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Earliest Writing
The earliest written records are tablets that apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns.
Image: Early Sumerian pictographic tablet, c. 3100 BCE. This archaic pictographic script contained the seeds for the development of writing. -
100
Petroglyphs
Prehistoric people left numerous petroglyphs, which are carved or scratched signs or simple figures on rock. Many of the petroglyphs are pictographs, and some may be ideographs, or symbols to represent ideas or concepts. A high level of observation and memory is evidenced in many prehistoric drawings.
Image: Engraved drawing on a deer antler, c. 15,000 BCE. This prehistoric image is shown in a cast made by rolling the antler onto clay. -
100
Writing enabled society to stabilize itself.
Writing enabled society to stabilize itself under the rule of law. Measurements and weights were standardized and guaranteed by written inscription.
Image: Black stone duck weight, c. 3000 BCE. The cuneiform inscription dedicates this weight to the god Nanna by the King of Ur and confirms a weight of five minas. A mina weighed about 0.6 kilograms, or 18 ounces. -
100
Hieroglyphs
The earliest known hieroglyphs date from about 3100 BCE, and the last known hieroglyphic inscription was carved in 394 CE, many decades after Egypt had become a Roman colony.
Image: Ivory tablet of King Zet, First Dynasty. This five-thousand-year-old tablet is perhaps the earliest known example of the Egyptian pictographic writing that evolved into hieroglyphics. -
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Rebus
Image: These Egyptian hieroglyphs illustrate the rebus principle. Words and syllables are represented by pictures of objects and by symbols whose names are similar to the word or syllable to be communicated. These hieroglyphs mean bee, leaf, sea, and sun. As rebuses (using the English language) they could also mean belief and season. -
100
Scribe's Trademark
The wooden palette used by the scribe was a trademark identifying the carrier as being able to read and write.
Image: Egyptian scribe's palette with an inscription in hieratic script. -
100
Alphabets
An alphabet is a set of visual symbols or characters used to represent the elementary sounds of a spoken language. They can be connected and combined to make visual configurations signifying sounds, syllables, and words uttered by the human mouth.
Image: This diagram displays several evolutionary steps of Western alphabets. The controversial theory linking early Cretan pictographs to alphabets is based on similarities in their appearance. -
100
Greek Alphabet
Image: Timotheus, The Persians, papyrus manuscript, fourth century BCE. This excellent example of the Greek alphabet shows the symmetrical form and even visual rhythm that evolved. These qualities made the Greek alphabet the prototype for subsequent developments. -
100
Early Pictoral Communication
Early human markings found in Africa are over two hundred thousend years old. From the early Paleolithic to the Neolithic period (35,000 to 4000 BCE), early Africans and Europeans left paintings in caves, including the Lascaux caves in southern France and Altamira in Spain.
Image: Cave painting from Lascaux, c. 15,000–10,000 BCE. Random placement and shifting scale signify prehistoric people's lack of structure and sequence in recording their experiences. -
100
Cuneiform
While the graphic form of Sumerian writing was evolving, its ability to record information was expanding. From the first stage, when picture-symbols represented animate and inanimate objects, signs became ideographs and began to represent abstract ideas.
Image: Old Babylonian (c. 1850 BCE) in Akkadian. The world's oldest cookbook, a collection of recipes for dishes for the royal palace or the temple. -
100
First Illuminated Manuscripts
The Book of the Dead was written as a first-person narrative by the deceased and placed in the tomb to help triumph over the dangers of the underworld.
Image: Detail from the Papyrus of Hunefer, c. 1370 BCE. Hunefer and his wife are worshipping the gods of Amenta. The sun god Ra bears an ankh symbol on his knee, and Thoth holds the udjat, the magical protective “sound eye” of the god Horus. -
100
Egyptian Visual Identification
The Egyptians used cylinder seals and proprietary marks on such items as pottery very early in their history. They inherited both forms of identification from the Sumerians. From prehistoric times the scarab beetle was considered sacred or magical.
Images: Scarab of lkhnaton and Nefertiti, c. 1370 BCE. -
100
Latin Alphabet
The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the ancient Etruscans, a people whose civilization on the Italian peninsula reached its height during the sixth century BCE. -
100
Ancient Etruscans
The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the ancient Etruscans, a people whose civilization on the Italian peninsula reached its height during the sixth century BCE.
Image: Etruscan Bucchero vase, seventh or sixth century BCE. A prototype of an educational toy, this rooster-shaped toy jug is inscribed with the Etruscan alphabet. -
Period: 100 to 110
Invention of Writing
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101
Rosetta Stone
A black slab was unearthed bearing an inscription in two languages and three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script, and Greek. This decree had been written in 197 or 196 BCE after a great council of Egyptian priests met to commemorate the ascension of Pharaoh Ptolemy V (c. 210–180 BCE) to the throne of Egypt nine years earlier.
Image: The Rosetta Stone, c. 197–196 BCE. -
105
Invention of Paper
Dynastic records attribute the invention of paper to the eunuch and high governmental official Ts'ai Lun, who reported his invention to Emperor Ho in 105 CE. Whether Ts'ai Lun truly invented paper, perfected an earlier invention, or patronized its invention is not known. He was, however, deified as the god of the papermakers.
Image: Li Fangying (1696–1755), from Album of Eight Leaves, ink on paper, Qing dynasty, 1744. -
165
Herb Lubalin - American Typographic Design
Discontented with the rigid limitations of metal type in the 1950s, Lubalin would cut apart his type proofs with a razor blade and reassemble them. In his hands, type was compressed until letters joined into ligatures, and enlarged to unexpected sizes.
Image: Herb Lubalin, typogram from a Stettler typeface announcement poster, 1965. Marriage, “the most licentious of human institutions,” becomes an illustration through the joined Rs -
500
Discovery of Printing
Printing, a major breakthrough in human history, was invented by the Chinese. The first form was relief printing: the spaces around an image on a flat surface are cut away, the remaining raised surface is inked, and a sheet of paper is placed over the surface and rubbed to transfer the inked image to the paper.
Image: Zhao Meng-fu, a goat and sheep, fourteenth century CE. Chops were used to imprint the names of owners or viewers of a painting. -
562
Chinese Rubbings
Beginning in 165 CE, Confucian classics were carved into stone to ensure an accurate, permanent record. The disadvantages of these
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stone “books” were their weight and the space they required. One historical work required thirteen acres for storage of the tablets, which were arranged like rows of tombstones. Soon, copies of these inscriptions were pulled by making ink rubbings.
Image: Buddhist dedicatory stele, c. 562 CE -
Jun 18, 770
Relief Printing
By about 770 CE, when the earliest existing datable relief printing was produced, the technique was well developed. Using a brush and ink, the material to be printed was prepared on a sheet of thin paper. Calligraphy was written, images were drawn. The block cutter applied this thin page to the smooth wooden block, image side down, after wetting the surface with a paste or sizing. When the paste or sizing was thoroughly dry, the paper was carefully rubbed off. -
Jun 18, 1045
Chinese Movable Type
n a woodblock print the wood around each calligraphic character is painstakingly cut away. Around 1045 CE the Chinese alchemist Pi Sheng (1023–63) extended this process by developing the concept of movable type, an innovative process never used widely in Asia.
Image: Chinese movable types, c. 1300 CE. This group of carved wood types ranges in size from about 1.25 to 2.5 centimeters (0.5 to 1 inch) in height. -
Jun 18, 1047
Romanesque and Gothic Manuscripts
The Romanesque period (c. 1000–1150 CE) saw renewed religious fervor and even stronger feudalism. Europeans launched some ten crusades in a vigorous effort to conquer the Holy Lands.
Image: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Beatus of Fernando and Sancha, 1047 CE. Unlike other interpreters of the Apocalypse, Beatus saw the first horseman as God's envoy, whose arrows pierce the hearts of nonbelievers. -
Jun 16, 1282
Watermarks
The watermark (Fig. 5–1), a translucent emblem produced by pressure from a raised design on the mold and visible when the sheet of paper is held to the light, was used in Italy by 1282. The origin of this design device is unknown. Trademarks for paper mills, individual craftsmen, and perhaps religious symbolism were early uses.
Image: French watermark designs, fifteenth century. These mermaid designs were produced by bent wire attached to the mold used in making paper. -
Jun 1, 1300
Woodblock Printing Comes to Europe
By the early 1300s pictorial designs were being printed on textiles in Europe. Card playing was popular, and in spite of being outlawed and denounced by zealous clergy, this pastime stimulated a thriving underground block-printing industry, possibly before 1400. Throughout Europe, the working class gathered in taverns and by the roadside to play with grimy cards that were block printed or stenciled on coarse paper. Image: Jack of Diamonds, woodblock playing card, c. 1400. -
Jun 18, 1300
Liturgical Books
Liturgical books of the late medieval era contained extraordinary designs. The Ormesby Psalter, created during the early 1300s in England, is a splendid example.
Image: Page from the Ormesby Psalter, c. early 1300s CE. Decoration, illustration, and initials are joined into a single complex text frame. Red and blue prevail in many late Gothic manuscripts. -
Jun 18, 1413
Late Medieval Manuscripts
During the transitional decades, as the medieval era yielded to the European Renaissance, the production of illuminated manuscripts for private use became increasingly important. In the early 1400s the Book of Hours became Europe's most popular book.
Image: The Limbourg brothers, January and February pages from Les tres riches heures du duc de Berry, 1413–16. -
Jun 1, 1415
Engraved Silver Plates used for Printing
In 1415 the Duke of Milan played cards with ivory slats bearing images painted by famous artists, and Flemish nobles used engraved silver plates. -
Jun 1, 1423
Wood Prints With Communicative Purposes
The first known European block printings with a communications function were devotional prints of saints, ranging from small images fitting in a person's hand to larger images. Many were hand-colored, and, because of their basic linear style, they were probably intended to serve as less expensive alternatives for paintings.
Image: Woodblock print of Saint Christopher, 1423. -
Jun 10, 1444
Alphabets of Steel
With the availability of paper, relief printing from woodblocks, and growing demand for books, the mechanization of book production by such means as movable type was sought by printers in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. In Avignon, France, goldsmith Procopius Waldfoghel was involved in the production of “alphabets of steel” around 1444, but with no known results. -
Jan 1, 1450
Copperplate Engraving
During the same time and in the same section of Europe that Johann Gutenberg invented movable type, an unidentified artist called the Master of the Playing Cards created the earliest known copperplate engravings. The finest work of the Master of the Playing Cards is a set of playing cards using birds, animals, and wild men as images.
Image: The Master of the Playing Cards, The Three of Birds, c. 1450 -
Jun 10, 1450
Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg
The judgment of history is that Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg (late 14th century to 1468) of Mainz, Germany, first brought together the complex systems and subsystems necessary to print a typographic book around the year 1450.
Image: Pages 146 and 147 from the Gutenberg Bible, 1450–55. -
Aug 14, 1457
Fust and Schoeffer Psalter
On 14 August 1457, Fust and Schoeffer published a magnificent Psalter in Latin with a monumental 30.5 by 43.2 centimeter (12 by 17 inch) page size (Fig. 5–16). The large red and blue initials were printed from two-part metal blocks that were either inked separately, reassembled, and printed with the text in one press impression, or stamped after the text was printed.
Image: Fust and Schoeffer, page detail from Psalter -
Jun 10, 1463
The German Illustrated Book
Design innovation did emerge in Germany, where woodcut artists and typographic printers collaborated to develop the illustrated book and broadsheet.
Image: Albrecht Pfister (printer), illustration from the second edition of Der Ackerman aus Böhmen (Death and the Ploughman), c. 1463. -
Jun 18, 1463
Illustrated Typographic Book
Block printers and woodcarvers feared typographic printing as a serious threat to their livelihood, but early in the evolution of the typographic book, Bamberg printer Albrecht Pfister began to illustrate his books with woodblock prints.
Image: Albrecht Pfister (printer), illustration from the second edition of Der Ackerman aus Böhmen (Death and the Ploughman), c. 1463. -
Jun 10, 1464
Letter K from a Grotesque Alphabet
Early prints evolved into block books (Figs. 5–5 and 5–6), which were woodcut picture books with religious subject matter and brief text. Each page was cut from a block of wood and printed as a complete word and picture unit.
Image: Letter K from a grotesque alphabet, c. 1464. This page is from a twenty-four-page abecedarian block-book that presented each letter of the alphabet by composing figures in its shape. -
Jun 18, 1467
Typography Spreads from Germany
The types designed by Sweynheym and Pannartz marked the first step toward a Roman-style typography based on letterforms that had been developed by Italian scribes. These scholars had discovered copies of lost Roman classics written in ninth-century Caroline minuscules.
Image: Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, page from Augustine of Hippo's City of God, 1467. -
Jun 1, 1472
The German Illustrated Book
Günther Zainer met resistance from the Augsburg woodcutter's guild when he wanted to illustrate his books with woodblocks. A 1471 agreement allowed Zainer to use woodblock illustrations as long as he commissioned them from members of the guild.
Image: Günther Zainer (printer), page with hand-colored woodcut of a couple playing a board game from Das goldene Spiel (The Golden Game), by Meister Ingolt, Augsburg, 1472. -
Jun 18, 1476
Italian Renaissance Design
Renaissance designers had a strong preference for floral decoration. Wildflowers and vines were applied to furniture, architecture, and manuscripts.
Image: Erhard Ratdolt, Peter Loeslein, and Bernhard Maler, title page for Calendarium, by Regiomontanus, 1476. -
Jun 18, 1478
Italian Design Renaissance - Metal Decorative Ornaments
Image: Giovanni and Alberto Alvise, title page from Ars Moriendi, 1478. The vocabulary of graphic design possibilities was expanded by the design and casting of metal decorative ornaments that, along with the type, could be composed as part of the page. -
Jun 18, 1486
Nuremberg becomes a printing center
Because printing required a huge capital investment and a large trained labor force, it is not surprising that by the end of the 1400s Nuremberg, which had become central Europe's most prosperous center of commerce and distribution, housed Germany's most esteemed printer, Anton Koberger (c. 1440–1513).
Image: Erhard Reuwich (illustrator), illustration from Peregrinationes in Montem Syon (Travels in Mount Zion), 1486. -
Jun 18, 1493
Nuremberg Chronicle
Image: George Alt, title page for the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. -
Jun 18, 1493
Nuremberg Chronicle
Image: Anton Koberger, pages from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493. This image depicts the city of Nuremberg. -
Jun 18, 1506
Innovation Passes to France
Tory's lettering, developed in Italy and used in the 1506 manuscript book Les heures de Jean Lallemant (The Hours of Jean Lallemant), is a light roman with long ascenders and descenders. Some scholars believe that Tory designed early roman types used by Henri Estienne and Simon de Colines.
Image: Geoffroy Tory, pages from the manuscript book Les heures de Jean Lallemant, 1506. -
Jun 18, 1521
German Illustrated Book
German graphic artists continued their tradition of using textura typography and vigorous woodcut illustrations.
Image: Lucas Cranach the Elder (illustrator), pages from Passional Christi und Antichristi, 1521. In a biting satirical contrast, Christ labors under the weight of his cross while the Pope travels in style in a sedan chair. -
Jun 18, 1526
Tory Initials
Nothing captured the imagination of French printers as did several series of initials designed by Tory. Roman capital initials are set into black squares that come alive with meticulous floral designs and criblé
Image: Geoffroy Tory, capital from a series of criblé initials, c. 1526. Engraved for Robert Estienne, this alphabet of roman capitals brought elegance and “color” to the pages of books printed at Estienne's press. -
Jun 18, 1529
Champ Fleury
Tory's Champ Fleury (subtitled The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work.
Image: Geoffroy Tory, construction of the letters Q, V, and R from Champ Fleury, 1529. -
Jun 18, 1529
Graphic Design of the Italian Renaissance
Many early printers designed trademarks to identify their books, these emblems bear witness to the revived attention to Egyptian hieroglyphics during the Renaissance.
Image: Printer's trademark, 1481. Attributed to Andreas Torresanus (1451–1529). One of the oldest symbolic themes, the orb and cross is found in a chamber of Cheops's pyramid at Giza -
Jun 18, 1535
Italian Writing Masters
The rapid growth of literacy created a huge demand for writing masters, and the attendant expansion of government and commerce created a need for expert calligraphers who could draft important state and business documents.
Image: Ugo da Carpi (c. 1479–1533), page from Thesauro, c. 1535. This contained a compilation of scripts by Italian writing masters Arrighi, Sigismondo Fanti, and Giovantonio Tagliente. -
Jun 18, 1557
Garamond
Claude Garamond was the first punch cutter to work independently of printing firms. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. Garamond is credited, by the sheer quality of his fonts, with a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors' cases all over Europe, except in Germany. -
Design of the Rococo Era
The fanciful French art and architecture that flourished from about 1720 until around 1770 is called rococo. 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.
Image: Louis Simonneau, construction of the letters G and H for the Romain du Roi, c. 1700. -
Caslon
Type and design ideas were imported across the English Channel from Holland until a native genius emerged in the person of William Caslon (1692–1766). After apprenticing to a London engraver of gunlocks and barrels, young Caslon opened his own shop and added silver chasing and the cutting of gilding tools and letter stamps for bookbinders to his repertoire of engraving skills.
Image: William Caslon, broadside type specimen, 1734. -
Engraving
engravers were free to take tremendous liberties with form. Basically, an 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. Because this free line was an ideal medium for expressing the florid curves of the rococo sensibility, engraving flourished throughout the 1700s.
Image: George Bickham the Elder, title page for The Universal Penman. c. 1750. -
Baskerville
Baskerville opted for the pure typographic book. Wide margins and a liberal use of space between letters and lines were used around his magnificent alphabets. To maintain an elegant purity of typographic design, an unusually large percentage of each press run was rejected, and he melted down and recast his type after each printing.
Image: John Baskerville, title page from John Milton's Paradise Lost, 1760. -
Innovations in Typography
Cotterell began the trend of sand-casting large, bold display letters as early as 1765, when his specimen book included, in the words of one of his amazed contemporaries, a “proscription, or posting letter of great bulk and dimension, as high as the measure of twelve lines of pica!” (about 5 centimeters, or 2 inches) -
William Blake
The lyrical fantasy, glowing swirls of color, 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. The title pages from The Book of Thel and America, a Prophecy show how Blake adeptly integrated letterforms into illustrations. -
The Modern Style - Bodoni
Around 1790 Bodoni redesigned the roman letterforms to give them a more mathematical, geometric, and mechanical appearance. He reinvented the serifs by making them hairlines that formed sharp right angles with the upright strokes, eliminating the tapered flow of the serif into the upright stroke in Old Style roman. The thin strokes of his letterforms were trimmed to the same weight as the hairline serifs, creating a brilliant sharpness and a dazzling contrast not seen before. -
Didot
Pierre Didot, title page for Vergil's Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis (Pastorals, Georgics, and the Aeneid), 1798. The typeface used in this book is an early presentation of a true modern-style letterform. Straight hairline serifs, extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, and construction on a vertical axis are characteristics that mark this break with transitional letterforms. -
Printing Revolution
Friedrich Koenig, a German printer who arrived in London around 1804, presented his plans for a steam-powered printing press to major London printers. Finally receiving financial support in 1807, Koenig obtained a patent in March 1810 for his press, which printed 400 sheets per hour, far more than the 250 sheets per hour that could be printed on the Stanhope handpress. -
Steam-Powered Press
Image: The first steam-powered cylinder press, 1814. Koenig's invention caused the speed of printing to skyrocket, while its price dropped considerably. -
Three Dimensional Fonts
Image: Vincent Figgins, five lines pica, In Shade, 1815. The first three-dimensional or perspective fonts were fat faces. Perhaps designers were seeking to compensate for the lightness of the thin strokes, which tended to reduce the legibility of fat faces at a distance. -
Arabic Type Specimine
Image: Giambattista Bodoni, page from Manuale tipografico, 1818. Arabic type specimen. -
Manuale tipografico
After Bodoni's death his widow and his foreman, Luigi Orsi, persisted with the project and published the two-volume Manuale tipografico (Manual of Type) in 1818. This monumental celebration of the aesthetics of letterforms and homage to Bodoni's genius is a milestone in the history of graphic design.
Image: Giambattista Bodoni, page from Manuale tipografico, 1818. -
Lithography
Lithography is based on the simple chemical principle that oil and water do not mix. An image is drawn on a flat stone surface with oil-based crayon, pen, or pencil. Water is spread over the stone to moisten all areas except the oil-based image, which repels the water. Then an oil-based ink is rolled over the stone, adhering to the image but not to the wet areas of the stone. A sheet of paper is placed over the image and a printing press is used to transfer the inked image onto the paper. -
Fat Typefaces
Other founders designed and cast fatter letters, and type grew steadily bolder. This led to the invention of fat faces, a major category of type design innovated by Cotterell's pupil and successor, Robert Thorne (d. 1820), possibly around 1803. A fat-face typestyle is a roman face whose contrast and weight have been increased by expanding the thickness of the heavy strokes. The stroke width has a ratio of 1:2.5 or even 1:2 to the capital height.
Image: Robert Thorne, fat-face types, 1821. -
Information Graphics
Playfair's diagram was a circle cut into wedge-shaped slices representing the area of each state and territory. Readers could see at a glance how vast the newly acquired western territories were in comparison with states such as Rhode Island and New Hampshire. In this way, Playfair created a new category of graphic design, now called information graphics.
Image: William Playfair, Chart no. 1 from A Letter on Our Agricultural Distresses, 1822. -
First Photograph
Image: Joseph Niépce, the first photograph from nature, 1826. Looking out over the rear courtyard of the Niépce home, the light and shadow patterns formed by (from left to right) a wing of the house, a pear tree, a barn roof in front of a low bake house with a chimney, and another wing of the house are seen. -
Wooden Types
As display types expanded in size, problems multiplied for both printer and founder. In casting, it was difficult to keep the metal in a liquid state while pouring, and uneven cooling often created slightly concave printing surfaces. An American printer named Darius Wells (1800–75) began to experiment with hand-carved wooden types and in 1827 invented a lateral router that enabled the economical mass manufacture of wood types for display printing. -
Decorative Three-Dimensional Fonts
Image: Johann Heinrich Meyer foundry in Braunschweig, Germany, decorative three-dimensional fonts, 1835. -
Photogram
William Henry Fox Talbot, camera-less shadow picture of flowers, 1839. By sandwiching the flowers between his photographic paper and a sheet of glass and exposing the light-sensitive emulsion to sunlight, Talbot invented the photogram, later extensively used as a design tool by designers such as László Moholy-Nagy. -
Clarendon
Image: Robert Besley (designer, with Thorowgood), specimen of an early Clarendon, 1845. An adaptation of Ionic that was even subtler than the development of Ionic from Egyptian, Clarendon styles were wildly popular after their introduction. When the three-year patent on Clarendon expired, other founders issued numerous imitations and piracies. -
Elements of Euclid
Image: William Pickering, pages from The Elements of Euclid, 1847. Although the ornate initial letters connected this book to the past, its revolutionary layout was far ahead of its time. -
The Arts and Crafts Movement
The writer and artist John Ruskin (1819–1900) inspired the philosophy of this movement. Asking how society could “consciously order the lives of its members so as to maintain the largest number of noble and happy human beings,” Ruskin rejected the mercantile economy and pointed toward the union of art and labor in service to society, as exemplified in the design and construction of the medieval Gothic cathedral. He called this the social order that Europe must “regain for her children.” -
The Grammar of Ornament
Owen Jones' main influence was through his widely studied 1856 book of large color plates, The Grammar of Ornament.
Image: Owen Jones, color plate from The Grammar of Ornament, 1856. This plate shows patterns found in the arts and crafts of India. -
Signboards
Image: Joseph Morse, multicolored woodcut poster, 1856. The heroic scale—262 by 344 centimeters (8.5 by 11 feet)—permitted life-sized figures to tower before the headline “Five Celebrated Clowns Attached to Sands, Nathan Co.'s Circus.” -
Chromolithography
The four decades from 1860 until 1900 were the heyday of chromolithography. American lithography maintained its German connection during this period. Excellent Bavarian lithographic stones—and the highly skilled craftsmen who prepared them for printing—were exported from Germany to nations around the world. -
Victorian Typography
As the Victorian era progressed, the taste for ornate elaboration became a major influence on typeface and lettering design. Early nineteenth-century elaborated types were based on letterforms with traditional structure. Shadows, outlines, and embellishments were applied while retaining the classical letter structure.
Image: Herman Ihlenburg, typeface designs. These typeface designs demonstrate the Victorian tendency for complexity. -
Labels and Packaging
Labels and packages became important areas for chromolithography
Image: Package designs chromolithographed on tin for food and tobacco products used bright flat colors, elaborate lettering, and iconic images to create an emblematic presence for the product. -
Wood Type Poster
Image: Handbill for an excursion train, 1876. To be bolder than bold, the compositor used heavier letterforms for the initial letter of important words. Oversized terminal letterforms combine with condensed and extended styles in the phrase Maryland Day! -
Photoengraving
In 1871 John Calvin Moss of New York pioneered a commercially feasible photoengraving method for translating line artwork into metal letterpress plates.
Image: Illustration of Moss's photographic department, from Scientific American, 1877. -
Halftone
Image: Stephen H. Horgan, experimental photoengraving, 1880. This, the first halftone printing plate to reproduce a photograph in a newspaper, heralded the potential of photography in visual communications. -
Children's Images
Before the Victorian era, Western countries had a tendency to treat children as little adults. The Victorians developed a more tender attitude, and this was expressed through the development of toy books, colorful picture books for preschool children.
Image: Randolph Caldecott, illustration from Hey Diddle Diddle, c. 1880. Oblivious to the outlandish elopement, Caldecott's dancing dinnerware moves to a driving musical rhythm. -
Chromolithography
Image: Louis Prang, Valentine card, 1883. Chromolithography. This sentimental card is a good example of the range of tone and color that could be achieved with chromolithography. -
Editoral and Advertising Design
Inventive book design was not a concern for most publishing firms in America and Europe, including Harper and Brothers, during most of the nineteenth century. With the rapid expansion of the reading public, and the economies resulting from new technologies, publishers focused on large press runs and modest prices. Modern-style fonts, often second-rate derivatives of Bodoni and Didot designs, were composed in workaday page layouts. -
William Morris
Image: William Morris, Rose fabric design, 1883. -
Century Guild Hobby Horse
Featuring the work of guild members, the Century Guild Hobby Horse began publication in 1884 as the first finely printed magazine devoted exclusively to the visual arts. The medieval passions of the Arts and Crafts movement were reflected in the graphic designs of Image and Horne. -
Photography as Reportage
Image: Paul Nadar, “Nadar Interviewing Chevreul,” 1886. The words spoken by the one-hundred-year-old chemist were recorded below each photograph to produce a visual-verbal record of the interview. -
Model 5 Linotype
Mergenthaler's brilliant breakthrough (Fig. 9–24) involved the use of small brass matrixes with female impressions of the letterforms, numbers, and symbols. Ninety typewriter keys controlled vertical tubes that were filled with these matrixes.
Image: The Model 5 Linotype became the workhorse of typesetting, with keyboards and matrixes available in over a thousand languages. -
Monotype
In 1887, another American, Tolbert Lanston (1844–1913), invented the Monotype machine, which cast single characters from hot metal. It was a decade before the Monotype was efficient enough to be put into production. -
Art Nouveau
Asian art provided European and North American artists and designers with approaches to space, color, drawing conventions, and subject matter that were radically unlike Western traditions. This revitalized graphic design during the last decade of the nineteenth century. -
London Underground
In 1890 the world's first underground electric railway system opened in London. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Underground Electric Railways of London, Ltd., consolidated much of London's urban transportation system. Just as AEG director Emil Rathenau was the catalyst for that firm's comprehensive design program, a statistician and attorney named Frank Pick provided the vision necessary to lead the Underground Group to the forefront of innovative publicity and design. -
Kelmscott Press
Typefounding of Morris' typeface, Golden, began in December 1890. Workmen were hired, and an old handpress rescued from a printer's storeroom was set up in a rented cottage near Kelmscott Manor in Hammersmith, which Morris had purchased as a country home. Morris named his new enterprise Kelmscott Press, and its first production was The Story of the Glittering Plain, by William Morris, with illustrations by Walter Crane.
Image: William Morris, trademark for the Kelmscott Press, 1892. -
French Art Nouveau
Even Jules Chéret had to concede that Toulouse-Lautrec's 1891 poster “La Goulue au Moulin Rouge” broke new ground in poster design. A dynamic pattern of flat planes—black spectator's silhouettes, yellow ovals for lamps, and the stark white undergarments of the notorious cancan dancer, who performed with transparent or slit underwear—move horizontally across the center of the poster. -
Toulouse-Lautrec - Art Nouveau
Image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, poster for Reine de joie (Queen of Joy), 1892. The banker Rothschild thought his own likeness had been used for the main character in the book being advertised and attempted to prevent distribution of the poster. -
American Art Nouveau
British-born Louis Rhead (1857–1926) studied in England and Paris before emigrating to America in 1883. After eight years in New York as an illustrator, he returned to Europe for three years and adopted Grasset's style. Upon his return to America, a prolific flow of posters, magazine covers, and illustrations enabled him to join the self-taught American William H. Bradley (1868–1962) as one of the two major American practitioners of art nouveau–inspired graphic design and illustration. -
Aubrey Beardsley - Art Nouveau
Image: Aubrey Beardsley, “The Eyes of Herod” illustration for Oscar Wilde's Salomé, 1894. The dynamic interplay between positive and negative shapes has seldom been equaled. -
Aubrey Beardsley - 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. A strange cult figure, he was intensely prolific for five years before dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-six. He became famous at age twenty, when his illustrations and binding for a new edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur began to appear in monthly installments.
Image: Aubrey Beardsley, binding design for Morte d'Arthur, 1893 -
Jules Cheret - Art Nouveau
Images: Jules Chéret, “Palais de Glace, Champs-Èlysée” (Ice Palace, Champs-Èlysée), 1893. Parisian elegance, a carefree grace, and astounding technical mastery are present. The figures create a lively play of angles, linking the top and bottom lettering. As with many of Chéret's larger posters, it was necessary to print “Palais de Glace” in two sections. -
Frank Lloyd Wright
In 1893 Wright began his independent practice. He rejected historicism in favor of a philosophy of “organic architecture,” with “the reality of the building” existing not in the design of the façade but in dynamic interior spaces where people lived and worked.
Image: Frank Lloyd Wright, first chapter opening spread for The House Beautiful, 1896–97 -
Eugene Grasset
Image: Eugène Grasset, exhibition poster, c. 1894. Quietly demure instead of exuberant, Grasset's figures project a resonance very different from that of the Chérette. -
The Story of the Glittering Plain
Image: William Morris (designer) and Walter Crane (illustrator), page spread for The Story of the Glittering Plain, 1894. Operating on his compulsion to ornament the total space, Morris created a luminous range of contrasting values. -
Pictoral Modernism
One of the most remarkable moments in the history of graphic design is the brief career of the Beggarstaffs. British painters James Pryde (1866–1941) and William Nicholson (1872–1949) were brothers-in-law who had been close friends since art school. Respected academic painters, they decided to open an advertising design studio in 1894 and felt it necessary to adopt pseudonyms to protect their reputations as artists. -
Gibson Girls
Image: Charles Dana Gibson, poster for Scribner's, 1895. Although the exquisite beauty of the “Gibson Girls” was captured with facility and control, Gibson was unconcerned with the design of type and image as a cohesive whole. In this poster the printer added text in incompatible typefaces. -
American Art Nouveau
Image: Will Bradley, covers for the Inland Printer, July 1894 and January 1895. Bradley's graphic vocabulary ranged from delicate contour line for an overall light effect, to complex full-tone drawing, to reduction of the image to black-and-white silhouette masses. -
Ethel Reed - American Art Nouveau
Image: Ethel Reed, poster for Arabella and Araminta Stories, by Gertrude Smith, 1895. With an imaginative use of three-color printing, the blond hair of the two girls glows against their black clothing. -
Art Nouveau
Art nouveau is a transitional style that evolved from the historicism that dominated design for most of the nineteenth century. By replacing this almost servile use of past forms and styles and rejecting the anachronistic approaches of the nineteenth century, art nouveau became the initial phase of the modern movement, preparing the way for the twentieth century. -
German Jugendstil
When art nouveau arrived in Germany it was called Jugendstil (youth style) after a new magazine, Jugend (Youth), which began publication in Munich in 1896. From Munich, Jugendstil spread to Berlin, Darmstadt, and all over Germany. German art nouveau had strong French and British influences, but it also retained strong links to traditional academic art. The German interest in medieval letterforms continued side by side with art nouveau motifs. -
Edward Penfield - American Art Nouveau
Image: Edward Penfield, “Poster Calendar,” 1897. Clearly a self-portrait, this shows the artist at work accompanied by one of his beloved cats. His stipple technique is used to create the tone for the background. -
Plakatstil
The reductive, flat-color design school that emerged in Germany early in the twentieth century is called Plakatstil (Poster Style).
Image: William Nicholson, illustration from An Alphabet, 1897. The reductive simplicity of Beggarstaff posters is maintained. -
The Vienna Secession
In Austria, the Vienna Secession, with its Sezessionstil, came into being on 3 April 1897, when the younger members of the Künstlerhaus, the Viennese Creative Artists' Association, resigned in stormy protest. Technically, the refusal to allow foreign artists to participate in Künstlerhaus exhibitions.
Image: Koloman Moser, fifth Vienna Secession exhibition poster, 1899. A metallic gold bronze figure and olive green background are printed on yellow tone paper that forms the contour lines. -
Italian Pictoral Tradition
At the turn of the century, Italian posters were characterized by a sensuous exuberance and elegance rivaling that of la belle époque in France. For twenty-five years, the Milan firm of Giulio Ricordi, previously known for publishing opera librettos, produced most of the masterpieces of Italian poster design.
Image: Adolfo Hohenstein, Bitter Campari poster, 1901 -
Peter Behrens and The New Objectivity
The German artist, architect, and designer Peter Behrens (1868–1940) played a major role in charting a course for design in the first decade of the new century. He sought typographic reform, was an early advocate of sans-serif typography, and used a grid system to structure space in his design layouts. -
Modern Art
Some of these modern movements, such as fauvism, had a limited effect on graphic design. Others, such as cubism and futurism, Dada and surrealism, De Stijl, suprematism, constructivism, and expressionism, directly influenced the graphic language of form and visual communications in this century. The evolution of twentieth-century graphic design closely relates to modern painting, poetry, and architecture. -
Peter Behrens
A dramatic transformation occurred in Behrens's work in 1904, after the Dutch architect J. L. Mathieu Lauweriks (1864–1932) joined the Düsseldorf faculty. Lauweriks was fascinated by geometric form and had developed an approach to teaching design based on geometric composition. Image: Peter Behrens, Behrens Kursiv und Schmuck (Italics and Ornaments) Klingspor Type Foundry, 1907. -
Switzerland and the Sach plakat
With his 1908 poster of Zermatt , Emil Cardinaux (1877–1936) created the first Sach plakat Swiss poster, sharing many characteristics with the Plakatstil in Germany. Even after modern production procedures such as offset printing began to be used in most poster production, traditional lithographic crafts were retained in what was known as Basel realism. This style was promoted by Niklaus Stoecklin (1896–1982). -
Will Bradley - American Art Nouveau
Image: Will Bradley, Collier's cover, March 30, 1907. -
The Manifesto of Futurism
The manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed, and modern life. It shocked the public by proclaiming, “We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.” -
Cubism
By introducing a design concept independent of nature, cubism began a new artistic tradition and way of seeing that challenged the four-hundred-year Renaissance tradition of pictorial art.
Image: Pablo Picasso, Man with Violin, 1911–12 -
Expressionism
In early twentieth-century art, the tendency to depict not objective reality but subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events was called expressionism, which emerged as an organized movement in Germany before World War I. Color, drawing, and proportion were often exaggerated or distorted, and symbolic content was very important. Line and color were often pronounced; color and value contrasts were intensified. achieved through thick paint, loose brushw -
Photography and the Modern Movement
It was inevitable that the new visual language of the modern movements, with its concern for point, line, plane, shape, and texture, and for the relationships between these visual elements, would begin to influence photography, just as it had affected typography in the futurist and Dadaist approaches to graphic design. -
Italian Pictoral
Art nouveau's legacy is a tracery of the dreams and lifestyles of a brief Indian summer in the human saga. Its offspring were twentieth-century designers who adopted not its surface appearance, but its attitudes toward materials, processes, and value.
Image: Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Calzaturificio di Varese poster, 1913. This classic Metlicovitz poster exudes an optimistic elegance. -
Russian suprematism and constructivism
The Russian avant-garde saw common traits in cubism and futurism and coined the term cubo-futurism. Experimentation in typography and design characterized their futurist publications, which presented work by the visual and literary art communities.
image: Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, c. 1913. -
War Posters
The poster reached the zenith of its importance as a communications medium during World War I (1914–18). Printing technologies had advanced rapidly, while radio and other electronic means of public communication were not yet in widespread use. During the war, governments turned to the poster as a significant medium of propaganda and visual persuasion. -
Dada
Reacting against the carnage of World War I, the Dada movement claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. Dada writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest, and nonsense. They bitterly rebelled against the horrors of war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes in a continent in upheaval. Rejecting all tradition, they sought complete freedom. -
Marcel Duchamp
The French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) joined the Dada movement and became its most prominent visual artist. Earlier, cubism had influenced his analysis of subjects as geometric planes, while futurism inspired him to convey time and motion. To Duchamp, Dada's most articulate spokesman, art and life were processes of random chance and willful choice. Artistic acts became matters of individual decision and selection. -
Postcubist pictorial modernism
The era between the two world wars began with a decade of unprecedented prosperity in much of Europe and North America. Faith in the machine and technology was at an all-time high. This ethic gained expression through art and design. Fernand Léger's celebration of mechanical, machine-made, and industrial forms became an important design resource, and cubist ideas about spatial organization and synthetic imagery inspired an important new direction in
pictorial images. -
Photomantage
Dada artists claimed to have invented photomontage.
Image: Hannah Höch, Da—dandy, collage and photomontage, 1919. Images and materials are recycled, with both chance juxtapositions and planned decisions contributing to the creative process. -
Bauhaus
The Bauhaus years in Weimar (1919–24) were intensely visionary and drew inspiration from expressionism (Figs. 16–1 and 16–2). Characterized by the utopian desire to create a new spiritual society, the early Bauhaus sought a new unity of artists and craftsmen to build for the future. Stained glass, wood, and metal workshops were taught by an artist and a craftsman and were organized along medieval Bauhütte lines: master, journeyman, and apprentice. -
Dutch Typography
n the Netherlands the traditional vanguard was led by Sjoerd H. de Roos and the brilliant Jan van Krimpen. They were followed by Jean François van Royen and two master printer-publishers from Maastricht, Charles Nypels and A. A. M. Stols . They too wanted to foster a renaissance in Dutch typography, and, like Morris, they did not consider the Industrial Revolution a blessing. On the contrary, mass production was viewed as a necessary evil, cautiously tolerated, principally for economic reasons. -
Suprematist
Image: Kasimir Malevich, cover of Pervyi tsikl lektsii (First Circle of Lectures), by Nikolai Punin. A suprematist composition is combined with typography, 1920. -
Private Press Movement
Established in 1895, the Ashendene Press, directed by C. H. St. John Hornby of London, proved an exceptional private press.
Image: C. H. St. John Hornby, pages from Saint Francis of Assisi's Legend, 1922. A liberal use of all-capital type and initial words printed in color brought distinction to Ashendene Press page layouts. -
Kathe Schmidt Kollwitz - Surrealism
Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz, “The Survivors Make War on War!” poster, 1923. This powerful antiwar statement was commissioned by the International Association of Labor Unions in Amsterdam. -
Die Hebräische Schrift
Die Hebräische Schrift (The Hebrew Script), type specimen, H. Berthold AG, Berlin, Leipzig, Stuttgart, Vienna, Riga, 1924. The graphic forms of the Hebrew alphabet are squared, bold letters whose horizontal strokes are thicker than their vertical strokes. -
Surrealism
With roots in Dada and in a group of young French writers and poets associated with the journal Littérature, surrealism entered the Paris scene in 1924, searching for the “more real than real world behind the real”—the world of intuition, dreams, and the unconscious realm explored by Freud. -
De Stijl
The De Stijl movement was launched in the Netherlands in the late summer of 1917. Working in an abstract geometric style, De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and harmony for art, which could then be a prototype for a new social order. -
Constructivism
Henryk Berlewi, Plutos Chocolates brochure, page 6, 1925. Copywriter Aleksander Wat collaborated closely with Berlewi to integrate text and form. -
The Bauhaus at Dessau
During the Dessau period (1925–32) the Bauhaus identity and philosophy came to full fruition. The De Stijl and constructivist underpinnings were obvious, but the Bauhaus did not merely copy these movements. Rather, it developed clearly understood formal principles that could be applied intelligently to design problems.
Image: Herbert Bayer, cover for Bauhaus magazine, 1928. -
Expressionism
Revolting against conventional aesthetic forms and cultural norms, expressionists felt a deep sense of social crisis, especially during the years prior to World War I. Many German expressionists rejected the authority of the military, education system, and government. They felt deep empathy for the poor and social outcasts, who were frequent subjects of their work. Intense idealism fueled the expressionists' belief in art as a beacon pointing toward a new social order and improved human conditio -
Dutch Typography
Image: Jan van Krimpen, pages from Het zatte hart (The Drunken Heart), by Karel van de Woestijne, Palladium no. 25, 1926. -
International Typographic Design
Image: Théo Ballmer, poster for an office professions exhibition, 1928. Traces of the grid squares used to construct this poster remain as the thin white lines between the letters. -
Independent Voices in the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, several designers were influenced by the modern movements and the new typography, but they were very personal and original in their visions.
Image: Piet Zwart, pages from the NKF cableworks catalogue, 1928. Equilibrium is achieved by a yellow circle balancing a red wedge crossing the blue halftone of the NKF plant. The NKF plant area, overprinted by the red, becomes a purple halftone on a red background. -
Man Ray
An American artist from Philadelphia, Man Ray (born Emanuel Rabinovitch met Duchamp and fell under the Dada spell in 1915. After moving to Paris in 1921, Man Ray joined Breton and others in their evolution from Dada toward surrealism, with its less haphazard investigation of the role played by the unconscious and chancee.
Image: Man Ray, “Sleeping Woman,” 1929. In this surreal image, solarization is used not just as a visual technique but also as a mean to plumb the psychic experience. -
Futurism
The futurist concept that writing and/or typography could become a concrete and expressive visual form has been a sporadic preoccupation of poets dating back at least to the work of the Greek poet Simias of Rhodes (c. 33 BCE). Called pattern poetry, the verse that explored this idea often took the shape of objects or religious symbols. -
Ludwig Hohlwein
A leading Plakatstil designer, Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949) of Munich, began his career as a graphic illustrator with work commissioned by Jugend magazine as early as 1904. During the first half of the century, Hohlwein's graphic art evolved with changing social conditions. -
New Approaches to Photography
The new typography emphasized objective communication and was concerned with machine production. The camera was seen as a vital tool for image making. Much of the photography used in conjunction with the new typography was straightforward and neutral. The role of photography as a graphic communications tool was expanded by Swiss designer/photographer Herbert Matter (1907–84). -
Spanish Civil War Posters
The Spanish Civil War arose out of tensions between the liberal Republicans and the conservative Nationalists. Shifts between monarchy, military, and democratic governments fractured the nation into many ideological, social, cultural, and geographic subgroups. -
Magritte - Surrealism
René Magritte, illustration for “Les Chants de Maldoror,” c. 1937. The surrealists defied our rational understanding of the world, and their vocabulary of pictorial and symbolic innovations began to seep into the mass media. -
Paul Rand
More than any other American designer, Paul Rand (1914–96) initiated the American approach to modern design. When he was twenty-three years old, Rand began the first phase of his design career as a promotional and editorial designer for the magazines Apparel Arts, Esquire, Ken, Coronet, and Glass Packer. His magazine covers broke with the traditions of American publication design. -
New War Poster
In 1941, as America's entry into the global conflict seemed inevitable, the federal government began to develop propaganda posters to promote production. Charles Coiner became its art consultant as America's colossal defense buildup began. He commissioned Carlu to create one of the finest designs of his career, the famous “America's answer! Production” poster. -
After the War
Herbert Matter, cover for Fortune, October 1943. Here photograms and geometric shapes are combined with photographs of ball bearings to construct a forceful image. -
New York School
Image: Paul Rand, Ohrbach's advertisement, 1946. A combination of elements—logotype, photograph, decorative drawing, and type—are playfully unified. -
Typeface Design in the Twentieth Century
Image: Jan Tschichold, brochure cover for The Pelican History of Art, 1947. The classical symmetry of this design has a power and subtlety rivaling Roman inscriptions and the best work of Baskerville and Bodoni. -
Huber - International Typographic Design
Image: Max Huber, poster for Borsalino Hats, 1949. The design devices below the hat help to unify the posters when hung in rows together -
Corporate Identity and Visual Systems
The first phase in the development of postwar visual identification resulted from pioneering efforts by strong individual designers who put their personal imprint on a client's designed image. This was the case with Behrens at AEG (see chapter 12) and with the Olivetti Corporation, an Italian typewriter and business machines company whose dual commitment to humanist ideals and technological progress dated from its 1908 founding by Camillo Olivetti. -
International typographic design
During the 1950s a design movement emerged from Switzerland and Germany that has been called Swiss design or, more appropriately, the International Typographic Style. The objective clarity of this design movement won converts throughout the world. It remained a major force for over two decades, and its influence continues today. -
After the War
Image: Alexey Brodovitch, cover for Portfolio, 1951. Screen tints produce the illusion that translucent rectangles of pink and blue-gray have been placed on the stencil logo slashing down the back cover. -
Design at CBS
The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) of New York City moved to the forefront of corporate identity design as a result of two vital assets: CBS president Frank Stanton (1908–2006), who understood art and design and their potential in corporate affairs, and William Golden (1911–59), the CBS art director for almost two decades. -
Information Graphics
Function is utilitarian need with a definite purpose: to make information easy to find, read, comprehend, and recall. Flow means the logical sequence of information. Sutnar felt the basic unit was not the page but the “visual unit,” that is, the double-page spread. -
American Typographic Expressionism
A playful direction taken by New York graphic designers in the 1950s and 1960s involved figurative typography. This took many forms—letterforms became objects; objects became letterforms. -
Informational Scientific Graphics
Since 1906 Sweet's had provided a compendium of architectural and industrial product information. Working closely with Sweet's research director, Knut Lönberg-Holm, Sutnar developed a system for structuring information in a logical and consistent manner. In two landmark books, Catalog Design and Catalog Design Progress, they documented and explained their approach to a generation of designers, writers, and clients.defined as a synthesis of function, flow, and form. Fu -
Japanese Design
Image: Yusaku Kamekura, booklet cover, 1954. Torn paper Japanese characters and Bodoni letterforms spell the same word, typifying Kamekura's synthesis of Asian and Western forms. -
Herbert Matter
Herbert Matter, meanwhile, received freelance design commissions from CCA and design and photographic assignments from other clients, including Vogue, Fortune, and Harper's Bazaar. Matter's editorial design solutions deftly exploited photography.
Image: Herbert Matter, brochure covers introducing a Knoll chair, 1956. When the translucent cover page is turned, the strange wrapped object is revealed to be a chair. -
Giovanni PIntori
For thirty-one years, Pintori put his personal stamp on Olivetti's graphic images. The logotype he designed for Olivetti in 1947 consisted of the name in lowercase sans-serif letters, slightly letterspaced. Identity was achieved not through a systematic design program but through the general visual appearance of promotional graphics. -
Corporate Identity
Image: Paul Rand, IBM trademark, 1956. The original design is shown with outline versions and the eight- and thirteen-stripe versions currently used. -
Design at CBS
William Golden (designer) and Ben Shahn (illustrator), trade ad for CBS Television, 1957. Textured shopping carts and text type unify into a horizontal band. This tonal complexity contrasts with a bold headline in the white space above and the staccato repetition of the black wheels below. -
New Swiss Sans-Serif
The emerging International Typographic Style was exemplified by several new sans-serif type families designed in the 1950s. The geometric sans-serif styles, mathematically constructed with drafting instruments during the 1920s and 1930s, were rejected in favor of more refined designs inspired by nineteenth-century Akzidenz Grotesk fonts -
Editorial Design Revolution
During the 1940s, only a few American magazines were well designed. Among them were Fortune, a business magazine whose art directors included Will Burtin and Leo Lionni (1910–99); Vogue, where Alexander Liberman replaced Mehemed Fehmy Agha as art director in 1943; and especially Harper's Bazaar, where Alexey Brodovitch continued as art director until his retirement in 1958. -
American Typographic Expressionism
Image: Don Egensteiner (art director), advertisement for Young and Rubicam Advertising, 1960. The heavy, one-word headline crashes into the body copy to accomplish a major objective: grabbing attention. -
The First Mouse
The first mouse, a small wooden box on steel wheels, was invented by scientist Douglas C. Engelbart (b. 1925) in the 1960s at the federal government's Augmentation Research Center. It was called an “x-y position indicator for a display system” in the patent. A colleague dubbed Engelbart's little position-indicator device “the mouse,” and the name stuck. The mouse made computers accessible through intuitive processes rather than tedious mathematical coding and empowered thousands of people, from -
Helvetica
Image: Edouard Hoffman and Max Miedinger, Helvetica typeface, 1961. The basic version of Helvetica released by the Stempel foundry in 1961 is shown, along with some of the variations developed later. -
McCall's
Image: Otto Storch (art director) and Dan Wynn (photographer), pages from McCall's, 1961. Typography bends with the elasticity of a soft mattress under the weight of the sleeping woman. -
Conceptual Images - Polish Poster
The next major trend in Polish posters started to evolve during the 1960s and reached a crescendo in the 1970s. This was a tendency toward the metaphysical and surrealism, as a darker, more somber side of the national character was addressed. It has been speculated that this represented either a subtle reaction to the social constraints of the dictatorial regime or a despair and yearning for the autonomy that has so often been denied the Polish nation during its history.
Image: Roman Cieslewic -
Conceptual Image - Polish Poster
Image: Jan Lenica, Warsaw Poster Biennale poster, 1976. Meandering arabesques metamorphose into a winged being. -
Japanese Design
Image: Yusaku Kamekura, Tokyo Olympics logo and poster, 1964. Three simple symbols—the red sun of the Japanese flag, the Olympic rings, and the words Tokyo 1964—combine into an immediate and compelling message. -
American International Typographic Design
The Swiss movement had a major impact on postwar American design. Its influence was first felt in the late 1940s and 1950s, and became especially evident during the 1960s and 1970s. Rudolph de Harak (1924–2002), a self-taught graphic designer who embraced European modernism, began his career in Los Angeles in 1946.
Image: Rosmarie Tissi, Univac advertisement, 1965. A dynamic, powerful image is created by the careful cropping and placement of two telephone receivers. -
After the Decline
During the late 1960s American graphic design slowly started to become a national profession. New photographic typesetting and printing technology permitted excellent work to be produced in smaller cities; professional educational programs developed around the country. Two national design magazines—Print, published in New York from 1940, and Communication Arts, launched in the San Francisco area in 1959 -
Paul Rand- Corporate Identity
Image: Paul Rand, American Broadcasting Company trademark, 1965. The continuing legacy of the Bauhaus and Herbert Bayer's universal alphabet informs this trademark, in which each letterform is reduced to its most elemental configuration. -
Dali - Surrealism
The theatrical Spanish painter Salvador Dalí (1904–89) influenced graphic design in two ways. His deep perspectives in his prints and paintings inspired designers to bring vast depth to the flat, printed page and has been frequently imitated in posters and editorial images .
Images: Salvador Dalí, “Don Quixote,” etching from Five Spanish Immortals, 1965. -
Psychedelic posters
Posters of the period were hung on apartment walls more frequently than they were posted in the streets. These posters made statements about social viewpoints rather than spreading commercial messages. The first wave of poster culture emerged from the late 1960s hippie subculture centered in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Because the media and general public related these posters to antiestablishment values, rock music, and psychedelic drugs, they were called psychedelic. -
European Visual Poets
Poetry was once defined as bringing together unlike things to create a new experience or evoke an unexpected emotional response. In Europe, beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s, there emerged a poetic approach to graphic design based on imagery and its manipulation through collage, montage, and both photographic and photomechanical techniques.
Image: Gunther Kieser, “Alabama Blues” concert poster, 1966. -
Supergraphics
Image: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, supergraphics for Sea Ranch, 1966. Vibrant primary colors, sans-serif letters, arcs, and slashing diagonals form a strong counterpoint to the architectural structure and the brilliant sunlight. -
American International Typographic Design
Image: Jacqueline S. Casey, announcement for the MIT ocean engineering program, 1967. Typography sits above an X-ray of a chambered nautilus shell superimposed on a wavelike repetition of fluid blue shapes. -
Psychedelic Posters
Image: Victor Moscoso, poster for the Chambers Brothers, 1967. The vibrant contrasting colors and Vienna Secession lettering inside of the sunglasses implies the drug culture of the period. -
Postmodern Design
Image: Robert Venturi, competition model for the Football Hall of Fame, 1967. A vast, kinetic electronic graphics display dominates the building, as information replaces structure as the dominant “subject” of architecture. -
Design at CBS
After Golden's sudden death at age forty-eight, Dorfsman became the creative director of CBS Television (Fig. 20–9). He was named director of design for the entire CBS Corporation in 1964 and vice president in 1968, which kept with Stanton's philosophy that design is a vital area that should be managed by professionals.
Image: Lou Dorfsman, advertisement for a program series, 1968. The combination of images carried tremendous shock value, gaining viewers for important news programs -
Postwar English Design
In post–World War II England, graphic design was characterized by an international culture that embraced the fine and performing arts. Both the purist modernism of Switzerland and the graphic expressionism of New York were assimilated, but outstanding English designers succeeded in making significant contributions to international dialogue while avoiding becoming tied to those movements that influenced them. -
Avant Garde
Image: Herb Lubalin, type specimen for Avant Garde, 1969. -
Third World Poster
The emerging nations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa have been called the third world. In social and political struggles, ideas are weapons, and the poster is a major vehicle for spreading them. The medium is effective because access to newspapers, radio, and television is often limited in these countries, where the poster is sometimes used with the intensity and frequency that characterized the European context during World War I. -
Japanese Design
Image: Ikko Tanaka, “Nihon Buyo” poster, 1981. A traditional Japanese theatrical character is reinvented using the aesthetic forms of a later age. -
Poster Mania
Image: David Lance Goines, classical film screening poster, 1973. The directness of image and composition gains graphic distinction from a poetic sense of color and sensitive drawing. -
Visual Autism
Another group of surrealist painters, the emblematics, worked with a purely visual vocabulary. Visual automatism (intuitive stream-of-consciousness drawing and calligraphy) was used to create spontaneous expressions of inner life in the work of Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Jean Arp. Miró explored a process of metamorphosis through which he intuitively developed his motifs into cryptic, organic shapes. -
Federal Design Improvement Program
In May 1974, the United States government initiated the Federal Design Improvement Program in response to a growing awareness that design could be an effective tool for achieving objectives. This initiative was coordinated by the Architectural and Environmental Arts Program (later renamed the Design Arts Program) of the National Endowment for the Arts. Image: John Massey, trademark for the U.S. Department of Labor, 1974. Stripes on the L forms suggest the American flag's stars and stripes. -
Transportation Sinage Symbols
Major international events, large airports, and other transportation facilities handling international travelers have commissioned graphic designers to create pictographic signage programs to communicate important information and directions quickly and simply. The development of these sign-and-symbol systems involved considerable time and expense, and near duplication of effort often occurred. -
New Wave Photography
Image: Wolfgang Weingart, announcement from Typografische Monatsblätter magazine, 1974. This early layered collage, with overlapping images and complex dropouts, uses numbers and arrows rather than left-to-right and top-to-bottom sequencing to direct the reader through the page. -
New Design
In 1974 Salisbury redesigned the entire format of Rolling Stone, a rock-and-roll newspaper repositioned as a tabloid magazine. The element of surprise became Salisbury's primary design tool for giving Rolling Stone visual energy. Typography was used differently for each article in an issue, and the range of illustrations.
Image: Mike Salisbury, pages from Rolling Stone, 1974. Diverse typefaces are contained in plaques and boxes. Full, two-page photographs produce a lively graphic pacing. -
Corporate Design
Image: Paul Rand, IBM package design, 1975. After two decades, the original packaging design program was replaced by an updated design using the eight-stripe logo. -
Design in the Netherlands
As Dutch design evolved, two strong currents became evident: a pragmatic constructivism inspired by Dutch traditions from the first half of the century, including the De Stijl movement, Piet Zwart, and Paul Schuitema as well as postwar influences from Switzerland; and a vigorous expressionism, with jolting images and spontaneous spatial syntax. -
Design at Yale
In 1950 Josef Albers was appointed director of the art school at Yale University. During the same year he invited Alvin Eisenman (b. 1921) to direct the graphic design program, providing the genesis of the first such program to be supported by a major university.
Image: Ivan Chermayeff, Between the Wars, 1977. The interwar years are represented by Churchill's hat between two helmets. -
Federal Design Improvement Program
Image; Massimo Vignelli (consulting designer), Vincent Gleason (art director), and Dennis McLaughlin (graphic designer), Unigrid system for the National Park Service, 1977. -
European Visual Poets
Image: Gunther Kieser (designer) and Hans Hartmann (photographer), Frankfurt Jazz Festival poster, 1978. -
American Conceptual Images
Traditionally, illustrators had exaggerated value contrasts, intensified color, and made edges and details sharper than life to create more convincing images than photography. But now, improvements in materials and processes enabled photography to expand its range of lighting conditions and image fidelity. The death of illustration was somberly predicted as photography made rapid inroads into the profession's traditional market. However, as photography stole illustration's traditional function, -
New Wave Photography
But by the mid-1970s Weingart set off in a new direction, turning his attention toward offset printing and film systems. He used the printer's camera to alter images and explored the unique properties of the film image. Weingart began to move away from purely typographic design and embraced collage as a medium for visual communication
Image: Wolfgang Weingart, exhibition poster, 1979. -
Saul Bass - Corporate Identity
Image: Saul Bass & Associates, trademark for Minolta, 1980. -
Gunter Rambow
One of the most innovative image makers in late twentieth-century design is Gunter Rambow (b. 1938) of Frankfurt, Germany, who often collaborated with Gerhard Lienemeyer (b. 1936) and Michael van de Sand (b. 1945).
Image: Gunter Rambow, poster for the play Die Hamletmaschine, 1980. A chilling sense of anonymity is produced by this self-inflicted act of vandalism. -
San Francisco School
The design community and art schools in San Francisco were strongly influenced by the international style. This direction was punctuated by the flowering of the psychedelic poster in the late 1960s, proving to Bay Area graphic designers that tremendous potential existed for innovative form and color. In the early 1980s, San Francisco postmodern design emerged 471472 472473quickly, earning the city a reputation as a major center for creative design. -
Memphis School
An important inspiration for all areas of design emerged in 1981, when global attention was concentrated on an exhibition of the Italian design group Memphis, led by eminent Italian architectural and product designer Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007).
Image: Christoph Radl and Valentina Grego, Memphis logo designs, early 1980s. The Memphis vocabulary of form and pattern is given typographic expression in this series of logo designs. -
Paul Rand - Corporate Identity
Image: Paul Rand, “Eye Bee M” poster, 1981. Using the rebus principle, Rand designed this poster for the presentation of the Golden Circle award, an in-house IBM occasion. Although Rand eventually prevailed, it was temporarily banned, as it was felt that it would encourage IBM staff designers to take liberties with the IBM logo. -
MTV
A moment of insight occurred when the designers realized the potential of varying the color, decoration, material, dimensionality, viewing angle, and motion of the logo, with its broad flat M and vigorous tv. With these variations, the logo could assume different personalities, participate in animated events, and be demolished. The concept of a logo with a constantly changing persona runs contrary to the widely held belief that trademarks and visual identifiers should be absolutely fixed. -
Weingart
Image: Wolfgang Weingart, exhibition poster, 1981. Moiré patterns are created by layered film positives -
Design in the Netherlands
Image: Jan van Toorn, Mens en Omgeving (Man and Environment), poster, De Beyerd Visual Arts Center, Breda, the Netherlands, 1982. Seven montage poster designs were produced, each using the same triangular fragments of a TV image of actress Sophia Loren and her son. Van Toorn altered the reproduction on each poster by manipulating color plates and adding hand coloring. The repeated images called attention to the designer's capability in shaping mass media and the media's power to invent celebrit -
Apple Computers
Apple Computer's 1984 introduction of the first-generation Macintosh computer, based on technology pioneered in its Lisa computer, foretold a graphic revolution. The Macintosh displayed bitmapped graphics; that is, its screen presented information as dots called pixels, with 72 dots per inch (dpi) on a black-and-white screen. Its interface with the user was achieved via a desktop device, called a mouse, whose movement controlled a pointer on the screen. -
Bezier Curves
Image: Sumner Stone, digitized data for Stone Medium b, 1985. The outline Bézier curves and filled laser-printed output are shown. -
Retro Design
Image: Paula Scher, Swatch Watch poster, 1985. A famous Herbert Matter poster from the 1930s (see Fig. 16–61) is unabashedly parodied for Swatch, the Swiss watch manufacturer. -
Digitized Images
Image: April Greiman, graphic imagery for Design Quarterly, no. 133, 1987. This poster composed of digitized images was output by a low-resolution printer. -
Adobe
Adobe Systems became a prolific and influential digital type foundry.
Image: Sumner Stone, the Stone type family, 1987. This typographic arrangement by Min Wang shows the harmony of the serif, sans-serif, and informal versions. -
Emigre
VanderLans used typewriter type and copier images in the first issue and low-resolution Macintosh type for subsequent issues. A magazine with a printing run of seven thousand copies became a lightning rod for experimentation, outraging many design professionals while captivating those who embraced computer technology's sense of infinite possibility for reinvigorating and redefining graphic design. -
Digital Type
Image: Carol Twombly, typefaces Charlemagne, Lithos, and Trajan, 1989. The inscriptional spirit of the ancient world is translated into the digital realm. -
Modern Chinese Design
Image: Min Wang, “The Forbidden City,” poster and logotype identity, 1994. The Forbidden City was the royal palace during the last two Chinese dynasties, the Ming and Qing, and is a national park today. -
Editorial Design
During the early 1990s, accelerating progress in computers, software, and output devices enabled graphic designers to achieve results virtually identical to those of conventional working methods, for the promise of seamless on-screen color graphics had been fulfilled. While designers explored the unprecedented possibilities of computers and graphics software, at the same time a renewed interest in handmade and expressionist lettering and images was growing. -
Modern Chinese Design
Image: Min Wang, font design, 1995. -
Interactive media, the Internet, and the World Wide Web
Image: Clement Mok and Brian Forst (designers), Scott Peterson (photographer), and Studio Archetype (design studio), iQVC main categories screen for Internet shopping, 1995. Drawers and cubbyholes make this screen adaptable to new and seasonal promotions, similar to a storefront. -
MTV Logo
The MTV logo was a harbinger of the world of motion graphics that would soon open up as cable television, video games, and computer graphics expanded the variety and range of kinetic graphic messages. On 8 September 1996, the New York Times observed, “The move of information from the printed page to other media has changed the nature of graphic identity. -
Recent British Design
Image: Michael Johnson, “Design Decisions,” poster, 1996. One of a series of posters created for Britain's Design Council. They were intended to be displayed in schools to spur children's interest in the design process by using beautifully “wrong” images. -
A Voice from Africa
Image: Chaz Maviyane-Davies, “Article 29,” UN human rights poster, 1996. Article 29 states that everyone has a duty to the community and the environment. -
New Conceptual Poster
Image: Luba Lukova, “Peace,” poster, 2001. A medley of weapons is used to construct a dove. -
Design for Portable Devices
In 2001, Apple unveiled its first iPod, a digital music player that fit in the palm of your hand. The iPod instantly became a cultural icon and changed the way we listen to music. At the same time, the iPod placed new demands on the design of the album cover, wich suddenly shrunk to less than one square inch. -
Letterpress Revival
In the midst of the technological revolution, designers using centuries-old techniques and processes are enjoying a renaissance, particularly those artisans concerned with preserving the art of letterpress printing. -
Japanese Design
During the postwar period technological leadership and an awareness of Western social patterns and lifestyles raised philosophic issues for Japanese graphic designers as they 485486 486487sought to maintain national traditions while simultaneously incorporating international influences.
Image: Siobahn Keaney, Royal Mail Yearpack for the Royal Mail, London, 2002. This folder features special-edition stamps from 2002. -
Conceptual Poster
Image: Luba Lukova, “Water,” poster, 2002. The message for water conservation is a barren lake bed that forms the body of a dead fish. -
Middle Eastern Design
Image: Reza Abedini, poster for Visual Experiments, an exhibition of his own work, 2002. -
South Korea
Image: In the early 1980s, the Korean graphic designer Ahn Sang-Soo (b. 1952) designed a succession of experimental letters based on older Korean typefaces. This series was the first to deviate from the rigidity of Hangul typography, a Korean alphabet created in the mid-fifteenth century, and the square frame of Korean writing. In his poster and publication designs, Sang-Soo incorporates letters as free and playful elements -
Chinese graphic design
Two pioneers of contemporary Chinese graphic design who embrace modern design, Henry Steiner (b. 1934), and Bingnan Yu (b. 1933), continue to inspire a younger generation of graphic designers.
Image: Henry Steiner, series of banknotes for the Standard Chartered Bank, 2003. -
New Typographic Expression
Image: Minoru Niijima, poster for Musashino Art University, 2003. -
Recent British Design
Image: Vaughan Oliver, Central St. Martin's Fashion Show invitation, 2004. -
Modern Chinese Design
Image: Jianping He, poster advertising Hesign Studio Berlin, 2004. The numbers for the year 2004 become part of the landscape. -
Film Titles
Imaginary Forces (Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller), Mad Men title sequence, 2007. This design received an Emmy Award in 2008 for Outstanding Title Sequence. -
Spain, Portugal, and Latin America
Graphic design from Spain and Portugal share similar aesthetic qualities and often reflects a tranquil view of life: charming, warm, colorful and, at times, imbued with the sensual, the surreal, and the witty.
Image: Emilio Gil, spread from Pioneers of Spanish Graphic Design, 2007. This spread highlights the work of Spanish designer Jordi Fornas (b. 1927), celebrating the illustrations and collages he uses to create book covers. -
New Typographic Expression
Image: Pentagram (Paula Scher), poster for the Public Theater's productions of Hamlet and Hair, 2008. -
Hatch Show Print
Founded by Charles and Herbert Hatch in April 1879 in Nashville, Tennessee, Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest continuously running letterpress shops in the United States.
Image: Hatch Show Print, “Three Baseball Shoes,” monotype, 2008. -
Conceptual Book Cover
Image: Paprika. François Leclerc (art director and designer), Louis Gagnon (creative director, Alain Pilon (illustrator), book covers for a series, Les Allusifs, 2008. -
Recent British Design
Image: Angus Hyland, spread from Grafik magazine, 2009. The spread visually interprets a series of essays on typographic forms. -
The design revolution continues...
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Illuminated Manuscripts - The Celtic Book
Celtic design is abstract and extremely complex; geometric linear patterns weave, twist, and fill a space with thick visual textures, and bright, pure colors are used in close juxtaposition.
Image: The Book of Durrow, the man, symbol of Matthew, 680 CE. As flat as a cubist painting and constructed from simple geometric forms, this figure, facing the opening of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, wears a checkered pattern of red, yellow, and green squares and tile-like patterned textures. -
Daily Contact with Printed Images
China became the first society in which ordinary people had daily contact with printed images. In addition to paper money, block prints bearing religious images and texts received wide distribution.
Image: Chinese woodblock print, c. 950 CE. A prayer text is placed below an illustration of Manjusri, the Buddhist personification of supreme wisdom, riding a lion. -
The Book of Kells
A radical design innovation in Celtic manuscripts was leaving a space between words to enable the reader to separate the string of letters into words more quickly.
Image: The Book of Kells, the Chi-Rho page, 794–806 CE.
