Lecture 3: The History of Type- production and distribution

The aim of this lecture is to understand where the now has come from and the chronologies of what has happened.

This lecture will cover from 3000BC to 1919

Any language to exist has to be an agreement that one thing will stand for another, it is social not purely individual therefore the sender and receiver must both understand if it is going to be successful. Type is a visualisation of language and the relationship between the type of language is its interpretation to visual communication. The interpretation with something as simple as 'type' is so vast. 

Type and typography is used interchangingly:
- Art and technique of printing with movable type
- The composition of printed material from movable type
- The arrangement and appearance of printed matter

TYPOGRAPHY:
- Craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form
- Type is a modernist obsession 
- "The written word endures... the spoken word disappears"
- The moment we identified visual communication was between 3000 and 7000BC
- In 7000BC stuff was beginning to be wrote down as trade was the primary source of putting spoken language into visual language.

TYPE is speech made visible 
Language itself isn't a linear process, its very complex and multi-dimensional, it is the basis of type

All that is necessary for any language to exist is an arrangement amongst a group of people. We can take our learnt understanding of language and interpret other languages, there can be remakes of letterforms and they can still maintain meaning. 

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 and represented 3 different languages: Egyptian; Democratic and Greek 

1450- Johannes Gutenberg began work in printing
Block and movable type had been around 600 years in China and he capitalised it in Europe- the first movable machine that made type.

1450-1700- Classical oldstyle type.
Type was designed for specific uses and in 1870, William Foster introduced the elementary education act and it became mandatory to learn how to read. It provided the basis for modern education. This then encouraged the mass production through print because the demand for newspapers increased and there was the introduction of ink, the typewriter and printing presses. 

1919- Walter Gropius
The Bauhaus from 1919-1933 was created on the back of the first world war. This lead to the industrialisation of design and it became an artisan craft based on rural economy- brought together by the Bauhaus.