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].