graphicdesignvictim

[graphicdesignvictim]

/journal 3/

chapters 9-10 / the bridge to the 20th century (part 1)

9 / graphic design and the industrial revolution

I must say, chapter 9 was very difficult for me to get through. Although it was interesting, I felt that there were a lot of run on sentences that including too many unknown big words. I think it was a lot for one chapter personally. (Chapter 10 as well, but not as hard)

I have never heard a bolder font be called a fat face, not even in my typography class. That's pretty hysterical.

The images in this chapter really saved it for me. It's fascinating to look at the different styles of posters as well as all the different typefaces that people were creating so early on in graphic design. It did make logical sense that they would use a variety of fonts to save money rather than thinking about what they would look like all cramped on one piece of paper. It's true that you have to try everything before you can know what you're doing and what you want!

I didn't choose to talk about photography because although I do enjoy taking pictures, the history of taking pictures never interested me all too much. Don't get me wrong, when I took Photography and I got to work in the dark room, I found the process to be more of an effort in the sense that I felt I earned owning the picture I developed. I respected older photographers way more as there are so many chances to easily mess up. I've also always thought negatives were a fun thing to have. I'm not sure why the different terms never got me intrigued, photography is just not my passion to learn hardcore about.

It was a bit funny to read about how each printer after the other was talking about how much better it is than its predecessor in terms of how many more pages it can print in one hour. I feel that similar facts of current technology does that as well: "this new phone is a little bit bigger, a little bit thinner, a bit more battery life, etc." While I obviously see the value in the printer being able to print more, it was just funny to read that about the Linotype machine, the Monotype machine, etc.

The toy books part was interesting, I never thought that they would be considered as toys just because they are books for children. Also, the part about how "Western countries had a tendency to treat children as little adults" (Meggs. pg. 179): I could compare that to how my dad frequently will talk about how when he was a kid, the adults just let him be and wouldn't necessarily helicopter parent compared to kids these days that are overly concerned about their children's safety that they won't let them actually live. Time has acknowledged that society needs to care passed the surface level but it has developed some negative traits as well, obviously.

10 / the arts and crafts movement and its heritage

I noticed that as this chapter progressed, the images showed less and less stylized drop caps. They went from being arrogantly bold and detailed to more so just barely outshining the regular body text. It may have been for multiple reasons: to save ink, realizing it was more of a waste of space and materials and that it was more important to be able to fit text, or it could have been neither and daintier thinner strokes looked more visually appealing. The Arts and Crafts movement seems to have also started the scrapbook type of vibe as the texts are sometimes written in various sizes of boxes.

Rudolf Kuch's calligraphy in red looks beautiful, I absolutely love how the stroke in the middle exaggerates downward into an empty space. When reading that he spoke of the alphabet as being "a supreme spiritual achievement of humanity", I thought that that was a unique way to phrase it, but I don't entirely agree with the spiritual part (Meggs. pg. 202). Obviously, it is more understandable that Kuch would be a religious person, the alphabet to me does not hold any sort of greater wisdom. I'm probably reading too much into this quote, but I just found it odd.

It is not surprise that more readable fonts like Garamound would stick around while more stylistic typefaces would leave their trended era. I feel this was a crucial point in time when the mass amount of people were still trying to master understanding the alphabet, how to read and possibly how to write, that more structured fonts could make it easier to comprehend.

Source: Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. PurvisJohn Wiley & Sons publishers.

[graphicdesignvictim]

journal 2/chapters 5-8 / a graphic renaissance

5 / printing comes to europe

Obviously before the technological era, everything had to be done by hand. It still blows my mind that one (albeit short) book would take almost half a year to write. I've said it before, no wonder our growth as a species seemed to move a lot slower back then.

The way they describe how Gutenberg made mirrors sounds incredibly fun, and I definetely want to learn more about that process, even though it's not that closely related to graphic design: "Molten lead was poured over glass, forming a reflective surface when it was cooled; the difficulty was preventing the glass from cracking from the heat" (Miggs. pg 76). How cool. Also, the cleverness of Gutenberg's two-part mold must have taken a lot of detailed research: he had to find a metal that didn't melt AND didn't shapeshift when it was drastically changing temperatures from scalling hot to touchable AND could work thousands of times without giving noticeable differences.

The illustration of Figure 5-11 (craftsmen in book production) is very well done. I might be an artist, but I am horrible at realism, especially drawing people is such a struggle for me.

6 / the german illustrated book

The illustrations in this chapter along with the beautiful text show that these artists really cared about producing great products. I wonder if and wyhat type of stress they were under to make every page of every book extraordinary. Like, if they had to meet a deadline, if they were under any threats to get it done faster than they were doing, if they were being pressured to add more or less. I know that censorship was still prevelant in these times, so I wonder all of that effected their work flow and mentality.

This chapter also mentions the senior Martin Luther, which was interesting to me as I initally wouldn't have guessed that a man would be involved in the arts, but it does make sense considering graphic design is a very literary art.

I wrote about this in my essay on William Caxton's contribution to type, and I think all English speakers and people who are currently learning how to speak English owe its theoretical "ease" to Caxton. English is one of the hardest languages to master, so hard that native English speakers (like myself) still struggle on semi daily basis. Imagining if this man had not spent countless hours of solidifying it as other regions made changes to the language would make modern English incomprehensibly harder.

7 / renaissance graphic design

This chapter discusses a lot of trademarks and identifying pieces to books that were up until this point, only loosely claimed as being one's creation. The construction of the specifics of each letter impress me. The intricate borders around the blocks of text insinuate that the typographers wanted everyone to get a sense of what the text was about even if they still didn't have the skills to learn. I particurally enjoyed the meta-type of illustrations at the end of the chapter, as artists drawing artists making the art on the art that they're making is a concept that has become (in my opinion) timeless at this point.

8 / an epoch of typographic genius

My main comment on this chapter is the madness that people thought of William Blake. Blake's illustrations are mystically beautiful, so to think that people were so quick to dismiss him as crazy and to just let him die in poverty. I understand that everyone has their own tastes and his illustrations just didn't hit them, but 700 years later...I reject their opinions. The movement that Blake's illustrations have is unmatchable to anything else I have seen in this textbook so far. He uses the whole determined area of the page and fills it will complementary blues, greens, blacks, etc. But his "unworldliness and spiritual beliefs" apparently were too much of a problem for people to appreciate the handmade craftsmenship (Meggs. pg.142).

To add to the last chapter's care for detail, the fact that René Descartes brought geometry into the "genius" of contrusting a consistent alphabet is impressive. When I took geometry my freshmen year of high school, a lot of the concepts on their own seemed mundane and useless. I understood the axes, but at the time I felt like how must of us did: "When am I ever going to use this in my real life?" And here I am 9 years later, looking dumb.

Source: Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. PurvisJohn Wiley & Sons publishers.

[graphicdesignvictim]

journal 1/ chapters 1-4 / the prologue to graphic design

initial thoughts

When I first received the textbook, the 6th edition of Meggs' History of Graphic Design (written by Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis) in the mail, I was immediately stressed out. I was unfortunately gifted the trait of being ultra stressed about a lot of things, but school always won first place in amount of stress. (My freshman year of high school I was so stressed I was getting a lot of gray hairs...so embarrassing!) In general, history has been my least favorite subject, and therefore was the subject I struggled with the most. Although I am passionate about graphic design, I wasn't super psyched to be reading about its history. Sorry Professor!

1 / the invention of writing

These terms! I believe I have only heard of pictographs and hieroglyphics before reading this. To read that there's petroglyphs, ideographs, cuneiform, and rebus writing. Wow.

"The symbol for sun...began to represent ideas such as "day" and "light"." (pg.9, Meggs.): You know, I never considered that. On my essay in quiz 1, I discussed how there were would be too many characters to represent every word, and that is why having an alphabet is more advantageous. Though I agree with my argument, I wonder how many symbols would have dual or more meanings, as that is the case for many words in the modern English language. For example, the word "die" could mean the verb of ceasing to exist, or it could mean the noun of a dot-marked playing cube / singular form of dice. So in cuneiform terms, would the symbol for "die" [noun] represent the idea of death? Probably not, but maybe with crazy English it might.

Whenever quarantine ends, I wonder how hard it would be to make my own cylinder seal. After reading this portion, I found the urge to make one. Obviously with modern technology, making a personalized stamp wouldn't be that hard, and I have seen some DIY artists make their wax seals. I think it would be fantastically ridiculous to have an obnoxious stone seal to go around "marking my territory" on.

Ah papyrus. I feel stupid for admitting this, but I didn't actually know papyrus was a plant. I didn't think it was not a plant, however I just never thought of it that deeply. I'm going to look up what it looks like right now. [...] Oh, okay. I suppose today is the appropriate day to say that it sort of looks like thin marijuana? Anyway, speaking of papyrus, the reason I never gave it much thought to it being a plant is because I have been too focused on everyone's hatred for the Papyrus typeface. Why does everyone hate it? I haven't found myself wanting to use it (yet), but I definitely feel this social pressure that I'm not allowed to use it.

I find superstition fascinating. I think if I could meet anyone from the past I would want to meet the illustrator of the Book of the Dead. That would be a morbidlly cool job to have, just feeling that some random guy named Bob has had enough days lived. AND WITH THE POWER OF THE PEN you kill hi- I mean let him enter the afterlife.

2 / alphabets

The definition of an alphabet is definetly something I have not thought about in depth. This definition makes sense, but I always took it for granted in terms of- well I know English, there's an alphabet. I tried to learn Spanish, there's an alphabet... it's almost the same except they're pronounced differently and there's another n- ñ. I tried to learn Japanese, and there's almost twice as many characters (as English), 2 for each sound.

Fascinating to learn that Hebrew and Arabic writing was the evolution of the Phoenician alphabet. I can very much see the resemblances. But it's crazier that different cultures took it in one direction, and then the Greeks took it in another direction, and the Romans took that alphabet in a completely different direction. It blows my mind to see how far we've come.

Ah yes, serifs. I love the whole argument over whether they originated at cleanup marks or sharpening-the-brush-tip marks. Can't we just be glad they exist? (I want to believe it's the sharpening origin, it sounds more efficient.)

Vellum paper feels amazing; no wonder it has to be made from that smooth baby skin. Yikes.

Scrolls are also an obnoxious thing I'd like to have. For instance, I probably will have my will written in a large scroll to represent how dramatic I am.

As someone who used to be obsessed with Kpop, I think it is absolutely amazing that Hangul is such a technical alphabet. It reminds me of how humans have that disk they threw into outer space teaching aliens how to speak English via the shape of your mouth and lips and what position your tongue should go for certain sounds. Obviously this is the origin and is way more impressive especially at such an early point in our history. It makes me appreciate the language and those that write in it much more.

3 / the asian contribution

I appreciated that this chapter starts off crediting the Chinese with creations forcertain things that I remember throughout middle school and high school, history class always seemed to gloss over. Like where did these Europeans know which way was north and to figure they could kill others by putting some powder in their guns. Paper also always came out of nowhere, but I'm glad I learned its origin sooner than reading this.

I have learned that Chinese calligraphy was more important that painting before, but in a different way. As I'm in a lot of art classes, I was taught that Chinese painters would usually also be calligraphers and viewers could tell that the same person who painted the painting wrote the calligraphy as the style of the strokes would match. Thinking about it more now, it would make sense why it would be more important as calligraphy was something you had to memorize AND learn where as with painting, anyone could technically learn how to visualize.

Referencing my earlier rant about cylinder seals, chops are also something I enjoy and would want to have one of my own. Personally I like cooler colors better, so maybe I would choose to have a blue ink instead... but I know that's not the point. I think this would make more sense to be the origin of printing as it is constructing something once and being able to reproduce it over and over just with the use of ink.

The Chinese also invented playing cards! How interesting that they were called sheet dice and a unique aspect of graphic design that you never realize until you actually think about it.

I agree with the authors, it is odd that languages with thousands of characters would decide to use such a tedious method like movable type. On the bright side, we wouldn't have our lovely lazy Susan's if it weren't for this tedious type!

4 / illuminated manuscripts

As someone who appreciates shiny things (my weakness is holographic) it was exciting to learn about illuminated manuscripts. I'm just imagining the gold leaf making the page glow from a couple meters away. Those kind of things make me like to pretend stuff is magical. And for your title to be an illuminator? Yes please. AND to learn that these were insanely portable for a lazy human like me? Perfection.

Earlier this year I learned about ascenders and descenders in typography, so it was nice to know their origin as well as how lowercase and uppercase letters came from minuscule and majuscule.

I am thankful for the Celtics for deciding to put spaces between words. Reading (especially something I'm not interested in) would be a much more painful task ifeverythinglookedlikethis. No wonder humans were evolving so slowly before this point. Howdoyouknowwhenonewordendsandanotherbegins?

All of these illustrations next to the text on the manuscripts make me wonder if they were still using hieroglyphics, would they even bother to illustrate these giant paintings or would it seem (or at least appear) to look repetitive? I particularly enjoy the page from Ormesby Psalter, a Gothic manuscript on page 61; it's very beautifully done.

While I'm not a religious person, I think the concept of aniconism is very interesting. Also how you could view illustrations of living things, but only inside. Can't deny that their commitment to an intricate and complex design in the Islamic manuscripts were not short of beauty.

The Limbourg brothers' story was interesting to me: how they were all illuminated book designers, how they all died before finishing their most well known project, just short of when the duc de Berry died.

This chapter was the roughest for me. I feel that it was a bit long for my tastes and it gave me a bit of anxiety that with it being so long that the professor told us to focus more on chapter 1 than this chapter. That's my issue though and it was still pretty insightful.

post thoughts

I understand the reviews for this book that I read, about how the writing is something I'm going to have to get used to. It is definitely informative, but oh my it is a lot. Will definetly not be doing this journal so late on Sunday night. Sorry professor...

Source: Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 6th Edition, Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. PurvisJohn Wiley & Sons publishers.

#graphic design