Introduction
How did the industrial revolution affect the development of new English language typefaces in the United States and Western Europe during the 19th century? The Industrial Revolution was a period of radical social and economic change beginning in England during the late 18th century. Cities grew rapidly as large groups of people left a subsistence existence looking for employment in factories. All sorts of industries were changing, especially printing and design. No longer was type just needed for the publication of books and newspapers, but there was now a commercial need for advertisement. The 19th century witnessed an astonishing succession of new technologies, imaginative forms, and new functions for graphic design. It was an inventive and prolific period for new typeface designs, ranging from fanciful and outrageous novelty styles to entirely new categories of type such as Egyptians and sans serif. This is a topic worthy of study because the way in which communicate with the world says a lot about the people doing the communicating.
This paper will argue that the industrial revolution allowed for the proliferation of fonts in the 19th century for two main reasons. First, there was an unprecedented need for new and eye-catching lettering to grab the attention of consumers a new variety of choices on the market. Secondly, the creation of new fonts was more affordable than ever due to the advancements in technology during the industrial revolution.
Early Typography
Humans have been using written language to communicate ideas with one another since as early as 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia. Since then, every great civilization has had a written language, each with its own unique characteristics. However, it was the writin...
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...echnology permitted these demands to be met at an unprecedented rate. As a result, the 19th century was an inventive and prolific period for new typeface designs, ranging from new categories such as Egyptians and sans serif to fanciful and outrageous novelty styles.
Wood-type printing allowed new typefaces to be created and used for printing cheaper than ever before. Technological advances permitted machine-set typography to be printed on machine-manufactured paper with high-speed steam-powered printing presses. The use of color lithography passed the aesthetic experience of colorful images from the privileged few to the whole of society.
It was no longer enough for the 26 letters of the alphabet to function only as phonetic symbols. The industrial age transformed these signs into abstract visual forms projecting a variety of shapes to be consumed by the public eye.
Without the Mesopotamians we would not have all the luxury we have today. Could you ever imagine a world without writing? You may think, life would not be so bad without it, but without writing we would not have stories, we could not write to the bank, we could not text. Two major contributions made to society were the first forms of writing known as Cuneiform and Hammurabi’s Code.
The printing press was, arguably, the most impactful invention in history. Created by Johannes Gutenberg, the printing press are sets of metal letters set in a frame that could be inked, papered and pressed. The printing press affected the fast and wide spread of new ideas changing everyday life. The Protestant Reformation was a movement that changed people’s mind about Catholic belief and created new sects of Christianity. The Exploration Era led to many discoveries of the Americas and opened up the curiosity of many. Both of these historical events were important consequences of the printing press. The Exploration Era was the more important consequence of the printing press than the Protestant Reformation.
By being educated at a young age in literacy, I included it in my pottery and also working for newspaper companies strengthened my form of expression. Working in the South Carolina Republican and then later on The Edgefield Hive as a typesetter, it was a good experience helping my literacy skills but I didn’t feel fully indulged. I did it because I had to but also to learn. By understand typography, I was able to understand the science of the anatomy of type. They taught me the use of size, spacing, and placement of typography in order to show hierarchy, direction and attraction. I became to understanding that type is a collective of shapes and strokes. Master Abner 's newspaper did not get a lot of publicity and hit a crisis, which led him to cease publication of the newspapers. Master Abner then moved to Columbia, South Carolina, in 1832. He decided to leave me back in Edgefield and...
Jan Tschichold devised a “universal alphabet” for German that not only improved it's non-phonetic spelling, but promoted the replacement of the multiple fonts that were being used with a much simpler sans serif type. He also played a very significant role in British book design after the war. When commissioned by the German printers to create a universal typeface ...
Writing is perhaps the most important building block of communication - after verbal speech, of course. Writing, like most of human civilization, has its roots in ancient Mesopotamia. The first writing systems began in a style known as cuneiform (Cuneiform, 2013). These wedge-shaped markings have their roots in Sumerian culture and were used predominantly for record keeping and accounting. At the archaeological site of Uruk in what is modern day Iraq, a great wealth of knowledge has been gained from the artifacts located there. Uruk was a ceremonial site and is home to the world’s oldest known documented written documents (Price and Feinman, 2013). The documents discovered list quantities of goods that may have been stored at Uruk, leading archaeologists to believe that writing in this part of the world was developed primarily to keep lists of transactions and stockpiled quantities of goods located at the site.
Like most people, typography is a focus in graphic design that most people overlook or don’t think anything of. Even though it’s seen every single day in multiple ways, people still forget that it’s considered an art of its own. Every single day we see typeface in multiple ways. Typography is one of the most influential art forms out in the world to date yet somehow it goes unnoticed. Max Miedinger, Adrian Frutiger, John Baskerville, and Matthew Carter are some of the most influential and famous photographers in history. Max Miedinger, the creator of “Helvetica”, (one of the most admired fonts) changed the world of typography / typeface.
The Industrial Revolution is a major turning point in mankind's history. It is no more viewed as the drastic change that its name prescribes, for it was the consequence of an economic evolution that began in the sixteenth century. However, the eighteenth century does speak to an unequivocal change in innovation technology and the growth of economy. The acclaimed inventions–the spinning jenny, the steam engine, coke smelting, thus forth–deserve their eminence, for they mark the begin of a process that has conveyed the West, in any event, to the mass thriving of the twenty-first century. The motivation behind this article is to identify what happened in the eighteenth century, in Britain, and how the methodology of their invention has converted the world.
82).” According to Walter Ong, the act of communication through writing heightens ones consciousness and begins to change the way in which the writer thinks. This in turn facilitates the development of increasingly sophisticated technological advancements. Early pictographs were typically monotone and very simplistic in nature. However, as the technology evolved, humankind developed multi-hued writing media that improved the visual accuracy of the images created and subsequently improved the complexity of the message delivered. Essentially more visual detail equals a more complex symbology and abstraction. Some major milestones in the evolution of communication technology include the simplification of earlier literal depictions in the late Paleolithic era, the development of the first “alphabets” as quasi-abstract symbols representing the basic sounds of spoken language. These early alphabets were extremely complex and cumbersome until the Phoenicians developed a “totally abstract and alphabetical system of twenty-two simple phonetic signs, replacing the formidable complexity of cuneiform and hieroglyphs (Higgins, 2003).” The inhabitants of Greece and Rome adopted this system of writing which was in effect by 1500 B.C. and later developed what we know as the
Copperplate typeface was created by Frederic William Goudy in 1901. Goudy was born in the United states in march 8, 1965 in Bloomington, Illinois. He was an American printer and typographer and best known for being one of the most productive type creators in history. He was first a book-keeper for credit and mortgage companies then he moved to Chicago to work in the real state business. Later in 1892 he launched a magazine called “Modern Advertising” which issued only a few numbers. He later opened up a print workshop where he started to design typefaces for various publishing houses and companies. Goudy died on May 11, 1947 in Marlboro, New York. He left us with more than a hundred designed typefaces which include: Camelot, Berkely Old Style, LTC Kennerley, Goudy Old Style, Hadriano, LTC Deepdene...
Born in Haag, Austria, in 1900, Herbert Bayer grew up in the period of the fast changing environment and technologically revolutionary years. After serving in the Austrian Army, he started studying architecture under Professor Schmidthammer in Linz, but in 1921, he enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he studied mural painting with Wassily Kandinsky. Bayer was later appointed by Walter Gropius to head the first printing and advertising workshop in Dessau. “Under Bayer’s charge, the newly installed workshop developed into a professional studio for graphic design and commercial art. The study of the communicative potential of letterforms and typographic layout was part of a basic curriculum in the mechanics of visual education. Such innovations as the elimination of capital letters, and the replacement of the archaic Gothic alphabet used in German printing by a modern “cosmopolitan” font, and the concept of composition based on strong geometrical elements and expressive values of colors, testify to a move away from individually handcrafted and traditionally shaped goods towards objects meeting functional requirements suitabl...
Not only has writing revolutionized, nevertheless writing utensils have as well. Writing utensils have gone from bone, to clay, to pen and pencil in thousands of years. With bone, you would scratch the bone against the clay to create the letters. With clay, cuneiform was formed and written by taking a wedge utensil and make the letters on a clay tablet. And today we use pen and pencil to take notes, write down information, and communicate.
Around the year 500 BC a new form of writing, the Demotic in which the formal way of writing hieroglyphics were written alongside the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone, came into light. It was phonetic, semi-alphabetical and a language that can be spoken in, which later developed into a language of religion, culture and literature.
Technology and social change have long been vital in the evolution of graphic design and its importance in the society. In particular was the Industrial Revolution between 1760 and 1840, which brought about the transformation from agrarian to industrialized societies across Europe and America. Mass production was made possible by new technologies; availability and variety of goods increased and cost of manufacturing decreased, accompanied by the higher standard of living for many people. A consequence of mass production on graphic design was that it led to the demise of the unity between design and production. Craftsmen were replaced by modern technologies, sacrificing artistry for speed and cheaper production.
Another thing about Émigré that struck my interest is that from 1984 to 2005 they put out a magazine that represented the visual arts. Émigré made some of the first digital typefaces that pushed the boundaries and made some professionals uncomfortable because of the experimental approach that Émigré took. Back in the times this first started being released on a quarterly basis I can see why professionals in the graphic design business were a bit cautious to accept what the Émigré company was doing because back then there was only one way doing things and only a few font styles to design to. With this magazine brought Émigré the exposure they needed to create one of the first independent font foundries and their own personalized computer technology. Although Émigré pushed the boundaries with their experimental typefaces they also created some traditional typefaces as well and now their font library consists of over 600 different digital
McLuhan, M. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.