Research & Reasoning - Chapter 1 The Guttenberg, before and after

Research & Reasoning - Chapter 1 The Guttenberg, before and after

Based on the prologue of the essay a preliminary body of research was gathered before starting to write and inform arguments based around my essay question, doing this allowed me to gather a thorough body of research to extract the strongest quotes from to inform my own writing, include drop quotes, paraphrasing and to inform further reading and influence in the future for my extended practice. A color coding system helps me quickly extract what quotes are needed for what purpose in the essay so it allows me to maintain a consistent and good flow when writing my dissertation. 


Key

Orange informs my own writing. 

Blue for potential drop quotes and paraphrasing.

Black will inform further investigations into my extended practice module. 

Red is a rationale and reasoning of the quote.

1 - The Guttenberg, before and after.

·Brief history of the development of typography and how it developed from been a visualization of spoken language to an organized physical system.

· How typography was distributed and communicated before the Guttenberg.

· How mass communication developed (Industry, Printing press, Newspapers).

· Contemporary technologies that will change the distribution and communication of typography. These been 3D print, moving image, eBooks, internet, emojis as a way off showing how personal communications developed and how a simple emoji can connote and communicate so much etc.

Gill, E (2013). An essay on Typography. London: Penguin Group.

Chapter 1 – Time and Place

p1.

The conflict between industrialism & the ancient methods of handicraftsmen, which resulted in the muddle of the 19th century, is now coming to its term.

(Development of Mass production through industrialization, from craft to mass production and introduction to mass communication)

The handicrafts are not killed, & they cannot be quite killed because they meet an inherent, indestructible, permanent need in human nature.

(Craft, Respect of ownership from end user & Pride of making)

p3.

Even the small craftsman, in spite of the impossibility of competition with ‘big business’ and mass production, cannot be permanently put out of action, if only because the pen-knife is always with us and men will always want to make things to please themselves, tho’ only in there spare time.

(Ownership and quality of craft)

Mr Maritain, in his recent essay on Religion and Culture, says: ‘The modern world is spiritually dominated by the humanism of the Renaissance, the Protestant Re-formation and the Cartesian Reform’

(Religion and its impact on communication through a key period within the Renaissance and the development of communication through this period)

p14.

It is no longer permissible to design things with no reference but to our own pleasure, leaving it to engineers to design machines capable of making them; our business is now to design things, which are suitable for machines to make. And this is not to say that we accept the limitations of machinery as such.

p17.

Nowhere is there a perfectly humane civilization, but all who are not enthralled by industrialism desire its perfection. On the one hand is the dream of those who imagine a perfectly organized system of mass production; every article of use made to a good standard pattern; a perfected system of marketing and transport, whether Communist or Capitalist; the hours of labour, both for masters & men, reduced to a few hours a day, & a long leisure time devoted to amusement & love-making, even to the pursuit of the thing they call Art.

p20,

The hard and logical development of industrialism will impose, even upon its enemies, a very salutary hardness and logicality. Fancy lettering will be as distasteful to the artist as it will be to the engineer (maker) - in fact it is more than probable that it will be the artists who will give the lead. It has always been so. It is not the artist who is sentimental – it is the men of the business and the man of science. Even now there are few really logical & relentless alphabets of plain letters in common commercial use in this country, and they were designed by artists.

Chapter 2 – Lettering

p23.

Letters are signs for sounds. Signs for numbers and other things (like the sign for a dollar) may in practice be included, though they are not strictly letters (except as in Roman or Greek numerals & the letter signs use in Algebra)

Letters are not pictures or representations. They are more or less abstract forms.

p24.

Lettering is for us the Roman alphabet and the Roman alphabet is lettering.

The English language is done in Roman letters, and these letters may be said to have reached a permanent type about the first century A.D.

Fourteen hundred years after the cutting of the Trajan inscription the tablet in Henry VII’s chapel was inscribed, and no Roman would have found any difficulty in reading the letters.

(Basic outline of development of lettering and communication)

p25.

But, although the Roman alphabet has remained essentially unchanged through the centuries, customs & habits of work have changed a great deal. In the time of the Romans, say A. D 100, when a man said the word ‘letters’ it is probable that he immediately thought of the kind of letters he was accustomed to seeing on public inscriptions.

Although all sorts of other kind of lettering existed (on wax tablets, on papyrus) the most common kind of formal lettering was the inscription in stone.

Letters are such and such forms; therefor, whatever tools & materials we have to use, we must make these forms as well as the tools and material will allow.

(Limitations of type design)

p25-27.

This is not to deny that tools and materials have had a very great influence on letterforms. But that influence has been secondary, and for the most part it has been exerted without the craftman’s conscious intention.

(Impact of new technologies even back then on the influence of type design)

p28-29. FIG 1.

Figure 2, reading in the customary order, shows (1) the essential form of A; (2) the same with the customary thick and thin strokes and serifs as made with a brush; (3) the same as incised with a chisel; (4) the same made with a broad pen, three strokes; (4-7) the two stroke A, as developed between the fourth and fifteenth centuries; (8-10) sixteenth century writing; (11-3) modern forms of the same suitable type

(Replication of carvings with a brush, this could relate to how contemporary type design still emulates traditional type creation elements)

p30.

The point that chiefly concerns me is that, with whatever tools or materials or economic circumstance (that is hurry & expense), the artist, the letter-maker, has always thought of himself as making existing forms, & not inventing new ones.

(Takes influence from past practices just develops them in better ways to aid communication and embrace technologies and change to develop better made typography)

p34.

Again they did not invent new forms, but formalized and adapted existing forms to the exigencies of typefounding and printing.

(Develop the way type is created for the introduction of mass communication and efficient communication of language)

p36.

The ninteeth century developed machinery, & machine makers are now able to supply accurate, though mechanical. Imitations of the type faces of the pre-commercial era.

p37-38.

Letters are letters, whether made by hand or by machine. It is, however, desirable that modern machinery should be employed to make letters whose virtue is compatible with there mechanical manufacture, rather than exact and scholarly resuscitations of letters whose virtue is bound up with their derivation from humane craftsmanship.

p40.

Letter’s are letters. A is A, and B is B. The letter maker of the twentieth century has not got to be an inventor of letter forms but simple a man of intelligence & good will. Weather in stone, wood paint or metal & the word fair can be taken in both senses – it means both beautiful and just.

p41.

The printed letter is lettering for us.

p42-43.

A return to mere legibility seems desirable even if the effect be less striking. To this end it is necessary to study the principles of legibility – the characters which distinguish one letter from another, the proportions of light and dark in the letters and spacing.

Without denying ourselves the pleasure and amusement of designing all sorts of fancy letters whenever the occasion for such arises.

(Relate to custom designed typefaces and headers)

p54.

Even the influence of the tools of the punch-cutter is now practically negligible. But a very considerable influence is exerted by the natures of type-metal and type-setting.

(How tools to create type have developed to adapt the final distribution method of typography)

Chapter 3 – Typography

p59.

One of the most alluring enthusiasms that can occupy the mind of the letterer is that of inventing a really logical and consistent alphabet having a distinct sign for every distinct sound.

For the letters we use only inadequately symbolize the sounds of our language.

(Main focus and aims of a type designer and the main purpose of typography as a translation of lettering into something that can be communicated clearly and efficiently and distributed/printed/made equally efficiently.)

p66.

TYPOGRAPHY (the reproduction of lettering by means of movable letter types) was originally done by pressing the inked surface or ‘face’ of a letter made of wood or metal against a surface of paper.

(Origins of type printing, relate this to a final outcome or comparison to contemporary typography somehow)

p73.

The introduction of mechanical methods into small workshops has an immediate effect on the workmen. Inevitably they tent to take more interest in the machine and less in the work, to become machine minders and to regard wages as there only reward

(Consider the output and efficiency of mass communication and production rather than the craft and quality of work they put in to the letters been printed)

You cannot see the difference between a machine-set page and one set by hand.

Chapter 4 – Punch-cutting

p76-78.

Punch-cutting by machine involves substantially the following procedure: the designer, according to his experience and skill, draws the letters to be cut to an enlarged size (say one to two inches high). The drawing is then again enlarged, by reflecting it through a lens on to a sheet of paper, to about twelve inches high. A draughtsman traces around the enlarged reflection, and the drawing made is laid flat & the line refined according to the draughtsman’s discretion, or that of his overseer, with the help of ‘french’ curves. The refined drawing is then placed under a pantograph, and while the same draughtsman or another traces the pencil end of the pantograph round the drawing the other end is cutting a sharp groove in a thin layer of wax laid on a metal bed. When the tracing is complete the wax slab is taken out and the wax is removed, by the same or yet another draughtsman, from between the cut grooves, leaving a wax letter lying in relief on the metal bed. This wax letter is then placed in an electric bath & copper is electrically deposited on it. The electrotyping is of course in charge of another specialist. The wax is then melted out and a copper matric of the letter remains; from this a ‘positive’ is made, & this is the ‘pattern’: it is usually about four or five inches high. The pattern is then placed in the punch cutting machine. This works on the same pantographic principle. The operator in charge of it traces round the pattern with the pencil end of the machine, & the cutting end cuts the punch to whatever size is required – large or small from the same pattern. The cutter is designed to cut the punch with a suitable bevel, more or less as the hand cutter would do it. If a slight alteration is required in the punch after it comes out of the machine, this can be done by hand provided it only involves cutting away from and not adding to the punch, & provided that there is someone available with the required skill. After the punch is cut the making of the matrix & the casting of the type are the same whether for hand cut punches or those cut by machine, tho’ either of these processes can be done with or without machinery. Mechanical casting appliances offer a higher average of accuracy, and this is considered of paramount importance by some printers and publishers.

(Introduction to mass communication through punch cutter type, relate these techniques into contemporary practices.

Limitations due to skill sets.

Slow process, not very efficient)

p79.

To know what a letter enlarged a hundred times will look like when reduced to the size of the intended type. And when the design is in the least degree fanciful or subtle these difficulties are infinitely increased.

(Benefits of this hands on process)

Chapter 5 – Of Paper And Ink

Relate to the transition from print to digital analyzing type design, distribution and print. Distribution of information, development of mass communication.

p81.

As to paper, it seems to be generally admitted that the kind called, and to some extent properly called. ‘hand made’ is the best, if only because the most durable.

Hand made paper is made in various standard sizes; it is best to use that which naturally folds to the size of book required without cutting

(Limitations of print and publication)

p82.

Paper is to the printer as stone is to the sculptor, one of the raw materials of his trade. The handicraftsman will naturally prefer the hand made, as the sculptor will naturally prefer the natural to the artificial stone.

(Transition of how communication was through lettering and stone carving but is now focused on typography, moveable type and the printing of a logical collation of letters into a typographic form. Introduction to industrialism and mass communication)

p86.

In typography the use of colour is a reasonable and not a fancy matter, & as every extra colour involves an extra printing, the expense alone places a curb upon the exuberance of the craftsman.

(Limitations of traditional print and color application withing typography reject this statement showing potential of contemporary print and type design. Reflect this on the gradient printed typography I made)

Chapter 6 – The Procrustean Bed

p88.

Now uneven spacing is in itself objectionable – more objectionable than uneven length of lines, which is not in itself objectionable.

(Relationship to visual rebellions/pretty ugly movement, rule breaking, how typography can be communicated outside its traditional principles)

p89.

Even spacing is a great assistance to easy reading: hence its pleasantness for the eye is not vexed by roughness, jerkiness, restlessness and spottiness which uneven spacing entails, even if such things be reduced to a minimum by careful setting.

Chapter 7 – The instrument

p95.

The printing press was invented, we are told, in order that books might be multiplied more quickly and cheaply than could be done by handwriting.

(Development from roman lettering, typography to mass communication)

And further, it is suggested, the invention of the printing press was inspired by precisely the same ideas and motives as inspire the invention of 20^th century machinery; that the ‘hand’ press is in essence the same kind of machine as the ‘power’ press, and that printing in the fifteenth century was as much ‘mass’ production as it is in the twentieth.

(How 15^th century print technologies where still seen as contemporary methods aiding mass production back then, things just developed to industrialization)

Chapter 8 – The Book

p103.

Legibility is what the Daily Mail reader finds readable; good style is what he finds good; the beautiful is what pleases him.

(The range of satisfaction certain elements of type design and its application and distribution can obtain)

p111.

The unfortunate printers who regard the title page as the only source of interest in an otherwise dull job.

(Relate to header fonts and custom typefaces for the purpose of drawing attention rather than communication and legibility)

Chapter 9 – But Why Lettering

p119.

I think it is generally agreed that picture writing was the beginning of our lettering. You might wish to communicate something to someone at a distance.

(Universal way of communication but not efficient for mass communication but this idea of an aesthetic focus to communicate something could resonate well with custom designed concept and aesthetic driven header and custom typefaces and emojis in the future.)

Think slowly, speak slowly, write slowly, but think the words, speak the sounds and write something which reasonably presents those sounds.

(A process on how to develop a well communicated collection of letters to turn into a typeface)

p128.

As things are at present, handwriting has been ruined because everyone is forced to scribble. The only use of handwriting today is for the making of personal communications between friends, and in spite of every improvement & cheapening of type writing machines there will always be a necessity for people to communicate by handwriting.

(How traditional hands on approaches will always help add personality and how the introduction of methods of mass publishing to aid mass communication on a more personal level)

p132.

Moreover the business of printed lettering has now, under the spur of commercial competition got altogether out of hand and gone mad. There are now about as many different varieties of letters as they are different kind of fools.

(Example of over exposure of cheap yet accessible typography and software, yet uneducated people out there to use them. Too many pretend grapic designers)

And as there are a thousand different sorts of fancy lettering so there are many too many different sorts of types for reading in books – all of them copies and resuscitations and re-hashes and corruptions of the printing types designed in pre-industrial days – non of them designed for modern machine production; & the machines themselves are complicated by every sort of complicated mechanism for producing the appearance of pre-industrial things.

(Emulation and reproduction of traditional typefaces in easy to access over saturated distribution methods placed into mass communication outputs)

p133.

The only way to reform modern lettering is to abolish it.

(Ideas for a physical resolution, go against all ideas of modern lettering production but somehow use digital process’s to create it but referencing traditional production methods, the outcome would reference physical type printing but be produced using contemporary production methods)

Buick, J. (1991). Cyberspace for Beginners. 1^st Edition. Avon, Great Britain. The Bath Press.

Blurb

Cyberspace – a new word and a new world for the late 20^th century, a world of information accessible via computer technology. Limited only by our imagination and the interface between ourselves and the machine, cyberspace can be all things to all people – a world of cyber-surfing fantasy, ‘virtual reality’ meetings of minds on the superhighways of networked electronic information, Big brother data bases or a global social club. It is where out money lives and where data about every recorded detail of our lives is collected.

Cyberspace for beginners traces the development of the communication technologies, which have led to the cybernetic revolution. It describes the growth of the information industry and points out social and political implications of identity and control in an electronic world order. It is also a fascinating guide to what the future might contain now that we have arrived at the threshold of a parallel electronic universe. 

P8.

The conjunction of information with networked communication technologies has generated a vast virtual world of knowledge – a parallel universe of recorded data, identification numbers, standards, methods and procedures.

P9,

All these technological developments would not have arisen without the human desire to know and communicate.

Language

P10.

Gesture was probably the origin of speech, language no doubt connected to tool-making culture – an evolutionary coordination of hand and mind.

Writing

P12.

The earliest writing wasn’t alphabetic, like this, but hieroglyphic. Using simple pictures of common animals and things, the Egyptians recorded stories of the lives of the Pharaohs, their gods, crop reports.

(Link to how emojis are a contemporary repurposing of these, connoting many different meanings with a light hearted image)

P13

Around 3500BC, when first potters’ wheels and wheeled vehicles were being used, the first coded language emerged…

Cuneiform

Cuneiform evolved from picture-writing and was read from left to right. The abstracted images still depended on associations with things they originally represented, so it was not truly alphabetical. But it was nevertheless capable of recording poetry, astronomical observations and monetary exchanges.

Mass communication

P16

The earliest forms of mass communication were public meetings (for example, Christ speaking to a crowd of 4000 people) and theatre. Early Greek drama was performed outdoors for audiences of up to 30’000 people – all without amplification.

(Introduction of mass communication before printing mediums and Guttenberg)

P17.

Human beings have always used technology to enhance communication and feel part of something greater and more meaningful than they experience alone – the belief in a collective unconscious, or at least a shared dream, doesn’t go away.

Religion & Communication

The Bible

P20.

In AD 600, Pope Gregory ruled that ‘pictures were books for literates’, and they could spread the message of the Bible more widely. While in Europe books were still being written by hand in monasteries, in China, nearly 800 years before Gutenberg books were being printed….

News, Music, Romance & The Koran

P21

In AD650 the Caliphs introduced the first organized news service, the first Indian dictionary and romantic novels were produced, Muhammad’s teachings were collected into the book called the Koran, and notation in music began

Newspaper

The first printed newspaper was published in Beijing and St. Vitus’ dance (chorea disease) became epidemic across Europe.

P27.

If you wanted to create cyberspace from scratch, what would you need?

Systematized information

Education

Writing and visual communication

Ways of sending and receiving information

Electricity

Machines for handling huge quantities of information

Storage systems…

(essence of cyberspace, these are the predated analog requirements. So happens there all the basic requirements to mass communication, production and revolution for technology and progression)

P28.

Gutenberg

Germany 1450

Gutenberg’s original type was similar to gothic script, but was replaced by a Roman typeface in 1970. This was specially designed for the printing process and was easier to read.

Although a book using movable type had been printed in Korea in 1409, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz is credited with starting the new age of communication in the 15^th century.

Moveable type (a printing block for each page cast from a hand assembled set of individual reversed letters) meant that any numbers of copies of those pages could be printed.

P29.

Information storage and retrieval.

Gutenberg’s first publication was the Bible. 1282 pages in 2 volumes.

P48.

Electric telegraphy by wire was a possibility first suggested as early as 1753 in Scotland, and messages were actually sent one kilometer by Francisco Salva of Barcelona in 1804 using a battery-powered system in which each letter used a separate wire.

P50.

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Researching methods of teaching deaf people to speak, he built the first microphone using a vibrating reed which coverts the sound waves of speech into the physical movements of an electromagnet to produce electric signals which are sent along wires to another transducer containing a reed that reproduced the original sound.

(Variation of how typography translates the spoken word into a visual system, this is turning the spoken word into a physical thing that can be mechanically turned into a communicative system across a distance)

P60.

In 1926, John Logie Baird introduced the first usable television with a picture of 30 vertical lines, its image changing 12.5 times per second.

(Introduction of news and film, a modern interpretation of greek theatre communicated to even larger audiences, relate this mass distribution to how typography developed from a small distribution circle been a physical thing to a mass distributed thing through the digital age)

P61.

The universal acceptance of television both as a medium for entertainment and news and as a common cultural denominator shows how rapidly the global village has become reality.

P72.

If cyberspace were simply a matter of communication, then the telephone system is nearly there.

(How introduction of modern telephones are starting to make a huge impact on contemporary mass communication)

P74.

We have an insatiable desire to organize, analyze and communicate what we know. The most powerful tool ever invented for doing all of these things is the computer

(Link with introduction of mac and software for type design)

There is nothing magical about computers. They’re very stupid machines that can only do what people tell them to do.

(Link how miss use of software and computers leads to bad designed type)

Let me output…

P90.

The output is not necessarily text – it can be music notation, electronic control signals to machinery, synthetic voice equipment

(How communication goes past text)

P91.

The connection between personal computers and music began with the introduction of MIDI (Musical instrument Digital Interface), a protocol for digital communication between electronic instruments.

The emerging multimedia technologies and hard disc recording (digital recording of audio material straight to the computers hard disc) are opening previously undreamed-of possibilities for artistic expression and new forms for musicians and composers.

(Influence ideas on the comparison between physical type to digital type and physical music to streamed digital music, the creating of the music started off with these analog interfaces but now software replaces these tools also causing oversaturation and easy accessed mediocre music.)

Software development

Paint and draw

P112

Painting applications use very similar principles: mark making ‘instruments’, such as pencils, brushes and spray cans in various shapes and sizes, and drawing tools to create, select or isolate chosen shapes.

Analogous to drawing equipment in the real world, these are operated using a mouse of pen interface.

Most painting programmes use a system known as bit-mapping similar to weaving in its use of coordinates to determine the location of particular coloured squares or pixels.

(Introduction to design software which feeds into type design software and other mediums for creating contemporary typographic outputs to create different means of communicating messages) (Also the idea of digitizing analog tools and techniques, from traditional to contemporary)

Internet

Only connect

P126.

It all started in the 1960s with ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency Network) built by the US Defense Department, connecting computers to radio and satellite systems to support military research into networks that would still work even if part was destroyed in wartime.

P132

The internet isn’t just email, but it’s a great start.

Talk to people in every country of the world, practice your foreign languages, discuss great literature and science, swap recipes and stories, make friends and influence people.

(Developing and giving opportunity to email a fundamental mode of mass communication)

Virtual real

P118

This is an ideal interface with cyberspace, total immersion in the virtual world, using a headset giving stereoscopic visual and audio inputs, a tactile body suit and data gloves for experience and control of the environment, and machinery to change gravity so that you can float or fly!

Because sight is the predominant sense, we suspend our disbelief if convincing visual information is presented to us. Introduction of appropriate sound, touch and movement can lead to entirely believable virtual worlds.

(Potential future technologies that will change how information is communicated)

Tschichold, J (1987 ). The New Typography . London: University of California Press.

p13-14.

In the battle between the old and the new, it is not a question of creating a new style for its own sake. But new needs and new contents create new forms which look utterly unlike the old. And it is just as impossible to argue away these new needs, as it is to deny the need for a truly contemporary style of typography.

(Accept progression, and accept there will always be an influence from traditional principles but there needs to be change to address the development of technologies both through distribution and typography design)

p15.

1440-1914

The history of typography shows a steady progress from its invention down to about the middle of the last century, but after that it is disturbed by disorganized movements and turned upside down by new technical inventions which decisively affected its course.

Guttenberg, who was concerned only to imitate the book of his day – which was handwritten – developed his types out of the contemporary book hand, the gothic minuscule.

p44.

One does not, after all, look at Renaissance art from the same standpoint as Romanesque. The basic premiss of all modern art is that it can no longer be representational. Previously art without a subject (real or imaginary) was unthinkable.

p52.

The History of the New Typography

After the jumble of styles of the eighties, which affected typography as devastatingly as everything else, and after the reaction of the “Freien Richtung” movement which followed it, the Jugendstil movement at the end of the 19^th century was an attempt to give expression to a new philosophy of life. It tried to discard historicism by going back to the forms of nature and creating a contemporary style out of function, construction, material and methods of manufacture.

p60.

Topography of Typography

1.    On the printed page words are seen, not heard.

2.    Ideas are communicated through conventional words, the concept is designed by means of letters.

3.    Economy of expression – visual not phonetic.

4.    The spatial arrangement of the book, by means of the type matter and according to the mechanical rules of printing, must express the strains and stresses of the contents.

5.    The special arrangement of the book by means of process blocks, which embody our new visual concepts. The supernaturalistic reality of the perfected eye.

6.    The continuity of page-sequence – the baroscopic book.

7.    The new book demands the new writer. Ink-pots and goose-quills are dead.

8.    The printed page transcends space and time. The printed page, the infinity of the book, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.

p64.

Modern man has to absorb every day a mass of printed matter which, whether he has asked for it or not, is delivered through his letter-box or confronts him everywhere out of doors. At first, todays printing differed from that of previous times less in form than in quantity but as the quantity increased, the “form” also began to change: the speed with which the modern consumer of printing has to absorb it means that the form of printing also must adapt itself to the conditions of modern life. As a rule we no longer read quietly line by line, but glance quickly over the whole, and only if our interest is awakened do we study it in detail.

The old typography both in feeling and in form was adapted to the needs of its readers, who had plenty of time to read line by line in a leisurely manner. For them, function could not yet play any significant role. For this reason the old typography concerned itself less with function than with what was called “beauty” or “art”. Problems of formal aesthetics (choice of type, mixture of typefaces and ornament) dominated considerations of form. It is for this reason that the history of typography since Manutius is not so much a development towards clarity of appearance (the only exception being the period of Didot, Bodoni, Baskerville, and Walbaum) as an embodiment of the development of historical typefaces and ornaments.

p66

The essence of the New Typography is clarity. This puts into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was “beauty” and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. This utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression. 

(Recycling this concept of beauty and aesthetics as a main focus now for holding a concept and communicating information)

p152-153

As regards to type, an effective and original typographic form must be found. The advertising card for the Kubin Exhibition by Walter Dexel shows the powerful effect which can be obtained from type alone. All secondary matter (rules etc.) has been excluded. It is in fact often necessary to use such secondary matter to obtain a good result, but it must always belong to the whole design and not be introduced like old ornamentation. Bold borders, rules, points etc. must be functional. The decorations which are typical of old typography are always wrong. Rules used in the New Typography are necessary when they provide contrast and emphasize visual effect.

p159.

Typography has thus become “three-dimensional” – an expression of our time, which seeks to conquer space.

M, McLuhan (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.

p18.

The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world

(Transition from spoken language, to letters to the organization of letters into logical typographic systems)

p20.

When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world.

Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as whim dictates. They lose those emotional overtones and emphases, which have been described, for instance, by Monrad-Krohn…. Thus, in general, words, by becoming visible, join a world of relative indifference to the viewer – a world from which the magic ‘power’ of the word has been abstracted.

p110.

For the oral man the literal text contains all possible levels of meaning.

(Losing value, personality that spoken words had (Try bring this back), this value from the spoken word can be related to how the value has been lost with mass produced typefaces based on expertly crafted physical type)

p40.

When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized.

p45.

The world of the Greeks illustrates why visual appearances cannot interest a people before the interiorization of alphabetic technology.

p71.

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration-the technique of the suspended judgment.

p74.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

(Development of communication before the introduction of typography)

p77.

The techniques of uniformity and repeatability were introduced by the Romans and the Middle Ages.

p153.

That printing from movable types was an event nearly related to the earlier technology of the phonetic alphabet is a fact that has been a main reason for studying all these centuries that preceded Gutenberg.

(How communication of information was developed in its own ways before mass communication distribution)

p79.

Perhaps Ivins overdoes this emphasis on the Dark and Middle Ages as a “culture of techniques and technologies,” but it is a kind of approach which makes scholasticism understandable, and that prepares us for the great medieval invention of typography that was the “take-off” moment into the new spaces of the modern world

(Typography is equally responsible for mass communication as well as how its distributed)

p86

The manuscript shaped medieval literacy conventions to all levels.

(Define manuscript and talk about how this was a key stage in ideas of mass communication)

p111.

The sheer increase in the quantity of information movement favored the visual organization of knowledge and the rise of perspective even before typography.

p119.

Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.

p159.

Applied knowledge in the Renaissance had to take the form of translation of the auditory into visual terms, of the plastic into retinal form.

(Evidencing how the renaissance movment was a key stage of communication, compare this with how communication as changed in post modern graphic design/contemporary type/graphic design)

p124.

The invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass production.

The invention of typography, as such, is an example of the application of the knowledge of traditional crafts to a special visual problem. Abbott Payson Usher devotes the tenth chapter of his History of Mechanical Inventions to the “The Inventions of Printing” saying that more than any other single achievement, it “marks the line of division between medieval and modern technology… We see here the same transfer to the field of the imagination that is clearly evident in all the work of Leonardo da Vinci” From now on “imagination” will tend more and more to refer to the powers of visualization.

p151.

Typography as the first mechanization of a handicraft is itself the perfect instance not of a new knowledge, but of applied knowledge.

p159

The invention of printing invented large scale manipulation of words in space and gave new urgency to the drive toward handling logic or dialectic quantitatively, a drive long manifest in the medieval arts scholastics…. The tendency for quantitative or quasi-quantitative manipulation of logic to dissipate itself in memory devices will be a noteworthy feature of Ramism.

p161

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

(Places language, something non physical into something physical that uses a logical system to communicate language, the idea of a portable commodity could be referenced to it been a universal system but also a physical thing. This transition from placing language into a physical context into physical type could relate to how times have reversed and now physical type has now been mass produced into digital variations)

p164.

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence

(How typography is a technology in itself and has become something accepted as a ways of communicating information in daily life and society’s reliance on it shows the importance of how typography is distributed and communicated both back then, now and the future.)

p165.

The passion of exact measurement began to dominate the Renaissance.

(How the accuracy and use of geometric practices within architecture and art reflected on how typography was beginning to be designed as a mechanical entity aiming at providing legible and efficient presentation of information and language.)

p199.

Print, in turning the vernaculars into mass media, or closed systems, created the uniform, centralizing forces of modern nationalism.

p200.

The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page.

p202.

The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.

(A suggestion through contrasting quotes that emotion and color was lost through mass produced printing, it holds efficiency but like arguments made before feeling is lost through this mass production and repetition n)

SEE IDEAS OF AURA in the The Work of Art in Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

p216.

Typographic man can express but is helpless to read the configurations of print technology.

p228.

Print had the effect of purifying Latin out of existence.

(Print was responsible for the development of how language was communicated, even though Latin was part of the introduction of lettering which in turn developed into typography and communication of language. Relate to how print has changed the context of language and communication through contemporary technologies)

p231.

Print altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made bad grammar possible.

p238.

Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.

(How typography, language and communication developed in itself through the distribution method of mass printing but it also gave birth to some limitations through miss use and understanding of how typography should be used to communicate information)

p240.

The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.

(How print is refining language through the development of typography and how it is the physical language and is moving at a fast pace developing itself alongside the distribution methods that are arising within the industrialization of print methods)

p241.

The new time sense of typographic man is cinematic and sequential and pictorial.

(Contrasting statement how typography has developed from outright legibility and mechanical communication to something more aesthetic and visual)

Dodd, R. (2006). From Gutenberg to Open Type. 1^st Edition. Sussex. ILEX.

P6

Its often said that the printed book is endangered by the computer, and yet both are products of the creative imagination. The advent of the printing press made possible the spreading of knowledge, debate, thought and ideas, and this provided the learning that eventually inspired the computer. Today the personal computer is used in the conception and production of the modern book.

The general personal computer user has at their disposal an array of letterforms that were previously the arcane province of the printer.

Typographers and printers have always been occupied by the merit of this or that typeface, but now the writer of a “thank you” letter, who once took up a fountain pen, can now sit at a keyboard and scroll through a collection of fonts, choosing one at random with no knowledge of its origns.

(Accessibility of multiple digital typefaces, from when it was a privilege to own them physical it is now an oversaturation of digital replicas) (No knowledge about heritage just uses them mindless)

P7.

Among the thousands of digital fonts now available are the classic typefaces from over 500 years of printing, some of which have been in existence since long before reading was a basic requirement of everyday life.

(Digital replicas predate basic communication itself not to mention mass communication)

P15.

The Birth of Printing

The production of books written and illustrated by hand was a highly organized, but slow and labor-intensive process. By the 15^th century, the demand for books was increasing. Printing from a raised surface had been known for many years, but only from woodcut blocks, not individual letters.

P16.

The renaissance was a vigorous period of cultural and economic change that began in the 14^th century and continued into the 16^th century, bringing to a close to the Middle Ages, and representing a definable step toward the modern world.

P36.

The Enlightenment period

The demand for books and other reading material increased throughout the 18^th century, and the period became one of increasingly widespread enquiry. The ability to read was empowering as it permitted access to knowledge, and the educated members of the population became more confident in themselves and less deferential to the authority of the crown and the church.

P52.

The Didot Family & the Modern Face

In the later part of the 18^th century, the Ditod dynasty was an important presence in French printing. The patriarch of this family of remarkable printers, publishers, typecutters, and papermakers was Francois Didot (1689-1757), printer and bookseller. Both his sons, Francois Ambroise and Pierre Francois, made significant contributions to the development of French printing.

(How type design reacted to the distribution of information/printing process)

Bodoni

P56.

Bodoni’s goal was to produce spectacular visual experiences for his reader; he created brilliant examples of the skills of punchcutting and presswork that were to became objects of great fascination for their aristocratic owners. His books were objects of great typographic beauty.

(Ownership, attention to detail and quality)

P62.

By the early 19^th century typefoundries had a new kind of client, demanding a new sort of typeface. The new client was the jobbing printer, and his demand was for “display” typefaces.

(Custom type for specific display/large scale purpose)

The machine age

Telephone

P61.

The Scottish scientist Alexander Graham Bell patented his invention, the telephone, in 1876. Later he worked on an early type of gramophone.

After the second world war

P126.

Max Miedinger & Helvetica

Helvetica has found enduring popularity from the 1960s onward. Arial, distributed by Microsoft, is a cheaper, unauthorized, Helvetica close, and can be distinguished by examing the uppercase “R”. A default typeface for the Mac OS system, Helvetica is now widely used in France, Britain and the Nordic countries, although Univers is prefered worldwide. 

P127.

Swiss international Style.

Also known as Swiss Style and International Typographic Style, this was build on Constructivism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and 1930s New Typography. The movement sought to present complex information in a unified and structured manner by relying on the typographic grid, sans serif text, narrow, ranged-left text columns, and photographs rather than illustrations. It was, and still is, seen as an objective and systematic approach to problem-solving for graphic designers.

Grotesques.

Originally the term used for sans-serifs in Britain (The United States used the term “gothic”), the word “grotesque” stemmed from the belief that serifs prevented the letterform looking awkward and unappealing. Helvetica was origgnally released as New Haas Grotesque (“Neue Haas Grotesk” in German)

Akzidenz-Grotesk

A forerunner of Helvetica and popular with the Swiss, Akzidenz-Grotesk was released in 1898. The name comes from the German word “Akzidenzschrift,” meaning “display face” or “jobbing type” This type is particular suitable for technical literature and tables.

Adrian Frutiger & the Photo Sans-Serif

In 1954, the Deberny & Peignot typefoundry in Paris was preparing a typeface collection for the new Lumitype/Photon photosetting machine. A sans-serif was required and Futura was a strong possibility, until Charles Peignot’s young design director Adrian Frutiger asked for the opportunity to submit a design of his own. Univers was the resulting typeface.

The new sans-serif introduced a variation of line thickness, so that there is a slight difference between vertical and horizontal strokes, creating a more refined form than the metal letterpress monoline Grotesques.

As a typeface designed for photosetting, the new type was intended to fulfill the role of a sans-serif for extended lengths of text as well as display.

(Reaction to technology and how type is reproduced)

P154-155

Technical Developments: From letterpress to offset lithography

During the 1960s, there was a radical technical shift in the printing industry from letterpress to offset lithography. By the start of the 20^th century there were four main methods of printing in use: letterpress, offset lithography, photogravure, and process screen.

Lithography was invented by the German Alois Senefelder in the late 18^th century, and it is a planographic printing method – that is, printing from a virtually flat surface, originally a prepared stone. It is based on the principle that water and oil do not mix, one that is maintained in modern offset lithography, which uses photochemical processes.

Traditionally lithography tended to be more expensive in preparation than letterpress. However, by the 1960s it had achieved so many technical advances that challenged the dominance of letterpress printing. Letterpress had reached the limits of its development. It suffered from constraints on its ability to print satisfactorily, and in this case lithography was able to provide more effective results.

(Development of the distribution of information)

P155.

The  other methods of printing were more specialized. Photogravure, a photochemical development of engraving, was expensive in preparation and generally used for very long print runs such as packaging, magazines, directories and books. It is an intaglio process, in which the image is etched, as a grid of tiny dots, into the surface of a copper plate or cylinder, allowing for excellent reproduction of photography.

Process screen printing is also known as silk-screen printing, and is a method popular for comparatively short print runs such as T-shirts. It is used for printing posters, labels, menus, and textiles, and as an art medium.

(Alternative methods for varying purposes, influence practical ideas on printing methods)

P156.

Offset lithography could not print directly from metal typesetting. To make that possible, a good quality “reproduction proof” (print) had to be made of the typesetting on “baryta,” a paper coated with barium-sulphate gelatin which provided a very fine, smooth surface. The proof was then cut and pasted into pages as required, then photographed and the negative used to make printing plates. This process was time consuming and the handling of inked proofs required special care.

The first generation of photosetting devices were adaptations of the hot-metal machines, converting metal matrices to film negatives. Linotypes photocomposition system was previewed at the International Printing Exhibition in 1955. Intertypes first Fototypesetter was installed in 1956, while Monotypes, Monophoto machine started work in 1957

P157

Phototypesetting machines could be of three kinds. The first was direct entry, a single unit combining input keyboard, typographic unit, and phototypesetter, designed for small jobbing printers. The second were off-line systems, consisting of a number of unconnected units where a visual display keyboard unit produced output on magnetic tape or floppy disk, to be stored or transferred to the phototypesetter unit. The third kind were online systems, consisting of a central phototypesetter unit that was connected by cables to a number of separate input keyboards, with visual display units.

(Limitations of past methods and development)

Adobe & The personal computer

P168-169

The postmodern era

The combined technologies of offset lithography and computer-assisted phototypesetting were very important aids to greater freedom and refinement in typographic design.

The manipulation of type and images was no longer limited by the heavy and to some degree clumsy strictures of letterpress.

Type was generated photochemicaly, therefore type no longer had a body, only a face. This allowed for refinements such as the adjustment of space between letters (tracking), so that it could be increased or reduced from the normal spacing.

(Introducing ability to alter how type is communicated more legible and readable, tracking, kerning, leading, type size etc)

And still technology and engineering marched on. In 1981, IBM launched the IBM Personal Computer (PC), the first small desktop computer with a text-based interface, responding to type commands. In 1984, Apple Computers introduced the Macintosh computer. This was also a desktop machine, but it had a Graphical User Interface (GUI); an operating system that consisted of on-screen menus, windows, and icons that allowed the user to interact with the computer by pointing with a cursor via a “mouse”

(Link this development with introduction of design software like adobe Photoshop and development of type design software taking type design from physical process to digital)

Although the technology for digital fonts already existed, two rival methods were developed for generating desktop computer fonts. Type 1 fonts were developed by Adobe and consisted of two parts: a set of fixed size bitmap font files for screen display and a Postscript font file to be used by the output device (Printing/Physical) TrueType, the other method developed by Apple, provided information for screen display and the output device in a single file, which could contain sufficient information to generate plain, plain italic, bold, and bold italic. In 1991, Adobe introduced Multiple Master Fonts, Type 1 fonts that carry more than one digital outline. Each character has a pair of outlines that represent each end of a design axis. A font may contain axes for weight, width, style, or size, or all four together. This makes it possible for the designer to customize fonts by modifying weights and widths with greater variety than that found in standard fonts.

Most standard font character sets can contain up to 256 glyphs (characters), which provide for setting most languages based on the Latin Alphabet. The glyphs consist of capitals and lowercase letters, figures, floating accents, common mathematical characters, reference symbols, currency symbols and punctuation marks. 

P169.

Opentype

Adobe OpenType is a new format, which has been described in Mac User magazine as “the format designed for the 21^st century.” It was launched by Adobe and Microsoft in 1997, putting an end to the rivalry of Adobe Postscript Type 1 format and Microsoft’s TrueType format, which created endless user problems when a document created using one format was sent to a service bureau using the other.

OpenType is also supported by Unicode to provide an increase of the standard character set of up to 64,000 glyphs (characters)

These innovations make possible typographic designs of amazing refinement and richness never before achievable. ­

Mcluhan, E & Zingrone, F (1995). Essential McLuhan. Ontario : House of Anansi Press.

Chapter 5 – Letter to Harold Adam Innis

p72-73

Mallarmé saw the modern press as a magical institution born of technology. The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, he saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance. (He used the world “symbol” in the strict Greek sense sym-ballein, to pitch together, physically and musically). He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one so far as communication was concerned. Its very technological form was bound to be efficacious far beyond any informative purpose.

p73-74

The hypertrophy of letter-press, at once the cause and effect of universal literacy, has produced a spectacular decline of attention to the printed or written word. As you have shown in Empire and Communications, ages of literature have been few and brief in human history.

p74.

The comic book for example has been seen as a degenerate literary form instead of as a nascent pictorial and dramatic form which has sprung from the new stress on visual-auditory communication in the magazines, the radio and television. The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action.

Print and Electric revolution

p90.

Students of computer programming have had to learn how to approach all knowledge structurally. In order to transfer any kind of knowledge to tapes it is necessary to understand the form of the knowledge.

(Relationship between how typography was a structured output for lettering and placing spoken words into a visual language with more electronic & digital languages that communicate information through different mediums)

p92.

“The Greeks took over the alphabet and made it a flexible instrument suited to the demands of a flexible oral tradition by the creation of words.” The alphabet is a technology of visual fragmentation and specialism, and it let the Greeks quickly to the discovery of classifiable data.

(Link with above quote describing how alphabet is a technology in itself, could change the definition of technology? Technology is something innovative and more mathematical, not scientific)

p94.

The disastrous effect of the monopoly of communication based on the eye hastened the development of a competitive type of communication based on the eye hastened the development of a competitive type of communication based on the ear, in the radio and in the linking of sound to the cinema and to television. Printed material gave way in effectiveness to the broadcast and to the loud speaker.

p95.

Walter Bagehot opinions

I have gone into some detail in my description of the role and function communication because it is so obviously fundamental to the social process, and because extensions and improvements which the physical sciences have made to the means of communications are so vital to the existence of society and particularly to that more rationally organized form of society we call civilization.

Chapter 9 – Understanding Media

Media is the message

p149.

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our sense and our nerves by the various media.

In the mechanical age now receding, many actions could be taken without too much concern. Slow movement insured that the reactions were delayed for considerable periods of time. Today the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time.

p150.

Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting. The advantages of fragmenting himself in this way are seen in the case of the surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. 

In the electric age, when out central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action.

The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.

p154.

General Sarnoff went on to explain his attitude to the technology of print, saying that it was true that print caused much trash to circulate, but it had also disseminated the Bible and the thoughts of seers and philosophers. It has never occurred to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.

(Value is dependent on the application, context and use’s of the process)

p156.

De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions. The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Mathew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or the cultural forms of typography.

p170.

As W.B. Yeats wrote of this reversal, “The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream.” Associated with this transformation of the real world into science fiction is the reversal now proceeding apace, by which the Western world is going Eastern, even as the East goes Wester.

p173.

One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies.

(Different types of communication, this contrast of radio and print been the distribution of type and language from visual to spoken relates back to the introduction of typography been an aid for placing spoken language into an organized system, the idea of movies is an expansion on how information and such can be communicated visually, like typography is a visual system)

p199

The new art or science which the electronic or post-mechanical age has to invent concerns the alchemy of social change.

Two hundred years ago it was idea and theory which distributed the old regimes. Now it is just the packaged information, which we call entertainment which transforms living conditions and basic attitudes. It is the ordinary flow of news and pictures from every quarter of the globe which rearranged our intellectual and emotional lives without either struggle or acceptance on our part.

p210-211.

Counterblast Manifesto 1954

The handwriting is on the celluloid walls of Hollywood; the Age of Writing has passed. We must invent a NEW METAPHOR, restructure our thoughts and feelings. The new media are not bridges between man and nature: they are nature.

Gutenberg made all history SIMULTANEOUS: the transportable book brought the world of the dead into the space of the gentleman’s library; the telegraph brought the entire world of the living to the workman’s breakfast table.

NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.

We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3000 years of literacy divorced us.

p231.

The future of language as a complex structure which can be learned without learning the words at all, is a possibility that the computer presents increasingly.

p232.

The future of language presents the possibility of a world without words, a wordless, intuitive world, like a technological extension of the action of consciousness.

p244-245

Chapter 13  - Playboy Interview

PLAYBOY: Why do you feel that Gutenberg also laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution?

McLUHAN: The two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step process’s, it became the blueprint of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Moveable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development. Without phonetic literacy and the printing press, modern industrialism would be impossible. It is necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology, shaping not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of life, from education to city planning.

PLAYBOY: You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

McLUHAN: Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matric while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesermizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.

PLAYBOY: You’ve discussed that constellation in general terms, but what precisely are the electric media that you contend have supplanted the old mechanical technology?

McLUHAN: The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense of function as the old mechanical media did – i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye – but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and physic existence. The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between oral-tribal man and visual man. In fact, today we can look back at 3000 years of differing degrees of visualization, atomization and mechanization and at last recognize the mechanical age as an interlude between two great organic eras of culture. The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, has its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the new electric media, and further obsequies were registered by the perception of “curved space” and non-Euclidean mathematics in the early years of the century, which revived tribal man’s discontinuous time-space concepts – and which even Spengler dimly perceived as death-knell of Western literate values. The development of telephone, radio, film, television and the computer have driven further nails into the coffin. Today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country, extending the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message. It is television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.

(Development of communication methods, from basic to mass communication to contemporary communications of information. Hands on methods, industrial process’s)

Chapter 14 – A McLuhan Sourcebook

p272

Language quotes.

Today we are beginning to realize that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

p273.

It is the framework that changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

p274.

Developing the potential of new media.

It is possible that our new technologies can bypass verbalizing. There is nothing inherently impossible in the computer, or that type of technology, extending consciousness itself – as a universal environment. There is a sense in which the surround of information that we now experience electrically is an extension of consciousness itself.

p276.

How new environments re-shape old ones.

Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment.

p280.

Media reprocessing media.

It is not surprising that these new [electrical] forms have beaten the book into the pulps, just as the book destroyed the manuscript and the great culture linked to it. In 1831 the French poet Lamartine foresaw that the newspaper was the book and the poetry of the future.

(Development to eBooks from books)

p283.

Language and speech.

The great and abiding mass medium is not literature but speech. Language is at once the most vulgar of all media and the greatest work of art that ever can be devised by man.

(Language is in itself mass media for communication)

Alphabet

p284

The unique power [of the alphabet] is its power to separate sound, sight and meaning. The letters of our alphabet are semantically neutral… This divorce… has permeated and shaped all the perceptions of western literate man.

Print.

p286.

Mechanization of any process is achieved by fragmentation, beginning with the mechanization of writing by moveable type.

(Supports statement of typography had been the development of lettering and handcrafted scribing into a repeatable process.)

The Telegraph

p288.

The telegraph… is not the mechanization of writing but the electrification of writing.

Xerography.

p293.

But xerography is electricity invading the world of typography, and it means a total revolution in this old sphere, or this old technology, a revolution that is being felt in the classroom itself.

Computer

p295-296.

A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance information retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individuals encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored date of a saleable kind.

Future media

(Potential future methods of mass communication predicted on certain dates)

p296.

Having extended or translated our central nervous system into electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. – 1964

p297.

The technological tendency to do more and more with less and less could now be exceeded only by putting the information directly into the human nervous system. If an age of “brain transplants” lies ahead, it may become possible to supply each new generation with “brain prints” taken live and directly from the intellects of the age. Instead of buying the works of Shakespeare or Erasmus, one might well become electroencephalographically imprinted with the actual brain perception and erudition of Shakespeare or Erasmus. The book…. Could then be bypassed. 

Morley, D. (2006). Media, Modernity, Technology: The Geography of the New. New Ed Edition. USA Canada. Routledge.

P218

Critically, here we have to consider the ways in which people are enabled by a variety of technologies to construct their spaces of reception as forms of ‘mobile home’ Here we need to consider three technologies in particular, as part of a ‘conceptual series’ which wall have a potential role in fulfilling this function: the car, the Walkman and the mobile phone. As Patrice Flichy argues, ‘in the 1950’s in the US… teenagers took their dates to the drive-in movie in their… car. Without leaving…[it] they passed from the sound-bubble of the car radio to the visual bubble of the cinema. Today, the users of Walkmans [or now iPods] and cellular phones… [also] transport their… [own] private sphere with them’

P223

As we have seen, the mobile phone is often understood (and promoted) as a device for connecting us to those who are far away and thus overcoming distance – and perhaps geography itself.

P295.

Even the very latest technologies can always be adapted – or domesticated – to suit very traditional purposes.

The most popular web site in the UK is now Friends Reunited, which, as its name implies, allows people to refind old friends from their schooldays -  clearly a fundamentally nostalgic project, even if in ‘high-tech’ form.

Davis, M (2012). Graphic Design in Context - Graphic Design Theory. London: Thames & Hudson.

Graphic design is communication, revolve and triangulate points around these investigations.

Communications model – Chapter 1

p15.

In 1945 Claude Shannon, a research scientist for the Bell Telephone Company, tried to optimize the process for transmitting an electrical signal with minimum distortion. His “Mathematical Theory of Communication” described message transmission in terms of a signal source, or sender, which transmitted information along a channel to a receiver. The signal passed through various types of interface, resulting in some degree of information loss.

(Advancement of how the spoken word can be distributed to wider audience through technology)

p21.

David Berlo

Berlo explains that the message has content – subject matter that is the topic of communication. The message takes physical form through elements: Text, headlines, illustrations, photographs, graphic marks and symbols. These are the tangible forms from which the message is composed and about which the designer makes choices.

(Essence of visual communication)

p27-28.

The experience of reading and owning a book is very different today than it would have been before Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century. 

(Talking about distribution of information development)

Chapter 2 – The nature of representation

p34

Representation is a process through which people make something that expresses an interest in some particular aspect of something else and that is motivated by context and intent. Representations are substitutions for something else, surrogates in some alternative form that provide information about things, as well as about the makers and, possibly, the audiences for those things.

(How type is a representation of the spoken word, but can also carry further context and meaning, this could give ideas to the practical element and ideas around custom aesthetic header fonts that hold concepts aas well as communicate information clearly.)

Chapter 3 – The Dimensions of Context

Technological affordances

p91.

The technology by which visual messages are created, reproduced, and distributed defines more than there material nature. Technologies have affordances, characteristics capabilities or functions that enable or constrain certain types of interactions among audiences, content, environments, and the originators of messages. Books have the affordance of self pacing, film does not. Websites have the affordance of instant information updating and user generated content; silk-screen printed posters do not. Word processing has the affordance of allowing different authors to work on the same document in different locations at the same time; calligraphy does not. Such affordances determine how easy or difficult it is to distribute certain kinds of message, who receives them, what they mean, and how recipients are able to respond.

The language of the Visual World – chapter 4

p104

The study of language holds particular significance for graphic designers, whose work involves the combination of visual and verbal elements according to social and cultural conventions. This concern for meaning and how it is made and interpreted is as fundamental to graphic design practice as are the aesthetics of form.

(Language interpretations from spoken word to visual systems)

p107.

Ferdinand De Saussure

Saussure did describe what he believed to be the only two systems of writing: the ideographic system, in which each word is reduced to a single sign that is unrelated to the sounds of the word itself (for example, Chinese); and the phonetic system, which attempts to produce a sequence of sounds that makes up a word (for example, English)

(Explaining 2 language systems in a simplified way to expand on past research on how type is a development of how the spoken word was placed into a visual system)

p120.

Although the American approach to typographic modernism showed less allegiance to rules than the European version, the goal in these exercises was still to manage contrast and hierarchy within a limited pallete of choices: to explore rhythm, coherency, convention and unpredictability, and legibility and readability in layout within certain typographic constraints.

(Pretty ugly relations and the pushing of boundaries of typical typographic principles)

Modernism the utopian vision – Chapter 5

p137.

The technological image

In this machine-centered environment of mass production, the application of technology to image-making was the next logical step.

(Relate to the development of the Mac and software like Photoshop)

p157

The International typographic style

The concept of universal form reached a pinnacle of expression in the International Typographic Style of the mid-twentieth century. Begun in Switzerland in the 1950s under such advocates as Ernst Keller, Max Bill, and Theo Ballmer (many with connections to earlier modernist movments), the style argued for neutrality, clarity, and privileging the content of text over its form.

(Development and contrast of how type began to become a strong method of distributing clear and understandable message developing on past experimentations and introductions of technologies to create these efficient systems)

Post-modernism reading the world as texts – Chapter 6

p176.

The concept of poster-modernism is not a simple one and its very definition has checkered past dating from the late 1960s and the 1970s. For some scholars, the term means the rejection of modernist values and principles, a critique of the notions that designers speak with authority about appropriate form and that universal meaning is achievable.

p196.

The graphic designer Neville Brody, one of the founding members of London Fontworks, referred to photographic technology in his font FF blur of 1992.

(Using technologies to create typography, a rejection of traditional principles, possible practical synthesis idea)

The diversity of these typefaces and layouts reinforced earlier notions that typography and the designer could have a voice, over and above that of the author; that type could speak about something other than its literal verbal meaning and even reflect on its own history.

Chapter 7 – A new paradigm designing experiences, not objects

p210

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, incorporate the older media of writing and photography and turn participant’s into content. Any individuals page is less significant than the fact millions of people are willing to broadcast personal information to strangers, that letters and the telephone are no longer satisfying as the only ways to stay connected to friends at a distance, and that online relationships can be formed more quickly and with fewer social constraints than those made in person.

(How technology turns something physical and meaningful into generic communications, how the web has expanded communication possibilities)

One of McLuhans most controversial ideas was his description of hot and cool media, which refers to our sensory experiences with differing levels of message definition under various technologies. He described radio and film as hot media because they were clearer and more information-rich than other media of his time (they had high-quality sound, clear visuals, and so on).

They therefore required little sensory participation by the listener or viewer for completion of the message. Political cartoons and television, according to McLuhan, are low-definition and cool because they require more of our involvement.

Steinberg, S, H (1974). Five Hundred Years of Printing. 3^rd ed. Suffolk : The Chaucer Press.

P27.

In outward appearance the books printed between 1450 and 1480 are almost indistinguishable from contemporary manuscripts. The printers took over virtually the whole range of scripts used in mid-fifteenth-century Europe: the textura of liturgical works, the bastarda of legal texts, the rotunda and gothico-antiqua, both Italian compromises between Carolingian and late medieval scripts, the formal lettera anticha and cursive cancellersca favored by Italian humanists, and so on.

P367.

The printing press has made it possible for millions of people to read the same text at the same moment: wireless, television, and the cinema enable millions of people to hear the same text spoken and to see the same performance acted at the same moment. To what extent are these new means of mass communication going to affect the future of the printed word?

Lipson, H. (2013). Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing. 1 Edition. USA. Wiley.

P11.

Like the magic wand of childhood fairy tales, 3D printing offers us the promise of control over the physical world.

3D printing is not a new technology. 3D printers have been quietly doing their work in manufacturing machine shops for decades. In the past few years, 3D printing technology has been driven rapidly forward by advances in computing power, new design software, new materials, and the rocket fuel of innovation, the Internet.

Openshaw, J. (2015). Touched Screens. Elephant. Issue 23. P184.

Its easy to get tangled up in technology when discussing ‘Post-Internet’ creativity. The term itself invokes ideas of screens, servers, clouds and bots, and perhaps overshadows the human agents and physical infrastructures caught up in this sticky web. It hints at things happening online, and so contains the impossibility of something ever being offline: as if the ‘virtual’ is opposed to the ‘real’, or the physical or the digital.

The average person in the UK spends upwards of nine hours a day looking at screens, while the web now absorbs around half of our waking attention.

We approach our physical environment with new expectations of malleable form, responsive surfaces and connected behaviour. The rise of technological production processes such as 3D printing and generative design only accelerates the process of slippage and cross contamination between digital and physical forms.

P185.

Touch screens don’t eliminate the human need to touch something more palpable than an electronic visual display. Its in this context that the ‘Post digital Artisans’ operate. Inescapably influenced by the digital world, they nonetheless reject strictly screen-based design, or a total reliance on automated production such as 3D printing. They advocate a return to craft, with objects made from clay, metal, glass and wood. They neither turn their backs on technology nor glorify nostalgia, but their high-tech honeymoon is over, and they place materials at the heart of art, design, fashion and architecture.