Slide presentation on the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the development of Graphic Design in England. For a History of Graphic Design course at Red River College. Reference text is Megg's History of Graphic Design
22. Summary
âą Technological advances caused mass
migration from rural, agricultural areas to
cities
âą People found work in factories, mass
producing cheap goods
âą The need to package and sell this flood of
products created a need for advertising and
package design
23. âą Printing, typsetting and photographic
processes developed to meet growing
demand
âą More literate public created demand for
printed material and periodicals
âą Contradictory design approaches often
created aesthetic confusion--there was no
unified design style
Hinweis der Redaktion
The conversion from an agricultural to an industrial society brought about radical social, economic, and political changes. As sources of energy shifted from animal and human power to steam-, electricity-, and gasoline-fueled engines, productivity expanded, and mass production increased the availability of merchandise and lowered the cost of manufactured goods.
Graphics played an important role in marketing factory output to a growing middle class. The French and American revolutions resulted in greater human equality, which led to increased public education and literacy and an increased audience for reading materials.
Graphic communications became more important and more widely available, and the era of mass communications dawned.
A side effect of the factory system of mass manufacturing on graphic design was the end to the unity of design and production that had existed up until this time. This separation becomes an impetus for the Arts and Crafts movement, which we will discuss next week.
Advances in typography, photography, and printing during this period profoundly changed the nature of visual material. This is a poster for the Hoe printing press, 1870. This press made mass editions of chromolithographs (basically colour printing) possible.
Typographic innovations included experimentation with casting larger type sizes, the manufacture of wood type, and the introduction of an abundance of imaginative new type styles and letter forms, many of which were influenced by the uninhibited lettering of chromolithography. Among the most significant new type styles were fat faces, Egyptians, and sans serifs.
The design philosophy at the time was to use all available materials. Both wood and metal type in various styles and sizes, rules, ornaments, and wood-engraved or metal-stereotyped stock illustrations were combined in a single printed letterpress poster or broadsheet
Steam-powered printing presses, the mechanization of paper, and the invention of machines to compose type led to the expansion of book publishing and a surge in the production of periodicals and illustrated weeklies. The printing process that had remained virtually unchanged since Gutenbergâs printing of the Forty-two Line Bible (1455) Ëwas radically altered in the nineteenth century.
Joseph Niepce, the first photograph from nature, 1826. Created through a process called âHeliogravure,â or âsun-engraving.â
. Louis Jacques Daguerre, Paris boulevard, 1839. In this early daguerreotype, the wagons, carriages, and pedestrians were not recorded because the slow exposure could only record stationary objects. On the lower left street corner, a man stopped to have his boots polished. He and the polisher were the first people ever to be photographed.
Talbot invented the photogram, later extensively used as a design tool by designers such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He also invented the first photographic negative, 1835.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Kodak camera put the power of photography into the hands of the lay public.
Before it was possible to actually print photographs, photographs were used as a research tool for wood engravings. A Mathew Brady, photograph, âFreedmen on the Canal Bank at Richmond,â 1865, and a John Macdonald, wood engraving based on the photograph.
The era of photographic reproduction began with the halftone screen, which produced the illusion of the continuous tone of a photograph. Photomechanical color separation remained experimental until the end of the century. This is the first halftone printing plate to reproduce a photograph in a newspaper, in 1880.
During this period, the aesthetic potential of photography was explored by artists and adventurers, and photography emerged as an important documentary and communications tool.
Matthew Brady was a New York based photographer whose photographs of the American Civil War stand as an early example of photography as reportage.
Eadweard Muybridge, is best known for his Sequence photography, which proved the ability of graphic images to record time-and-space relationships. His work foreshadowed the development of motion pictures.
As photography began to monopolize factual documentation, illustrators gained a new freedom of expression and consequently turned toward fantasy and fiction, including colorful picture books for preschool children. The so-called "Golden Age" of children's illustrated booksâa period dating from around 1880 to the early twentieth centuryâis today regarded as a literary epoch that produced some of the finest works of art ever created for children's literature
The contradictory design approaches and philosophies of the Victorian era often resulted in aesthetic confusion. Various historical styles, such as Medieval letterforms, baroque plant designs, and Celtic interlaces were combined to form complex designs.
The eighteenth-century invention of lithography and the subsequent German development of using colored inks with lithography led to the development of chromolithography.
This planographic printing process, with its meticulous and convincing tonal drawing, achieved remarkable realism through subtle color, and suited the sentimentalism, nostalgia, and canon of idealized beauty that characterized the graphics of the Victorian era.
