Comm via printed media 04

Communication via Printed Media
4. History of Visual
Communication
Hasan Hüseyin Erkaya
Eskişehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi
2019
Source: http://historyofvisualcommunication.com
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4. History of Visual Communication
Timeline:
• Rock and Caves
• Ideograms
• The Alphabet
• The Art of the Book
• The Printing Press
• The Masters of Type
• Encyclopedias, Maps, Etc.
• Breaking the Grid
• The Avant-garde
• The Modernists
• Post WW2
• The Computer
2

4. History of Visual Communication Rock and Caves
Rock and Cave Paintings
• Images painted on cave or rock walls and ceilings, usually dating to prehistoric
times (40,000 years ago)
• Believed to be the work of respected elders or shamans
• Most common themes: large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and
deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns.
• Human figures: rare and usually schematic rather than the more naturalistic
animal subjects.
• The paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide
and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first.
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4

4. History of Visual Communication
5

Petroglyphs
• Petroglyphs are images carved in rock, usually by prehistoric, especially
Neolithic, peoples.
• They were an important form of pre-writing symbols, used in
communication from approximately 10,000 B.C. to modern times,
depending on culture and location.
• Many petroglyphs are thought to represent some kind of not-yet-fully
understood symbolic or ritual language.
6

Petroglyphs
7

Petroglyphs
• The oldest petroglyphs are dated to 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
• Around 7,000 to 9,000 years ago, other writing systems such as
pictographs and ideograms began to appear.
• Tribal societies continued using petroglyphs much longer, even until
contact with Western culture was made in the 20th century.
• These images probably had deep cultural and religious significance for the
societies that created them.
8

Geoglyphs
• Geoglyphs are drawings on the ground, or a large motif, (generally greater
than 4 meters ) or design produced on the ground by arranging clasts
(stones, stone fragments, gravel or earth)
• Some of the most famous geoglyphs are the Nazca Lines in Peru. They
were created by the Nazca culture between 200 BC and 600 AD.
• There is not much evidence why these are built
9

Geoglyphs
• Other areas with geoglyphs include Western Australia and parts of the
Great Basin Desert in SW United States. Hill figures, turf mazes and the
stone-lined labyrinths of Scandinavia, Iceland, Lappland and the former
Soviet Union are types of geoglyph. The largest geoglyph is the Marree
Man in South Australia
10

4. History of Visual Communication Ideograms
Pictography
• A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity,
place or event by illustration.
• Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing.
It is the basis of cuneiform and hieroglyphs.
• Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what
they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas).
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Pictography
• It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were
used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and
began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC.
• Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some
non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as
simple symbols by most contemporary cultures.
12

Logogram
• A Chinese character is a logogram used in writing Chinese, Japanese and
Korean (the oldest surviving writing system)
• It appeared as 8000 years ago, and completed 3500 years ago in China
• Derived from individual or combined pictograms and phonetic signs.
• Kangxi dictionary has 47,000 words
• 4,000 - 5,000 characters may be sufficient for literacy.
13

Logogram
• A knowledge of calligraphy is an important step in the understanding of
Japanese culture.
• Calligraphy is not merely an exercise in good handwriting, but rather the
foremost art form of the Orient. It is the combination of the skill and imagination
of the person who has studied intensely the combinations available using only
lines.
14

Cuneiforms
• World's earliest systems of writing
• Invented 5000 years ago by Sumerians in southern Iraq for accounting and record
keeping.
• Use of signs to represent numbers, things, words, and the sounds of words.
• All of the signs were originally pictograms
• Written on clay via reed styli to produce wedge-shaped lines
• "Cuneiform" – Latin for "wedge-shaped."
15

Hieroglyphs
• Egyptian hieroglyphs are a writing system used by the Ancient Egyptians, that
contained a combination of logographic, alphabetic, and ideographic elements.
Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt.
16

4. History of Visual Communication The Alphabet
The Alphabet
• The alphabet emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of
language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles
had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium.
• Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery,
or were directly inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the
Greek alphabet.
• The Rosetta Stone shows the co-existence of Hieroglyphics, Hieratic script and
the Greek Alphabet in Egypt in the third century B.C.
18

The Phaistos Disc
• From the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age.
• Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture,
remain disputed
• Cretan inscriptions, known summarily as Cretan hieroglyphs. on display at the
archaeological museum of Herakleion in Crete, Greece.
19

The Phoenician Alphabet
• The Phoenician alphabet seamlessly continues the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by
convention called Phoenician from the mid 11th century.
• The Phoenicians are the descendants of the Bronze Age Canaanites who,
protected by the Lebanon mountains and the sea.
• The Phoenician alphabet was based on the principle that one sign represents one
spoken sound
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The Greek Alphabet
• The Greek alphabet is the source for all the modern scripts of Europe.
• Started with the adoption of Phoenician letterforms and continues to the present
day.
• The Phoenician alphabet had only consonants. Several of the Phoenician
consonants, representing sounds or distinctions not present in Greek, were
adapted to represent vowels; consequently the Greek alphabet can be considered
to be the world's first true alphabet.
21

The Roman Alphabet
• Several hundred years later, the Romans used the Greek alphabet as the basis for
the uppercase alphabet that we know today.
• They refined the art of handwriting.
• They developed a formal script for important manuscripts and official documents
and a quicker, more informal style for letters and routine types of writing.
• Romans made important contributions to type design: Serifs (little hooks at the tips
of letters) originated with the carving of words into stone in ancient Italy to prevent
the chisel from slipping, which turned out to be the very aesthetic as well as
legibility increasing addition to type that we use to this day.
23

The Roman Alphabet
• Lower case letters and rough forms of punctuation
were gradually added.
• Romans invented the codex: a handwritten book.
• The codex gradually replaced the scroll.
• By A.D. 100, the Romans had developed a flourishing
book industry
• Early books were made of papyrus; papyrus was
fragile and there was a shortage of it; the more durable
parchment and vellum gained favor, despite the cost.
• From the point of view of Graphic Design the codex
completely revolutionized the field in that codices
brought about the gridded page layout system, which
we still use today.
26

4. History of Visual Communication The Art of the Book
Illuminated Manuscripts
• Medieval Europe = Pestilence and plague,
darkness and fear, witch-hunts and illiteracy
roam the land.
• There lived some great book designers who
created some of the most beautiful books the
world has ever seen: Illuminated Manuscripts.
• An illuminated manuscript is a book in which the
text is supplemented by the addition of
decoration or illustration, such as decorated
initials, borders and miniatures (often with gold
or silver)
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4. History of Visual Communication The Art of the Book
Scribes copying books in scriptoria, on papyrus, parchment, vellum or
(later) paper

4. History of Visual Communication The Printing Press
The Incunabula
• An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed — not
handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe.
• Prima typographicae incunabula: "the first infancy of printing."
• Two types of incunabula: the xylographic (made from a single carved or
sculpted block for each page) and the typographic (made with movable type on
a printing press in the style of Johann Gutenberg).
• The term is used for all printed books starting from the late 17th century.
32

Block printing
• Individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and
illustrations carved into them
• First recorded in Chinese history, and was in use in East Asia long before
Gutenberg.
• By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of
thousands of printed books.
• The Chinese and Koreans knew about moveable metal type at the time, but
because of the complexity of the movable type printing it was not as widely used
as in Renaissance Europe.
33

Movable Type
• Individual letters were put together to form the text
• Various sizes, styles and “faces” were produced
• Dutchman Laurens Janszoon Coster was the first
European to invent movable type.
• Johannes Gutenberg (1398 – 1468) was a German
goldsmith and inventor who achieved fame for his
invention of the technology of printing with movable
types during 1447.
• Antimony (Sb) + Lead (Pb) + Tin (Sn)
alloy is used.
34

Page Construction
• Gutenberg applied the golden rule of page construction to his
work.
• Gutenberg's Bible's page was based on the golden section
shape, based on the irrational number 0.618.... (approximately
5:8)
36

Typography
• Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) was a painter, printmaker,
and theorist of the German Renaissance
• Produced high-quality woodcut prints and engravings
• Published books on geometry, architecture, engineering and typography.
• Described the geometric construction of the Latin alphabet, relying on Italian
precedent. However, his construction of the Gothic alphabet is based upon an
entirely different modular system.
37

4. History of Visual Communication The Masters of Type
The Renaissance
• a period in European history, from the 14th to the 17th century
• the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history
• started as a cultural movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period
• spread to the rest of Europe, marking the beginning of the Early Modern Age
• its intellectual basis: its own invented version of humanism originating from
Ancient Greek Protagoras’ words: "Man is the measure of all things."
• new approach manifested in art, architecture, politics, science and literature.
• Painters:
– Sandro Boticelli (1445 - 1510)
– Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610)
– Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
39

40Sandro Boticelli (1445 - 1510)

41Sandro Boticelli (1445 - 1510)

42Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610)

43
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

The Renaissance masters of type
• New, humanist writings required creating a new type of fonts—more secular,
more legible, and more elegant.
• Usage of paper had gradually replaced parchment and vellum
• Page designs were rapidly becoming lighter: there was more white space
• Font artisans looked into the past in order to create better typefaces for the
present.
• Typographers designed lowercase lettershapes to match the Roman
uppercase letters and to better adopt to Gutenberg's printing technology.
– Aldus Manutius (1450–1515)
– Claude Garamond (1480–1561)
– Geoffroy Tory
44

The Baroque masters of type
• Baroque masters took the art of book design and typography even further
• Pages became even whiter, margins broader and type even more refined.
• One of the most beautiful characteristics of Baroque page design are the
ornate borders and typographic flourishes.
– Philippe Grandjean (1666-1714)
– William Caslon (1692–1766)
– John Baskerville (1706 - 1775)
– Pierre Simon Fournier (1712 - 1768)
45

The Age of the Enlightenment
• The refers to either the eighteenth century in European philosophy, or the
longer period including the seventeenth century and the Age of Reason.
• The intellectual leaders saw themselves as a courageous elite purposely
leading the world into progress.
• The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American and
French Revolutions, the Latin American independence movement, and the
Polish Constitution of May 3; and led to the rise of classical liberalism and
capitalism.
• The 18th century brought about the ultimate refinement in page design and
typography
46

The Age of the Enlightenment
• François-Ambroise Didot (1730-1804)
• Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813)
47

4. History of Visual Communication Encyclopedias and Maps
Scientific Illustration
• represents aspects of science through visual means, particularly through
observations and subsequent renderings of the natural world.
• The emphasis is on accuracy and utility, rather than on aesthetics
• main areas of work are biological and anatomical illustrations and technical
drawing for the engineering fields.
• an important part of scientific communication prior to photography, but has
retained its importance through selective renderings rather than lifelike
accuracy
• Historically, biological illustrations have been in use since the beginning of
man's exploration and attempts to understand the world around him. In the
Alexandrian era (356 – 323 BC), the Greek physician Herophilus performed
public dissections and recorded his findings.
48

49
Andreas Vesalius (1514 - 1564)

50
Sydney Parkinson: The voyage of HMS Endeavour (1768-1771),

51
Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741).

52William Curtis (1746 - 1799).

53
Martin Waldseemüller (1470 - 1522).

54
Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) "The Mercator Atlas."

55Johann Bayer (1572 – 1625) "Uranometria."

56
Cyclopaedia, or, A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (folio, 2 vols.) was an encyclopedia
published by Ephraim Chambers in London in 1728,

57Encyclopédie, or "Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts" was an
early encyclopedia, published in France beginning in 1751, the final volumes being released in 1780

58L'Architecture Francoise (1752-1756).

4. History of Visual Communication Breaking the Grid
Industrial Revolution
• the major technological, socioeconomic and cultural change in the late 18th
and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread throughout the world.
• an economy based on manual labour was replaced by one dominated by
industry and the manufacture of machinery (steam engine)
• began with the mechanisation of the textile industries and the development of
iron-making techniques
• trading expanded by the building of canals, roads and railways.
• led to the Second Industrial Revolution around 1850:
– the development of steam-powered ships, railways, the internal combustion engine and electrical
power generation.
– innovator Henry Ford, father of the assembly line, stated, "There is but one rule for the
industrialist, and that is: Make the highest quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible,
paying the highest wages possible."
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Breaking the Grid on Printed Page
• Printing with movable type suggested an inflexible grid on page design.
• Illustrations, maps and the like were hand drawn and engraved, only allowing
for limited, costly editions due to the wearage of the engraving plates.
• The industrial revolution manifested itself in printing technology—a unique
technique called lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder towards the
end of the 18th century (printing with stone plates instead of movable type)
• originally intended for the reproduction of music notation - quickly spread
throughout the art world
• Munich became the center of this printing technique, which was to be come
extraordinarily important for 19th century art and advertising.
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Lithography
• a printing process that uses chemical processes to create an image.
• the positive part of an image would be a hydrophobic chemical, while the negative image
would be water.
• when the plate is introduced to an ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive
image and the water will clean the negative image.
• The stone plate last for many prints.
• Separate plates for color printing  Chromolithography
61

Typecasting Machines
• movable type was set by hand for 400 years—a difficult task
Hot metal casting machines:
• 1822 Dr. William Church invented a typesetting machine—others followed
• 1886 Linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler
• 1887 Monotype by Tolbert Lanston
• 1906 Ludlow Typograph by Washington Ludlow
• 1911 Intertype by William Reade
Newer processes:
• 1949 Phototypesetting
• 1970 Electronic typsetting
• 1985 Plain-paper typesetting (laser printer)
62

Photography
• the process of making pictures by means of the action of light.
• another invention which greatly affected visual communication procedures
• cameras are used for imaging
• originally light-sensitive chemicals were used to record the image
• The first photograph: in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter
plate with a camera.
• Niépce and Louis Daguerre announced the Daguerreotype in 1839
• William Fox Talbot refined the process to take photographs of people.
• 1852 William Fox Talbot produced halftone photographs for printing press
• In 1884 George Eastman developed photographic film
• In July of 1888 Eastman's Kodak camera went on the market with the slogan "You press the
button, we do the rest".
• Photography became available for the mass-market in 1901 with the introduction of Kodak
Brownie.
64

The first photograph
by the French
inventor Nicéphore
Niépce in 1826
Exposure time:
8 hours
65

The first
photograph of
people taken by
Daguerre one
spring morning
in 1838 from the
window of the
Diorama.
Exposure time:
10 minutes
66

The Arts and Crafts movement
• a major English and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of
the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century.
• Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin, it was at its height between
approximately 1880–1910.
• a reformist movement that influenced British and American architecture,
decorative arts, cabinet making, crafts, and even the "cottage" garden designs of
William Robinson or Gertrude Jekyll.
• Its best-known practitioners were William Morris, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
Frank Lloyd Wright, and artists in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
• began primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th
century and as a reaction to the eclectic historicism of the Victorian era and to
"soulless" machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution.
• was in large part a reaction to industrialization, if looked at on the whole, it was
neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern.
68

Graphic Design: a new profession
• In the late 19th century, graphic design emerged as a distinct profession in the
West, in part because of the job specialization process that occurred there, and
in part because of the new technologies and commercial possibilities brought
about by the Industrial Revolution.
• New production methods led to the separation of the design of a communication
medium (e.g., a poster) from its actual production.
• Increasingly, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
advertising agencies, book publishers, and magazines hired art directors who
organized all visual elements of the communication and brought them into a
harmonious whole, creating an expression appropriate to the content.
• In 1922 typographer William A. Dwiggins coined the term graphic design to
identify the emerging field.
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70
Thanks for your attention
Hasan Hüseyin Erkaya
Eskişehir Osmangazi University
February 2019
70

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