Week 5 Notes and Reaction

Notes for Week 5 (2-7-12)

Pictorial forms evolve into Cunieform.

Cunieform develops out of efficiency.

For the test we need to identify Capitalis Quadrata, Capitalis Rustica,

Caroline Minuscules, and the book of Kells

Xylography is printing from wood.

Earliest expressions of woodblock printing are playing cards and a devotional.

Ars Memorandi: instructions on how to die. Examples of Block Books – books using block printing.

Textura, Black Letter, and Gothic are used interchangeably.

Gutenberg used textura on his early press because it was the type of the time.

He wasn’t an artisan. His foreman was.

Recognize: the punch, matrix, and type mold.

Identify the Letter of Indulgence(an early example of letterpress printing).

Define: Xylography(printing from wood), Ligature, Icunabula(the first 50 years of printing), Fleurons(a flower or decoration within the text).

An exemplar page is a preliminary sketch done before you do the set.

Calendarium included a tippin(moveable page insert).

Steven Daye’s Book of Psalms was an example that he was not an expert in printing.

Romain du Roi(Royal Typeface) identified by the dot on the lowercase el.

Remember: French Rococo – fussy and decorative.

Copper plate engraving allowed for greater contrast between thick and thin.

Rococo evolved into modern style type.

Bodoni was invented in the style of 18^th Century Neo-classical

Bodoni typeface was similar to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in they way that it had interchangeable parts within the design(serif, width, etc.).

Large poster style fonts were from Wood Type. Made possible by the router.

Point size is simply highest to lowest.  Leading is baseline to baseline.

Joseph Niepce took the first photograph from nature in 1826.

Louis Daguerre famous for long exposure Paris street photo.

The first ad men were not creators in any way. They were brokers of space aka advertising solicitor.

Victorian era was visually confusing.

Late1800’s early 1900s:

Scrap cards so called because they were printed to be disposable. They were an example of ephemera.

Late 1800s had lots of expositions going on. Allegory was popular at the time. Trump Loy Effect(sp?) – illusion of pages curling and pictures overlapping. Lots of Chromolithography exposition posters.

Chromolithography begins to be applied to tin containers. The product was beginning to replace the shopkeeper with images being put on the product.

The product became recognizable and name brands became popular.

Corporations begin to form when farmers came together in a consortium instead of competing with each other.

It is a time when the public starts to get manipulated by the media.

Journalists won’t mention the products in order to build trust with the reader, but they put an ad of a product that might be used the recipe next to the article.

Signage gets plastered on any available surface. It becomes a culture of advertising.

People begin to pull back and reduce the ornate style in reaction to the overt advertising culture.

Toy books come into existence. Changes from preaching to entertaining and educating. ie. Walter Crane’s Absurd ABC, 1874

Influence of Japanese prints.

Caldecott – The dish and the spoon. Ridiculousness.

Kate Greenway, Under the Window. Known for images of freely playing children. Uses a generous amount of white space – unusual at the time.

Harper’s becomes an empire of books and magazines for just about everything. The beginning of visual journalism.

Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly was an illustrator that helped bring down Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Although many people couldn’t read, they could understand Nast’s political illustrations.

John Henry Heinz begins by selling horseradish. Starts releasing a line of prepackaged foods (57 of them). He puts up the first large scale electric sign (the giant pickle). The first one to figure out that your employees are your marketing. Hired lots of pretty young girls and had them work in store fronts for people to see. Even gave them a sunning deck to keep them looking good. In a era of grueling working conditions, this company was the diamond in the rough.

Personal Thoughts

It was good to review what was going to be on the test. It helped me to retain the information for the topics to be presented again, but in a slightly different way. What more can I say about the review information that I didn’t already post. As for the new information, I found it interesting, because it started to become more graphic. There was a lot more chromolithography, which I very much enjoy looking at. It is a unique art form that has pretty much disappeared from todays illustration styles. I would love to see a resurgence of the old chromolithographic style. I think it is crazy how overboard the plastered advertisements got. It is interesting to look back on, but I can’t imagine living in an area where there are advertisements on every surface. I suppose there are ads everywhere we go today, but it is a lot more subtle. The advertisements then were right in your face. It is neat to find out where the 57 came from in Heinz57. I thought the whole creation of visual journalism was a fascination part of the presentation. I would like to learn more about that.

Questions

Is the Heinz Corporation still at the same location and if so, how much has it changed?

I wonder how difficult it was to get a job at Heinz, being that it was so rare to find good working conditions at the time.

Were there any other companies that took as good care of their employees as Heinz did?

What companies were the first to follow suit behind Heinz in that respect?

I would like to learn more about Caldecott and the Caldecott Awards.

What did the first toy books with color look like?