Crafts style.
• ·         Gothic Revival was a great impact on the Arts and Crafts style.
• ·         Use of bold forms and strong colours were particularly inspirational.
• ·         Material, structure, and function became crucial principles of the Arts and Crafts movements.
• ·         The arts of the book including calligraphy, typography and book binding are highly valued.
• ·         The press movement was Kelmscott Press.
• ·         A desire to break down the hierarchy of the arts (elevated fine art like painting and sculpture, but looked down on applied art) to revive and restore dignity to traditional handicrafts and to make art that could be affordable for all.

Credit: Naomi Zammit Ciantar, Group B

Signs

In my observations while visiting Malta’s capital city we are introduced to multiple different types of Art movements.

The first thing that we saw in Valletta where multiple store front signs. They a lot of the signs had a postmodern / simple feel to them meaning when you study the signs you can see that there is mainly the use of typography. The common fonts that are used are sans serif fonts and sometimes you will see typography that had serifs in there font as well.

For example this sign has a san serif font. There are also images on the sign repreesting a playing card character  that is influneced from the illumitated menu scrpits.                

This signs is a serif type font and it is mostly influenced with art nouveau because it has some patterns and details in the middle of the sign to resemble the hierarchy for the sign that is in the middle

There where also signs that where created with the use of neon lights. Most of the neon lights are influnced with the work of the Bauhaus, Constucivists and psychedlic movements .

These signs are using a modernistic typography it has a simplistic style.

This sign is using a modernitic typography aswell but this one is more influnced with the bauhuas movement where you have the text in front of the neon and it has different colour to it.

Credit: Darren Camilleri, Group B

 

Art Noueau

Art Nouveau

It was an international decorative style that thrived roughly during the two decades that girded the turn of the century. Its identifying visual quality is an organic, plantlike line. It can either undulate with whiplash energy or flow with elegant grace as it defined, modulates, and decorated a given space. Art nouveau is a transitional style that evolved from the historicism that dominated design for most of the nineteenth century. The Victorians sought solutions through established historical approaches, while the modernists adopted a new international ornamental style, using elegant motifs aligned with nature and often distinguished by free and graceful lines. The organic linear movements frequently dominate the spatial area and other visual properties, such as colour and texture. Forms and lines were often invented rather than copied from nature or the past, there was a revitalization of the design process that pointed toward abstract art. 

Art Nouveau

Cheret and Grasset

Cheret was convinced that pictorial lithographic posters would replace the typographic letterpress posters that filled the urban environment, but he could not convince advertisers of this. He simplified his designs and increased the scale of his major figures and lettering. He worked directly on stone, whereby an artist's design was executed on the stones by craftsmen. During the 1880s he used a black line with the primary colors. This allowed subtle overprinting an astonishing range of colors and effects. Stipple and crosshatch, soft watercolor-like washes and bold calligraphic chunks of color, scratching, scraping, and splattering. Typical composition is a central figure in animated gesture, surrounded by swirls of color, secondary figures or props, and bold lettering that often echoes the shapes and gestures of the figure. 

Grasset's design ideas were rapidly assimilated after publication, including the decorative borders framing the contents, the integration of illustration and text into a unit, and the design of illustrations so that typography was printed over skies and other areas. His formal composition and muted color contrasted strongly with Cheret's informally composed, brightly colored work. His flowing line, subjective color, and ever-present floral motifs pointed toward French art nouveau.

Cheret's design

Grasset's design

English Art Nouveau

Aubrey Beardsley was the enfant terrible of art nouveau, with his striking pen line, vibrant black  and white work, and shockingly exotic imagery. He sythesized Japanese block prints and William Morris into a new idiom. He reproduced retained complete fidelity to the original art. The flat patterns and dynamic curves of art nouveau yielded to a more naturalistic tonal quality, and dotted contours softened the decisive line of his earlier work. He learned how to indicate figures and clothing with minimal lines and flat shapes with no tonal modulation. 

English Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau comes to America

Beardsley's style as a stepping-stone to fresh graphic technique and a visual unity of type and image that moved beyond imitation. He made innovative use of photo mechanical techniques to produce repeated, overlapping, and reversed images. Type became a design element to be squeezed into a narrow of letters became the same length and formed a rectangle. 

American Art Nouvea

Innovation in Belgium and the Netherlands

Privet Livemont produced nearly three dozen posters and was strongly inspired by Mucha's idealized women. His major innovation was a double contour separating the figure from the background. Were often outlined by a thick, white band, which increased the image's impact when posted on billboards. They brought about an important artistic revival in the Netherlands that provided the seeds for future movements such as De Stijl, art deco, and what is now known as the Wendingen style. The original discoveries were taken over by those who only saw their superficial appeal and continued t exploit them as fashionable decorative styles, easy to manipulate and applicable to almost any goal.

De Stijl

The German Jugendstil movement

Full double-page illustrations, horizontal illustrations across the top of a page, and decorative art nouveau designs brought rich variety to a format that was about half visual material and half text. Large-scale ornamentation ranged from Peter Behrens's abstract designs inspired by ancient Egyptian artifacts to stylized floral designs. Behrens became widely known for large, multicolor woodblock prints inspired by French art nouveau and Japanese prints. He experimented with ornaments and vignettes of abstract design through two other publications.

Jugendstil Movement

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

The Arts and Crafts Movement and Its Heritage

Diagrams and symbols are printed in brilliant primary colors with woodblocks, color replaced traditional alphabet labeling to identify the lines, shapes, and forms in the geometry lessons. The dynamic color and crisp structures anticipate geometric abstract art of the twentieth century. This first treated the book as a limited edition art object and then influenced commercial production, which was largely a result of Arts and Crafts movement. This flourished in England during the last decades of the nineteenth century of the Industrial Revolution. William Morris's main inspiration were medieval arts and botanical forms. Morris tried to implement Ruskin's ideas, the tastelessness of mass-produced goods and the lack of honest craftsmanship might be addressed by a reunion of art with craft.

The Century Guild

The designs provide one of the links between the Arts and Crafts movements and the floral stylization of art nouveau. The medieval passions of the Arts and Crafts movement were reflected in the graphic designs of Image and Horne. Its careful layout and typesetting, handmade paper, and intricate woodblock illustrations made it the harbinger of the growing Arts and Crafts interest in typography, graphic design, and printing. It was a design and printing movement advocating an aesthetic concern for the design and production of beautiful books. It sought to regain the design standards, high-quality materials, and careful workmanship of printing that existed before the Industrial Revolution. Morris admired the well-crafted typographic ages, generous margins, wide line spacing, and meticulous printing alive with hand-cut woodblock illustrations, head and tailpieces, and ornamented capitals.

Century Guild

The Kelmscott Press

Morris had made a number of manuscript books, writing the text in beautifully controlled scripts and embellishing them with delicate borders and initials with flowing forms and soft, clear colors. Punches were made and revised for the final designs, which captured the essence of Jenson's work but did not slavishly copy it. The Kelmscott Press was committed to recapturing the beauty of incunabula books. This design approach was established in its early books. These have a wonderful visual compatibility with Morris's types and woodblock illustrations. The entire design would be developed through this fluid process, for Morris believed that meticulous copying of a preliminary drawing squeezed the life from a work. The influence between Morris and Kelmscott Press upon graphic design, was evidenced not just in the direct stylist imitation of the Kelmscott borders, initials and type-styles. 

The private press movement

Ruskin went furthest in establishing an idyllic workshop paradise became a major English voice calling for integration of art and industry in a later era. Illustration and ornament were rejected in the approximately fifty volumes produced there using fine paper, perfect presswork, and exquisite type and spacing. It possessed a ringing elegance and straightforward legibility with modest weight differences between the thick and thin strokes and a slightly compressed letter. 

Private Press Movement

A book-design renaissance

The long-range effect of Morris was a significant upgrading of book design and typography throughout the world. In Germany, this influence inspired a renaissance of arts-and-crafts activities, wonderful new typefaces, and a significant improvement in book design. Mass production was viewed as a necessary evil, cautiously tolerated, principally for economic reasons. Guidelines included symmetrical layouts, tranquil harmony and balance, careful margin proportions, proper letter and wrong spacing, single traditional typefaces in as few sizes as possible, and skillful letterpress printing. Typography existed for the book and all of the typefaces designed for this purpose. The most important German type designer in the Arts and Crafts movement was Rudolph Koch, a powerful figure who was deeply mystical and medieval in his viewpoints. His type designs ranged from original interpretations of medieval letterforms to unexpected new designs, such as the rough-hewn chunky letterforms.

Book-Design Renaissance

Arts and Crafts attitudes about materials, function, and social value became an important inspiration for twentieth-century designers. Its positive impact on graphic design continues a century through the revivals of earlier typeface designs, the continued efforts toward excellence in book design and typography, and the private press movement that continues to this day.

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

Graphic Design and the Industrial Revolution

Graphic communications became more important and more widely accessible during this period of incessant change. Technology lowered unit costs and increased the production of printed materials. Handicrafts greatly diminished as the unity of design and production ended. The nature of visual information was profoundly changed. The range of typographic sizes and letterform styles exploded. The use of color lithography passed the aesthetic experience of colorful images from the privileged few to the whole of society.

Inventions of Typography

Larger scale, greater visual impact and new tactile and expressive characters were demanded and the book typography that had slowly evolved from handwriting did not fulfill these needs. It was no longer enough for the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to function only as phonetic symbols. A fat-face typestyle is a roman face whose contrast and weight have been increased by expanding the thickness of the capital height. The rapid tilt in typographic design taste toward modern-style romans and new jobbing styles after the turn of the century seriously affected him. 

The antiques convey a bold, mechanical feeling through slablike rectangular serifs, even weight throughout the letters, and short ascenders and descenders. It seems that the English typefounders were trying to invent every possible design permutation by modifying forms or proportions and applying all manner of decoration to their alphabets. Typefounders also varied the depth of shading, producing everything from pencil-thin shadows to deep perspectives. The mechanization of manufacturing processes during the Industrial Revolution made the application of decoration more economical and efficient. Designers of furniture, household objects, and even typefaces delighted in design intricacy. 

Sans serifs, which became so important to twentieth-century graphic design, had a tentative beginning. The cumbersome early sans serifs were used primarily for subtitles and descriptive material under excessively bold fat faces and Egyptians.

Early Sans Serifs

The wood-type poster

Durable, light, and less than half as expensive as large metal types, wood type rapidly overcame printers' initial objections and had a significant impact on poster and broadsheet design. The designer had access to a nearly infinite range of typographic sizes, styles, weights, and novel ornamental effects, and the prevailing design philosophy often encouraged an eclectic style. Long words or copy dictated condensed type, and short words or copy were set in expanding fonts. Important words were given emphasis through the use of the largest available type sizes.

Wood-Type Poster

A revolution in printing

The first powered press was designed much like a handpress connected to a steam engine. Its innovations included a method of inking the type by rollers rather than by hand-inking balls. the horizontal movement of the type forms in the bed of the machine, and the movement of the tympan and frisket were automated. The type form was on a flat bed, which moved back and forth beneath a cylinder. The printing phase the cylinder rotated over the type, carrying the sheet to be printed. The value of high-speed steam-powered printing would have been limited without an economical and abundant source of paper. 

The mechanization of typography

Setting type by hand and then redistributing it into the job case remained a slow and costly process. Before the Linotype was invented, the high cost and slow pace of composition limited even the largest daily newspaper to eight pages, and books remained fairly precious. Ninety typewriter keys controlled vertical tubes that were filled with these matrixes. Each time the operator pressed a key, a matrix for that character was released. It slid down a chute and was automatically lined up with the other characters in that line. Melted lead was poured into the line of matrixes to cast a slug bearing the raised line of type. Handset metal typography for advertising and editorial headlines until the advent of phototypography in the 1960s.

Popular graphics of the Victorian era

The Victorians searched for a design spirit to express their epoch. Aesthetic confusion led to a number of often contradictory design approaches and philosophies mixed together in a scattered fashion. They defined design as a moral act that achieved the status of art through the designer's ideals and attitudes. They believed the integrity and character of civilization were linked to its design. Victorian graphic design captured and conveyed the values of the era. Sentimentality, nostalgia and a canon of idealized beauty were expressed through printed images of children, maidens, pupies and flowers. The production medium for this outpouring of Victorian popular graphics was chromolithography, an innovation of the Industrial Revolution that unleashed a flood of colorful printed images.

Popular Graphics of the Victorian Era

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

An Epoch of Typographic Genius

To construct the new roman capital letters, a square was divided into a grid of sixty-four units. Each of these units was divided further into thirty-six smaller units for a total of 2,304 tiny squares. Italics were constructed on a smaller grid. The new letter designs had fewer calligraphic properties inspired by the chisel and flat pen. A mathematical harmony was achieved by measurement and drafting instruments. Romain du Roi was the new typeface which had increased contrast between thick and thin strokes, sharp horizontal serifs and an even balance for each letterform.

Types designed for the Imprimerie Royale could only be used by that office for royal printing other use constituted a capital offense. Some typefounders quickly cut types with similar characteristics but they made certain the designs were sufficiently distinct to avoid confusion with Imprimerie Royale fonts.

Graphic design of the rococo era

Florid and intricate rococo ornament is composed of S- and C- curves with scrollwork, tracery and plant forms derived from nature, classical and oriental art and medieval sources. Light pastel colours were often used with ivory white and gold in asymmetrically balanced designs. Engraving is a drawing made with a graver instead of a pencil as the drawing tool and a smooth copper plate instead of a sheet of paper as the substrate. This free line was an ideal medium for expressing the florid curves of the rococo sensibility, engraving flourished throughout the 1700s. Engravers prominently signed broadsheets, title pages, and large images for domestic walls that were frequently based on oil paintings. Because the serifs and thin strokes of letterforms were reduced to the delicate scratch of the engraver's finest tool, the contrast in the text material was dazzling and inspired imitation by typographic designers.

Rococo Era

Caslon and Baskerville

Caslon's type designs were not particularly fashionable or innovative. They owned their tremendous popularity and appeal to an outstanding legibility and sturdy texture that made them comfortable and friendly to the eye. He increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes by making the former slightly heavier. These fonts have a variety in their design giving them an uneven, rhythmetic texture that adds to their visual interest and appeal. He worked in a tradition of Old Style roman typographic design that had begun over two hundred years earlier during the Italian Renaissance.  

Baskerville was involved in all facets of the bookmaking process. Frames, boxes, clock cases, candlesticks and trays were made from thin sheet metal, often decorated with hand-painted fruit and flowers and finished with a hard, brilliant varnish. these type designs represent the zenith of the transitional style bridging the gap between Old Style and modern type design. Patterns were created in manufacture by wires that form the screen in the papermaker's mold, the close parallel wires are supported by larger wires running at right angles to the thinner wires. 

Baskerville font

The imperial designs of Louis Rene Luce

Engraved borders were being widely used and required a second printing, first the text was printed and then, in a second run of the same sheets, the borders. Luce created a large series of letterpress borders, ornaments, trophies and other devices of impressive variety and excellent printing quality. The density of line in Luce's ornaments was carefully planned to be visually compatible with his typefaces and often had an identical weight so that they looked as if they belonged together in a design.

Imperial Designs of Louis Rene Luce

The modern style

The modern style was first used by Fournier le Jeune in his Manuel typographique to describe the design trends that culminated in Bodoni's mature work. The initial impetus was the thin, straight serifs of Grandjean's Romain du Roi, followed by engraved pages by artists. The letterforms and page layouts of Baskerville came next. The design of narrower, more condensed letterforms, gave type that formed sharp right angles with upright strokes, eliminating the tapered flow of the serif into the upright stroke in Old Style roman. 

The illuminated printing of William Blake

Each page was printed as a monochrome etching combining word and image. The lyrical fantasy, glowing swirls of colour, and imaginative vision that Blake achieved in his poetry and accompanying designs represent an effort to transcend the material of graphic design and printing to achieve spiritual expression. His bright colours and swirling organic forms are forerunners to expressionism, art nouveau and absract art. Printing had been a handicraft, and graphic design had involved the layout of metal type and related material with illustrations printed from handmade blocks.

Printing of William Blake

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

Renaissance Graphic Design

The word renaissance means revival or rebirth. The term was used to denote the period that began in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, when the classical literature of ancient Greece and Rome was revived and read anew. The flowering of a new approach to book design that was independent of the German illustrated book started in Venice and continued there during the last three decades of the 15th century.

Graphic design of the Italian Renaissance

Johannes da Spira was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice, publishing the first book, Cicero, in 1469. His innovative and handsome roman type cast off some of the Gothic qualities found in the fonts of Sweynheym and Pannartz he claimed that it was an original invention and managed to restrict it to his exclusive use until his death in 1470. Printed to in partnership with his brother, Wendelin, da Spira's 1470 edition of Augustine of Hippo's De civitate Dei was the first typographic book with printed page numbers. The ending of the monopoly cleared the path for other printers such as Nicolas Jenson to establish presses in Venice.

Part of the lasting influence of Jenson's fonts is their extreme legibility but it was his ability to design the spaces between the letters and within each form to create an even tone throughout the page that placed the mark of genius on his work. He designed Roman, Greek and Gothic fonts and published over 150 books that brought him financial success and artistic renown. The characters in his fonts aligned more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time. The emblems bear witness to the revived attention to Egyptian hieroglyphics during the Renaissance. Renaissance designers had a strong preference for floral decoration. Another innovation was the way woodcut borders and initials were used as design elements. These type of features included naturalistic forms inspired by Western antiquity and patterned forms derived from Eastern Islamic cultures. The light contour style of woodblock illustration initiated the fine-line style that became popular in Italian graphic design during the later fifteenth century.

It was written in semi-Gothic script but has marginal corrections in a roman hand. The text is set in a tight column with wide outer margins and the freely shaped images spread across the pages in dynamic asymmetrical layouts, which gives the pages a lively visual rhythm. This was inspired from classical writings of Greek and Roman cultures. The typographic book came to Italy from Germany as a manuscript-style book printed with types.

Italian writing masters

The first of many sixteenth-century writing manuals was created by Italian master calligrapher, printer and type designer Lodovico degli Arrighi. Arrighi's directions were so clear and simple that the reader could learn this hand in a few days. Giovanni Battista Palatino produced the most complete and widely used writing manuals of the sixteenth century.

Giovanni Battista Palatino's works 

Innovation passes to France 

The cultural epoch was fertile for book design and printing and the sixteenth century has become known as the golden age of French typography. Books printed in roman types, with title pages and initials inspired by the Venetians, sprouting over Paris. The leading printers produced books of fine proportions, outstanding legibility, beautiful typography and elegant ornamentation. Claude Garamond designed roman typefaces in such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. He eliminated Gothic styles, achieved a mastery of visual form in a way that allowed closer word spacing and a type of design between capitals, lowercase letters and italics.

Claude Garamond's works

The seventeenth century

There were no important new layout approaches or typefaces to provide a distinctive format for the outstanding new literature. The nature of engraving, scratching fine lines into metal, encouraged the development of script letterforms of extreme fineness and delicacy, used with meticulously detailed illustrations. Their format designs were consistent, leading one prominent printing historian. 

Works from the seventeenth century

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].