Portfolio Statement

As an artist, the history of art in general is very important to how one creates artwork.  Through the History of Graphic Design, I was able to put together my practice and relate it to what I had learned.  Although I consider myself primarily as a photographer, I have a love for print work.  As my printmaking evolved, I noticed that I have moved from traditional ways of making a print to more digital forms.  However, as more and more of my prints were digitally produced, I began to resent the digital form of printmaking and tried to incorporate both into my style.  

It is very interesting in this class how we started with the prehistoric mark making methods to the evolution of the printing press.  I noticed that in my practice I was trying to create a balance.  How do I use digital technology to keep up with current trends yet use historical processes as well.  The solution I came up with was to create digital files in the beginning and the move backwards through the evolution of the press.

First I create a digital image which is then produced through a printer.  Then this digital negative is exposed to a polymer using current (perhaps not the latest technology, but certainly modern) methods in practice.  Once the plate is created, I move further back in time using hand made paper and a completely manual press, where the pressure is set by hand, to create the embossing into paper.  Finally the print is air dried and prepared for matting and framing.  I'm sure that there are more historical processes that I can develop further and I look forward to exploring more ways of producing works in this fashion.

Table of Contents

1.  Introduction

2.  Prehistoric Prelude to Graphic Design

3.  Early Writing: Mark-Making, Notation Systems, and Scripts

4.  Classical Literacy

5.  The Graphic Effects of Industrial Production

6.  Mass Mediation

7.  Formations of the Modern Movement

8.  Innovation and Persuasion

9.  The Culture of Consumption

10.  Public Information Campaigns and Information Design

11.  Corporate Identities and International Style

12.  Pop and Protest

13.  Postmodernism in Design

14.  Digital Design

Introduction

The history of graphic design is not only a study of what is past, but also we can extrapolate what will come in the future.  It is not only a study of an ancient culture, but rather how this ancient civilization created ways of seeing and communicating.  A practice that we still use in our societies today.  It really should be a study of how primitive humans or ancient civilizations came up with the their ideas of form and how we utilize the same ideas thousands of years later.  

Graphic Design as a Cultural Practice

In the beginning there were no 'graphic designers' only a primitive human who wanted to express or communicate to the rest of the tribe.  As the evolution of the graphic designer progressed, they became artisans, working with manuscripts and painted signs, then tradesmen working in print shops.  Now they are professionals with specialized skills and recently some have even reached celebrity status!  Although we may not recognize this fact, it is in everything we see on a daily basis.  Things we take for granted today follow a certain convention that was established long ago.  The most basic would be how our writing looks.  The letterforms individually may have evolved from Greek and Roman times, but the way we write, how a page looks, the spacing of the letters are constantly evolving.  Is it even possible for us to image a time when text read from left to right, then right to left written backwards?  Undoubtedly that would be a stretch for any person today.

Technology

The way we conduct our designs today is affected by the technology that is available.  Style choices are not completely controlled by the designer or the technology.  Rather it is a marriage of the two.  For example, when mass production was required, there needed to be technology that helped this process, therefore the high speed press was invented.  Sometimes technology advances much quicker than the style conventions of the day.  It is a relationship, if technology advances, then the designer has to learn how to utilize new ideas best suited for that purpose.

Style

The images or designs that attract us are often ingrained into our minds as beautiful or pleasing but every culture has their own particular styles.  Graphic artifacts have their own point of view and whether or not it is evident to the viewer is irrelevant.  The control the design has over the viewer is what is important.  It excites the viewer in good or bad ways, but either way the work elicits an emotional reaction.  It is unlikely that a person will look at an advertisement with absolutely zero reaction.

Prehistoric Prelude to Graphic Design

Evolutionary Foundations of Communication

The Stone Age artists were the first to establish conventions that are used even today in design and art.  We often would like to believe that modern humans are evolved and do not use such primitive ways of communication, but it is likely that at some point every one has resorted to pictures to tell a story or communicate with another person.  The way we look at things today are also indicative of how we evolved and our past.  A drawing is almost always shown in relation to some type of ground or surface.  We use drawings to communicate yet these images represent an abstract idea as well.  We make the associations to what we are seeing as we are seeing it.

When humans first started to draw and communicate visually, it was a big leap in evolution.  No other animal have such a sophisticated way of communication.  The images that early humans created was not done by chance.  There was careful thought and preparations that went into everything.  From the placement of the bison in relation to the ground, the size of the humans in relation to an animal, and the planning involved with mixing the pigments in order to create a certain color all indicates to a development of visual communication.

Invention of Proto-Writing

Perhaps one of the inventions that catapulted the human evolution was the invention of writing.  Even though it was not a finalized version, like what we see today, early writing was developed in order to deal with the increased population and help with social organization.

As humans were more and more successful with cultivating grains, the writing system was updated accordingly so that cataloguing was possible.  For the first time, writing became an integral part of human socialization and development.  As more grains were harvested, accounting and other systems were developed to monitor ownership, distribution, and storage.  Although these developments happened later among Northern European, Asian, and African settlements, it did occur nonetheless.  

We can see how crucial it was when the first humanoids made their mark in the caves.  Because of that step forward, other advances occurred, especially writing.  The primitive images lead the way to create more sophisticated ways of communicating visually.  This is the foundation for all of our graphic advances today.  Where would be today if early humans didn't develop visual communication?  Would we still be in those caves trying to figure out how to survive?  Or would we have developed other skills?  The possibilities are endless and perhaps frightening as well.

Glossary

Symbolic Form - signs or objects whose value derives from their meaning as representations rather than from their material properties or literal form.

Conventions - rules or approaches that have come to be accepted through use but for which explicit guidelines or manuals may not exist.

Sign System - finite networks within which symbols circulate and gain their value.

Proto-Writing - signs, glyphs, marks, and other forms of inscription that anticipate more systematic writing systems but do not have a stable representational relation to language.

Works Cited

Sanford & A Lifetime of Color: Study Art.  1998.  2005

Early Writing: Mark-Making, Notation Systems, and Scripts

Mark-Making

From making primitive marks on the cave walls in France to writing whole codes of law in Babylon, it is a constant evolution of how thoughts and ideas are represented and recorded.  It is hard to imagine that the languages around the world today could be directly related to the breakthrough of mark making in the earliest forms.  It is truly remarkable that our ancestors were the first designers and graphic artists.  Could that be the legacy of the human race?  The development and evolution of a single written expression that has blossomed into over 100 different languages in the world today? 1

Proto-Writing Systems

Although some of the early writing may have evolved from pictorial origins, others were often more schematic.  There are some notation systems found in the Near East that could be considered proto-writing.  These proto-writing systems differ from the pre-writing systems in the sense that the notation had stable meanings and value.

Cuneiform

These marks were made on a clay tablet with a wedge like tool and to a modern day viewer it does not look like anything more than a bunch of triangles and lines.  In reality the cuneiform writing system may be the oldest system of writing.  The development of the cuneiform was to make writing systems more efficient by simplifying the pictorial signs to more schematic ones.  It was used and integrated into the languages of the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.

Example of Akkadian Cuneiform 2

Varieties of Early Writing

It is interesting that not all writing evolved from Mesopotamia.  It appears that Egyptian and Chinese writing systems evolved independently from the Mesopotamian cuneiform.  The Egyptians were not the only culture to have developed hieroglyphic writing.  Both the Mayan and Aztec cultures utilized hieroglyphic languages and organization.  It is definitely curious to see different cultures on completely different parts of the world develop languages that are similar to each other.

Example of Mayan hieroglyphs 3

Literacy

Many scholars seems to think that literacy began with the advent of the Greek alphabet, yet there is a considerable list of cultures prior to this period that had written language.  Some earlier texts include: Hammurabi's Code of Babylon, the developed philosophical systems of India and Asia, and civic structures and administrations.  Perhaps when defining civilized cultures, one should ground their ideas in archaeological fact.  In order to advance technologically and socially, the culture most move from spoken word to written text.

Glossary

Acrophonic - the principle of naming a letter with a word that begins with that letter.

Cuneiform - writing composed of wedge-shaped signs made in web clay with a stylus by ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and others.

Logographic - of or pertaining to writing that represents words with visual signs.

Pictographic - of or pertaining to writing that represents words or ideas with pictorial signs

Hieroglyphic - literally, sacred carvings.

Works Cited

1.  "Language Listing." Languages of the World. 2007. National Virtual Translation Center. 07 Oct. 2008.

2.  "Language Affinities of Unspecified Analytic Weapon." 07 Oct. 2008.

3.  Ford, Anabel.  "Eyes Wide Shot: Exploring Solutions Past." 02 Oct. 2006. 07 Oct. 2008.

Classical Literacy

Variations of Literacy and the Alphabet

In Greece and southern Italy, variants of the alphabet were used during the Classical period.  With the exception of early indigenous writing in Crete, all were derived from scripts in the ancient Near East and dispersed by the Phoenicians along their trade routes.  In Greece literacy was a requirement for citizenship and its rights, however it is still debated whether or not Greek writing caused the advent of this form of democratic government.  These early scripts consisted of only uppercase letters and the format of writing was varied, including orientation of the writing, reading direction, and word spacing had not been fixed yet.  One of the most significant modifications made by he Greeks to the alphabet was the addition of vowels.  These vowels provided considerable flexibility in adapting the script to a wide range of tongues.  Perhaps it was this addition that made it easier to read than its predecessors.

1. The Greek alphabet and how it is written.

The Function of Graphic Codes

Writing had served many purposes in Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite cultures.  Legal and literary texts, business records accounts, official decrees, ritual prayers, and expressive graffiti had been developed.  Tablets and scrolls remained the basic portable media, while stone carving indicated site-specific and official text.  When writing functioned as a form of personal expression in a letter or graffiti, it usually took the form of a cursive script that was gestural and informal.  Commemorative statements on funeral steles, tributes celebrating victory, and inscriptions marking other civic occasions took on considerable gravity when carved in the most elegant majuscules.

Models of Writing: Gestural and Constructed

The use of models for lettering was essential to the development of a culture of literacy.  Scribes relied on models to help train their hands to render the specific shapes.  Such knowledge became somatic and gestural patters of production became habitual.  Cursive writing can be rapidly produced handwritten versions of the alphabet.  This type of writing was rarely used for important or monumental documents.  However, the purpose of cursive was to produce texts that were legible and efficient, rather than something that based on aesthetic forms.

2. Early Roman cursive writing.

Glossary

Constructed forms - letters made up of drawn parts, often with the aid of a mechanical device, such as a compass or straight-edge, often according to mathematically calculated ideals of proportion and distinguished from letterforms that bear the trace of a (continuous) hand gesture.

Cursive - a script with rounded, looped forms, often with letters joined within words and made by hand in a continuous motion without raising the writing instrument from the paper or breaking letters into individual strokes.

Gestural - pertaining to movements of a hand, limb, or other part of the human body.

Majuscules - upper case letters.

Minuscules - lower case letters

Mono-line - type or writing in which ascenders and descenders are the same height as the body of the letters.

Ostraca -plural of the Greek ostracon (shard), fragments of pottery or stone used as writing surfaces.

Uncial - from the Latin uncia (inch), rounded letterforms in which ascenders and descenders extend slightly beyond the x-height and baseline (beyond the lines used as guides for the height of the body).

The Graphic Effects of Industrial Production

Industrialization

The time of the industrial revolution brought about many changes that affected the course of art and graphic design.  Several new inventions allowed for the presses to become more efficient and more productive.  Instead of printing one sheet at a time, the new cast iron presses had larger tables as well as heavier pressure.  Also paper was now being made in machines and not by hand which also increased the speed of paper production.  Because of all these exciting changes, the literacy rates increased as businessmen and publishers promoted inexpensive educational materials.

Photography was also developed during this time and images were reproduced even faster with more details.  No longer does an artist have to make an engraving for the weekly publications.  A photograph was much easier to capture and reproduce.  These new technologies allowed images to circulate much more freely, ideas blossomed, and new ways of thinking emerged.

Culturally, Europe and the United States moved towards romanticism where nature, passion, and imagination flourished.  The romantics rebelled against the ways of the old: they promoted public education, introduced images and text on a daily basis, and reinforced the standards of style and beauty.  Knowledge was no longer limited to the upper class, rather it was integrated into the working and middle classes.

1.  Newspapers were printed easily and distributed daily as a result of the invention of the cast iron press.  Also photographs were used instead of engravings which drastically decreased the amount of time it took to produce an illustration.

With the invention of photography, illustrations no longer had to be planned out weeks in advance.  An article could be written on the same day as making the image.  Instead of 4-6 weeks of planning, engraving, and proofing, a photograph would only take several hours.  The reproducibility of photographs also allowed more copies to be made, since the plate did not wear down after several runs through the press.

Illustrated Papers

The development of illustrated papers is perhaps one of the most radical contributions of the industrial revolution.  In the beginning, papers focused mainly on scandals and other 'news' that was merely for entertainment.  The images used were found in stock agencies.  However, the more liberal businessmen brought forth new material that was based on education.  Some publishers sought to provide this new printed material as a means to make money.  

For pennies, people could buy papers and gain extra knowledge for the betterment of themselves rather than read tabloids for the entertainment and pleasure.  The consumption of information quickly fueled imagination and fantasy.  

Niches were developed as different types of papers/magazines were developed.  Some were for a broad audience and others catered to the more discriminating audiences.  Self image could very well have been started during this time with women's journals that presented the subject of beauty through fashions of the day.  

More technical manuscripts were developed such as the Mechanic's Magazine but none were as successful as papers about scandals.  Perhaps people are more drawn to something that takes them away from the daily life of themselves and into the daily lives of others.  Much is the same in today's society.  Far more people read fashion magazines or tabloids than The Journal of the American Medical Association.  Probably even the people who read JAMA read Vogue as well!

Books and Printed Images

Now that more people can and like to read, novels and poems gained a wider audience.  It was not until the invention of the steam powered press was book widely available.  While the production was catching up to the demand, many of the books of poetry and fiction were still decorated with illustrations.

 

2.  Examples of illustrations from an eighteenth century alphabet book.

Although books were being mass produced during this time, there was not much care put into them.  Often times the pages bled into each other and the text smeared because of worn type.  The layout was not done with thought of creating wide margins or well leaded lines.  Instead they were produced with more economical means.  The production grew tremendously during this time but the graphics element still had much catching up to do.  

Books were not the only printed material to gain popularity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Images became a widely reproduced commodity as well.  In the beginning of the eighteenth century, printed images were a luxury as they were copper engravings or relief woodblocks.  However with the development of lithography, the production capabilities expanded exponentially.  Also the development of photography brought about new ways of seeing and producing images.

3.  An early (perhaps the first) daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1837.

Advertising and Typography

The once public notices of laws or decrees are now becoming more advertisements for lost possessions, sales of properties, or criminal behavior in the neighborhood.  The notices were carefully composed with extra attention to graphic details and line breaks.  This industry grew and the advertisers and printers began to invest in their designs to attract more clientele.  People were consuming these designs at an extremely rapid rate which in turn created more opportunities for emerging graphic artists.  

Posters, handbills, and other advertisements were quickly becoming common place in urban centers where there were professional billposters!  Typefaces had to be designed so that on a crowded wall plastered with many different posters, the type would stand out and still be legible.  The art of type was only limited to the imagination of the designer.  

4.  Early 19th century handbill.

Works Cited

"The Wonderful World of Early Photography." 28 Oct. 2008

DorsetLife On-Line Magazine. 28 Oct. 2008