A brief and patchy history of Western Graphic Design since about 1000BC

Introduction

There are in my opinion three significant epocs in the history of western graphic design. I will try here to shed a little light on what happened during them if I can. This is by no means a comprehensive work but I hope it touches on most of the main influences especially the period from the end of the Victorian era to today.

 

The first few thousand years


A page from the Book of Kells
To start with people had books or scrolls. The Greeks had papyrus books or at least scrolls by 1000BC. The dead sea scrolls written in ancient aramaic around the time of the birth of Christ are simple text with no images. By 800AD some people had books and the books sometimes had pictures in. If they had pictures they were hand drawn or used techniques like wood cut printing, where an engraved board is inked and pressed on to the page. Or the images were handrawn and painted.


Text was rendered by hand (written) usually in Ink on parchment or vellum (animal skin). In the latter part of this period monastaries started to produce elaborate and decorative versions of the bible and other books from Roman and Greek history. The books were usually in Latin and were often copied by scribes from an original. This was a painstaking and time consuming task so books were extremely valuable. Some libraries had chains on the books to stop them being stolen. A bit like we somteimes do with laptops now.


Perhaps the most famous example of these early bepoke books is the Book of Kells a version of the four Gospels Which was created in 800AD and is on display in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.

 


A medieval Drop Cap

Books of this period often have text and images interwoven together typically using a Drop Cap, a large first letter of a sentence often “illuminated” ie decorated and coloured, sometimes using gold leaf. These methods of production worked well for a few thousand years but writing and reading remained the preserve of the very few.

1450 AD to 1980'ish



moveable type
In the middle of the fifteenth century in western Europe and incidently 450 years earlier in China, the way books were created changed forever. Movable metal type was invented by Johannes Guttenburg. This meant books could be mass produced for the first time.

Guttenburg's major work was a bible. The 42 line or Guttenburg Bible. It is believed that 180 or so were printed (mass production still meant surprisingly few). A copy of the bible retailed for about 3 years average wages (not cheap either then).

 

 

 


Guttenburg's typeface
Guttenburgs first typeface was designed to look like the writng you would get from a quill pen and so he reproduced a few different versions of each letter.

Images were reproduced by engraving on copper plates and he also invented a printing press whilst he was at it. That was it really. The process didn't change much for 400 hundred years but there were a few major stylistic improvements.

Evolution of typefaces



The Garamond Font
The earliest typefaces (fonts) after Guttenburg's first go were often based on the Roman script found on stonework, all over what had been the Roman Empire.

Claude Garamond Designed a wide range of early fonts in the Sixteenth century said to have be inspired by monumental masonary. It is reasonable to speculate that some of these early fonts look the way they do because when you are using a chisel to hack at a lump of rock the corners of letters tend to flair out a bit at the ends.

These serifs are charecteristic of early typefaces and do incidentally aid readability. Serifed fonts are still used for longer written work, the idea being that the serifs help the eye flow easily from, one letter to the next and so are less tiring to read. I have never been that convinced myself.

Times New Roman is probably still the most well known of these types of font and is an example of the evolution of this type of typography. Originally used by the Times newspapaper and released in 1933 it remains the most used typeface on the planet as it is included with MS Word.

"Have nothing in your home, that
you do not know to be be useful or believe to be beautiful".



Liberty
Wallpaper
The Arts and Craft Movement was a late 19th century movement which was partly a reaction to the mechanisation of the Industrial Revolution. It was influential in terms of graphic design although had little evloutionary influence on typography or imagery. Their theory being one should look to nature and history for inspiration.

William Morris who is considered the movements leader in Europe went out of his way to produce amongst much other work, books that looked like much older woodcut manuscripts. Despite their look though they were typeset and the images were produced using lithographs. He did however leave us with the quote above and whilst I don't like his work its a great quote.

To some degree this celebration of adornement and a desire to escape the oppresion of a mechanical age, can be said to still be the ruling aesthetic in the UK and US. Morris's influence came to typify what is often now refered to as Victorian Style even though it came at the end of Victoria's reign. Elaborate wallpaper and repeating print are two other of the Arts and Crafts movements legacies. The liberty paisley print being a popular example.

The Arts and Crafts Movement were also inspired by the writings of John Ruskin an early Socialist and it is interesting to see how they interpreted the Socialist ideal compared to the Bauhaus who followed them.

 

Toward the modern "less is more"


Early Poster
The Bauhaus movement active in Weimar, Germany in the 1920's had as big an impact on typography and design as Guttenburgs invention some 400 years before. In truth before the Bauhaus thre was no "graphic design" just print layout. The Bauhaus pretty much invented the idea of modernism and its director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is asociated forever with the phrase “less is more” a quote inspired by a Robert Browning poem.

Predominently concerned with archeitectural design the Bauhaus also re-invented the use of image and text.The Bauhaus's graphic design popularised the use of san serif fonts which were used in unusual (at least at the time) ways. They also promoted a paired down “minimal” aesthetic which embraced architecture, furniture, design and graphic design.

 


poster

Bayer's Universal font
For the Bauhaus pieces of text became elements or graphics that needed as much thought about thier position as images did. This seems obvious now but in 1920 it was a revelation.

The Bauhaus's leading typographer Herbert Bayers is responsible for much of their Iconic work. In 1927 his Universal Typeface mixed upper and lowercase lettering and with not a serif in sight conventions were shattered. Not satisfied with mixing cases he standardised on a lowercase typeface for many later Bauhaus publications. He went on to be art director at German Vogue.

 

 

The Bauhaus's style was inspired by industry and by design was anti-adornment. Further it was Socialist in its belief of what design could achieve. They were interested in making products for everybody and were linked to the Socialist revolution in Russia as well as ideas like Constructivism. Whilst the Bauhaus were influential at the time it was to be a while before their design ideas reached a mass market. In 1940 the Nazis effectively closed down the Bauhaus and many of its lecturers fled to Europe and the US. They took thier ideas with them and after the war these ideas did reach a wider world. If the Bauhaus design ideal is alive and well today it is in IKEA of all places.

An age of heroes


Early Batman comic
As the 1930's became the 1940's and the Bauhaus broke up intellectually inspired graphic design lost its way rather. However something "low brow" that had been bubbling under for a few years came to the fore and filled the void. Pulp printing of cheap books and comics for mass consumption at cheap prices.

Nowhere was this more popular than in the USA. Superheoes emerged and as they had super powers they needed super illustrators with good graphics skills to breath life into what were often fairly leaden plots.

Aimed at children initially but actually consumed by an audience that grew up with the comics, they used interesting font layouts and often used the shape of text to illustrate its meaning. Comics were seen at the time as morally dubious but the genre survives today and the off- shoot the graphic novel has had a resurgance. Works like Watchmen have sold as well as any text based novel, The genre also has huge followings in the Far East with Japanese Manga crossing over into western comic book design. Comic book design is one of the last areas of graphic design where most of the work including the lettering is still done by hand.

Helvetica and the Swiss Style


Some examples of swiss style

The next major event was a return to the formalism and paired down aesthetic of the Bauhaus. Coming from the design houses of Zurich and Basel, it bought the ideas of the Bauhaus to a mainstream mass audience. The so called Swiss or International Style used realistic images, san serif fonts and lots of white space to great effect

Much moden "design" is in the swiss style its hard to image how much impact Helvetica, the Swiss styles font of choice has had . This site is definately in the swiss style as are much of the company logos and brands we all see all the time. The Gap is Swiss style gone mad.

Max Miedinger invented Helvetica in (1957) and from then on the world went for the Swiss style in a big way. Magazines, posters and advertising all changed rapidly and in lots of ways they have never changed back. Oddly some areas of life notably archietecture and furniture design took rather longer to get swissed. The swiss style is one of those things. You love it or you hate it.

Pop Goes the postwar era


Whilst not neccessarily mainstream or commercial, the Pop Art movement of the late 1950's and 1960's influenced the way we use and view graphic imagery. Andy Warhol's iconic album cover for the Velvet Underground's first LP was influenced by his screen print works using primary colours and the increasing amount of graphic design people were becoming exposed to in everyday life.

 

 

Roy Lichtensteins work often took the superhero comic books of the 1930 and 40's as inspiration. Again vibrant colours and a creative use of text made a big inpact.

 

By championing the mundane Pop Art, took what may have been considered low art or bad design and made it acceptable and "cool" amognst the cogniscentii. Many people accused the Pop Artists of making bad art but it seems to have stood the test of time pretty well.


Englands Dreaming

It seems important before I close this period of history to mention the work of Jamie Reid who's graphic design style broke almost all the conventions the Bauhaus had established when they themselves tore up the rule book in the 1920's.

In his use of of layout and typogrpaphy links can be seen to Pop Art but also a desrire to break with any real formalism and just let rip. What better way to promote anarchy than by an aesthetic that is itself anarchistic and deliberately provocative.

 


Neville Brody
Face cover

1980 to Today

1980 is significant because about then the use of manual layout methods of type and true cut and paste with scisssors and glue were abandoned, in favour of computers and digital images. Packages like Quark Express and Photoshop start to become the creative tools of choice from about this time and prototyping and versioning become easier.

One of the most important and influential early masters of graphic design in the computer age was Neville Brody. Brody pushed the conventions of type to the limit with his ground breaking work in the late 1980's. On notably The Face magazine. He continues to plough an innovative furrow today. His style is minimal but with a fluency the Bauhuas could perhaps imagine but not execute, given the technical constraints of the day.

 

 

David Carson is again an influential graphic designer said to be responsible for the Grunge Movement in graphics in the late 1990's. Using a free, rough style that is influenced by the art of Keith Harring and the graffitti art of Jean Michel Basquiat. His work echoes Jamie Reids work in the 1970's but again the digital nature of the execution means there is more oppurtunity to spend ages making something that looks like it took no time at all.


Neville Brody for Macromedia
The biggest innovation in the digital era has been that type and imagery have become virtually interchangeable on the page. Editing and imaging applications have meant that getting ideas on to the page is easier than it was in the past. Conventions about what can and cannot be done both within typography and design have become blurred or just disregarded.

Today high quality graphics output is available to anybody who has the skills and creativity. When the Bauhaus set out to make good design available to everyone it seems unlikely they imagined a world where so much content would be created and so much of it would be low quality. Having said that the sheer volume of stuff created means there is more good work around than ever.

 

 


David Carson
Perversly the sheer ease of producing work in the digital age means that to capture someones attention you have to make something a little different from the mainstream. It is hard to say who the graphic design stars of the 21st century will be but somewhere, somebody is having ideas about type and imagery and it seems likely that they will put these ideas in to practice in a screen based format. I have yet to see a piece of work on the web that I thought was as good as the best poster or book cover I have ever seen. I wonder if I will still say tht in 10 years time.

I have picked a few of my heroes out here but many others designed fonts or made software that made these peoples creativity possible. If art influenced graphics to a great extent technology influenced it just as much. As good graphics is so good you don't notice it much will always go un-noiticed.

 

 

 

 

Note the images on these pages are believed to be exempt from Copyright as they represent fair use in Law. In that they are used to represent point of view in an educational work.