Bauhaus is the famous German school of design that had inestimable influence on modern architecture, the industrial and graphic arts, and theater design. It was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar as a merger of an art academy and an arts and crafts school. The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It … depended on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. Thus, classes were offered in crafts, typography, and commercial and industrial design, as well as in sculpture, painting, and architecture. The Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed.

Victorian Era

People started to show forbidden. Mass produce increased, especially in printing, clothing and house decoration. The location for Victorian Era is England.

Russian constructivism

Constructivism is an art movement of Avangarde art. It is started in Russia. They are successfull of graphic design. Lets see some examples.

Malevich

From the simplest geometric, monochrome shapes, Malevich built an entire suprematist universe in a series of stunning canvases like this composition painted around 1916. Unlike Goncharova and Larionov, Malevich remained in the Soviet Union after the Revolution. In the first years after 1917, he held a series of major teaching posts in Moscow, Petrograd, and Vitebsk. There he tried to systematize the insights he had gained in his suprematist period, and apply them to the creation of a scientific school of art teaching and production.

Dadaism

Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.

John Baskerville

He was an english business man but he was remembered as a printer and typographer.  Hwe was a member of the Royal Society of Arts. His typeface is inspired by Benjamim Franklin, who was a printer.

He developed a technique which produced a smoother whiter paper which showcased his strong black type. Baskerville also pioneered a completely new style of typography adding wide margins and leading between each line

William Caslon

He was an english typeface designer. He was inspired by Dutch Baroque types.

His typeface become so popular and used most of the printed works, which includes  the United States Declaration of Independence . It is also still today very comon used. 

Claude Garamond

Typography is the study of type and type faces, the evolution of printed letters. Since man did not begin to write with type, but rather the chisel, brush, and pen, it is the study of handwriting, that provides us with the basis for creating type design.

One of the most important Type Designer in history is “Claude Garamond.” We are still usign his typeface Garamound. He was born in 1480 in Paris and died in 1561 in Paris.

Garamonds first type is used in an edition of the book “Paraphrasis in Elagantiarium Libros Laurentii Vallae by Erasmus. It is based on Aldus Mnutius type De Aetna, cut in 1455. 1540. The typeface Garamond produced between 1530 and 1545 are considered the typographicak highlight of the 16th century.

2009 type winner

I found this type, while I was looking for the type blogs and I was confused, which of my blogs ahoul I post it…and decided to post it here, never minds all the 2 blogs are mine=)

This year there were 165 entries for TDC² from 26 countries resulting in 18 winning entries representing 8 countries. The jury, chaired by Fiona Ross lecturer at University of Reading, and Associate Designer to Tiro Typeworks, included Ken Barber (House Industries); Jonathan Hoefler (Hoefler & Frere-Jones); Richard Kegler (P22 Type Foundry), and Gabriel Martinez Meave (Kimera Type Foundry, Mexico).

The winning entries will be published in Typography 30: The Annual of the Type Directors Club available at the end of 2009. Join the TDC to receive the Annual free, or find it in bookstores.

Death and Press

This illustration I found in a blog and want to share with you. It’s about a mechanical printing, which is  a chapbook version of the Danse macabre printed in Lyons in 1499, at the very end of the incunabula period. By this time printing has spread across Europe and the structure of the wooden press and the workflow of the printing house are well established.  On the left of the woodcut sits the compositor, filling his tray with letters from the case.  Beside him, resting on the bench, is the forme which holds the type tightly together during printing; this one looks like it holds two pages, making a folio-sized book.  The page sticking up is the copy that he works from.

In the middle are the two pressmen, one waving an ink ball.  These were made of treated, stuffed leather and the inker worked with one in each hand to spread the special, greasy ink on the assembled type.  The third man would have operated the press itself, pulling on the wooden bar to lower the heavy platen, squeezing the paper onto the inked forme.  The detail here is very good—the large wooden screw in the top of the press is clear and the press stone, which holds the forme and slides in and out for easy access, is visible.  The press is also accurately shown as being stabilized via beams attached to the ceiling.  The image on the right is a stationer’s shop, which were sometime attached to printing houses.

On a side note, one has to feel for the poor inker: with his colleagues dead and work at a standstill he’s loosing a day’s wages.  No wonder he’s yelling.