day 4

1. Day Notes

01-31-12

Revolutions in printing

Industrial revolution video.

Be sure to study the things that define type such as baseline. Read a quote relating back to last weeks class about the king and his printers, but still unknown if the others were actually killed.

William Caslon released a font with rounded serifs with a Egyptian face. Vincent Figgins. 1796 lithography invented, 1804-1806nLewis and Clark, 1817 Harpers opens printing firm, 1837 chromolithography, Became Queen Victoria, 1839 Daguerre Paris Boulevard, 1840 chromolithography in America. 1846 New pictorial bible, 1850 new monthly magazine, 1857 harpers weekly, 1865 Lincoln killed.

1800 Still working with Guttenberg’s work. Then the iron press. Greatly increased quantity and quality. Only used 1/10 of power of what it took to use the wooden press. Steam power press paten, dual sided press. The first iron press could push about 250 pages while the later version pushed 400. People start to panic because they become useless compared to the printing press.

Ladite: someone who hates and wont use technology

The cost of papers price dropped dramatically. 3 pennies to 1-2 pennies. ( generally sold to anyone to gain a wider audience) They started to sell ad space within the papers. The papers tended to be more enlightening than anything.

1841 John Hooper becomes first Ad man. Ad men are basically a broker for space. Known today as a media buy.

Ottmar Mergenthaller created the linotype. Very close to our own history even though its from the 1800’s. Printing 25000 pressings an hour. 1825 First files a patent for machine that would allow people to composite. Worked in Germany in machinery and came up with the idea to cast more words or letters at a time. One linotype can do the job of 7-8 people all at once. Printing company workers kept undercutting each other with new ideas until they have to merge with another company until they become the Type Founders Company.

Joseph Nipce took the first photograph of nature 1826. The photograph of the city in Paris took so long that it couldn’t capture the people on the streets except for the two people on the corner getting their shoes shined. Henry Talbot experimented with photograms.

Photogram: taking a piece of light sensitive paper, painting something on it and then exposing it in the light. 1889 the Kodak camera for the public is released. Used to be available to only scientists because you had to understand the chemistry and how to develop the image. Photographers were sent out to take photos and then give them to illustrators who then carved the image into a block of wood that becomes a stamp for the newspapers.

Halftone needed to print tone.

1861-1865 civil war, while photography is being developed. First war to be documented and people say that many of the photos are staged because people believe that bodies don’t fall to the ground like that, so the photographer must have moved the bodies for the composition. Most of the photos were the aftermath.

Edweard Muybridge photographs a horse multiple times to win a bet. He said that the horse flies for a moment with all four hooves come off the floor and the other man didn’t believe him. 1872

1819-1901

Photograph of a Victorian parliament. The era’s graphic as known for aesthetic confusion.

The period was known for its strong moral and religious beliefs, they loved confusion.

Pencil of nature, by Talbot was one of the first examples of Victorian era graphics.

Lithography: print from stones.

You had to carry the stone to your desk; level out the piece to erase the previous image with grit and then draw with a grease pencil the image you want and then use types of acids to cut the image into the stone.

The Swedish song quartette company

Ephemera: written or printed material not intended to be retained or preserved. (ads, trading cards, greeting cards, letters)

2. Personal Thoughts

The industrial revolution may have been advancement in the world but its hygiene is absolutely disgusting. I understand the idea of sharing an apartment with another family in order to keep the rent down, but to rent just the bed seems like an impossible task. Then to add to the sickliness, the cities and towns north of the countryside would dump their bowel movement into a sewer or river where people would gather their drinking water. Diseases transferred from water into the people thus destroying the families outside the city. It’s interesting to here that people still want to use the letterpresses. I don’t know if I could ever spend hours working to print a paragraph using the machine. The experiments with the photograms creates a really neat effect and I hope I get the chance to try something like this one day in my lifetime, whether in Ringling or in the future. To spend days working on a stone to imprint an image with acid is one the dumbest career choices as an artist that I know of. Id rather clean bathrooms then do that day in and day out.

3. Questions

How many of the letterpresses from the 1800s exist if they exist at all?

What do modern people now use the letterpresses for? Is it an exploration or something that we used in the past or simply because they like the process itself?

How many people would carve an image into a wooden block and what was their time span to complete it? Was the acids that the lithographers used damage their hands or skin?

Day 3

1. Day Notes

Transitional letterforms were used in Rococo designs.  They tend to be fussy and highly detailed. Typography done by copper plater’s allowed for greater contrast between thick and thin.

Charles would only take 20 printers and the rest to be killed. Printers tend to take over the media, and that’s a threat to Royalty and their clergies.

Bodoni is inspired by the transitional studies (old style + modern)

The French revolution leads to the death of the lush decorative designs.

1790 Bodoni redesigns an alphabet, mechanical appearance, geometric, and redesigned the serif.

The old style serif tended to be more fluid and soft to the eye, Bodoni’s style is more angular and straight.

The Design of the letterforms should be built from a limited number of identical units.

While in America there are interchangeable parts for guns. Compact and efficient.

Bodoni became the historical typeface (“fat-face”)

Display faces are not made to text, purely decorative

Industrialization, going to factories building factories buying stuff selling stuff.

Industrialization leads to consumerism.  Rise of middle class, people with money have no idea what to do with their wealth and so people come around and give you ideas or instructions on how and where to spend it. Mass unemployment and tenements.  People are flooding to the states and desperately need jobs but there’s no one had a place to live, so people built these small tenements where 4-8 people would live.

Video: Gangs of New york

Break

Think of printers as drug dealers. If you have a better quality and quantity you’ll do better.

They need to sell creates larger faces.

Wood type, machinery

Egyptian faces. Bulky serifs. Why the name? It’s just what was cool at the time.

What used to be two line Egyptian is known today as sans serif.

Think of Tuscan font with obnoxious cowboy signs.

Dimensional lettering, knocked-out lettering.

Ephemera, printed materials that aren’t meant to kept.  Such as concert tickets.

Old style

Transitional

Modern

Egyptian

Sans serif

            These are the five historic families of type.

Basic information about type faces: cap height, x-height, base line, descender line, and ascender line; all also known as point size.

Leading is the measurement from base line to base line or the space between text. Text is generally 20% (point size of face + 20%) 

2.Personal Thoughts

Knowing where certain fonts come from, makes life a bit easier when going to choose from the huge lists of fonts that you never knew existed. The simpler ones that are known as the five historic fonts are probably the most used because they are just simple. If you were to go into the cursive or detailed fonts people may get overwhelmed or bored. Bodoni for example is clean and simple, the font became very popular when the industry started to boom and with retailers needing to get costumers attention. They ended up creating fat face and as time went by the print got bigger and bigger. If they had stuck to the complicated and highly detailed fonts people would most likely ignore the signs. Today the fonts only changed slightly to appeal to the younger generations, but instead of plain back and white we add intense, bright colors to attract customers. Same ideas, just slightly different process, but altogether it has the same goal.

3.Questions

Did Charles really kill everyone else that couldn't be a printer?

Is there a place where the Rococo design wasn't accepted?

How long did it take Bodoni to spread across the country or world?

Day 2

 1. Days Notes

Know how to distinguish between various types of texts.

 Key terms to remember: Lascaux, Sumerian, cuniform, scribe, illuminated manuscript, book of kells.

Some of the earliest of visual communication known are the Paleolithic cave drawings found in the Lascaux caves of France.

The crusades took up a lot of time 1005-1270

Charlemagne ruled the Roman Empire, says one guy is to create a standardized writing system. Caroline Minuscule.   But he also was the head scribe for Charlemagne.

Until the invention of playing cards, our brains worked completely differently before this point.  Becomes entertainment for the rich and poor. (a bit of democracy)

With printed devotionals the poor could own a piece of artifact.

The art of dying

Guttenberg to invent printing, there’s a growing middle class, there’s students in expanding universities. Increased literacy. Monopoly over literacy is being taken away from the church.

Guttenberg is your average Joe who just wants to make a buck. He develops a system to cast letterforms and alloy. He creates the press system, type styles, ligatures. Prior to the printing thing he was a jeweler or goldsmith.

Short film: the making of a renaissance book

Typography, printing with type became a important advance in history.

Guttenberg bible is printed between 1400-1455

Gets sued and loses and someone else takes over the business.

Incunabula- refers to the first 50 years of printing ( the Guttenberg bible is the first )

Guttenberg goes on to open his own press but with a lesser quality.

Printings center was in meinz Germany, 1500 35 editions of 9 million books

Typographic printing major communication advances the invention of writing and 20^th century.

Guttenberg based his type on the book of the dead.

Exemplar page: example page like a storyboard

In 1465 two printers from meinz brought Italy

They were exploring classical text. Assumed that it was original text

1475 the first oriented English book. Caldarium

1639 Steven Daye’s brought printing to the colonies

1700’s Rococo period (early baroque): ornate, girly, French wigs, people that you would beat up in bar.

 1702 Philippe Grandjean, specimen of romaine du roi

Typeface stayed the same until the French revolution.

2. Personal Thoughts:

It's amazing to see the progress of text through the years. The complexity that it was to create a letter form for a press really made me cringe at the thought of sitting there for hours. I got excited when we started to get into the Rococo period, it happens to be something i remember the most from past art history classes. Just the complexity of each ornate object made me wonder more and more about the style until it died because most people thought it was a hideous movement.

3. Questions/ Research

Im curious to see how the english text expanded after it was brought to the colonies. But also what happened in Europe after that as well?