Lecture 5: Print culture and distribution- part 1

'Late age of print' Comes from Media theorist Marshall Mcluhan. 

The age of print began in 1450, it primarily began due to Gutenberg's printing press.

The industrial revolution happened from 1760-1840, through this the 'working class' were able to use mechanised production. The clear and noticeable classes began to emerge during this time and there was a clear class antagonism and segregation. The working class commerce together and create new forms of popular entertainment and art, using the machines of mass production. 

This created an identity struggle, chartistic and political (working class and women had no vote). John Martin (1820) Belshazzar's Feast. Rather than work for long and bypassed circuits of production and put it in exhibition and pay to see it (entrance fee), he made a fortune and the paintings then sell for thousands. This allowed people to be artists without funding and an elitist background. There then became an increase in mass image culture because people were realising they could make a living out of this. 

Culture is ‘the best that has been thought & said in the world’, Study of perfection, attained through, disinterested reading, diseased spirit of our time. Working class culture is not art it has political function to keep them in place. 
Leavism- F.R Leavis & Q.D. Leavis:

• Still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.
• For Leavis- C20th sees a cultural decline
• Standardisation and levelling down
• Culture has always been in minority keeping
• The minority, who had hitherto set the standard of taste without any serious challenge have experienced  'coppice of authority'     

The Royal Academy of Arts was the first governmental school of design and was created out of political divide.

Walter Benjamin 'The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction' 1936. There began an aura of art- Mona Lisa rejected, threatens and commercialised the auratic status and becomes less special. New printing technologies are de-stablising art- newspapers can use their images in publications, with the invention of photography, didn't need portrait painters. 

1842- PRINT CAPITALISM

Images for the purpose of profit- London Illustrated News February 28th 1855- own culture writes its own rules and replaces culture for pop culture.

A great nation does not ‘send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thousands with a bow; and its bankers, rich with poor men’s savings, to close their doors ‘under circumstances over which they have no control’, with a ‘by your leave’; and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money going armed with steamers up and down the China Seas, selling Opium at the cannon’s mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common highwayman’s demand of ‘your money or your life’, into that of ‘ your money and your life’. 
-Ruskin, 1903, 'Of Kings Tresuries'

Lecture 4: Type- Production and distribution part 2

In order to move forward, we need to understand the discipline of all practices and all other cultures that impact type.

Type is physical production of printed matter and this has impacted on how they are used. Type is words turned into physical form, then letterform is given a sound which means there is a common understanding of agreed communication as type is embedded in to how we see the world.

We are currently in a 'post-digital' age of type,

Bauhaus was the joining together of all disciplines, local industries were new technologies and it was the first time all disciplines were all working alongside each other. FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION- is the key principle of what we look at in terms of modernism. This was the first time promotion was used as visual communication and the first time the industrial age had a visual outcome. There had to be a common ground and it was available through type communicating out to industry for the first time- this led to graphic design. 

PRE-MODERN= the way it's always been

MODERN= post war, why does it have to be disturbed?

POST-MODERN= systematic and pragmatic development

1957 was the next point in when something significant happened, Max Medinger created Helvetica, "Miedinger set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with the successful Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. Originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, its design was based on Schelter-Grotesk and Haas' Normal Grotesk. The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage." Helvetica was designed for mass communication, mass delivery and production. Function drives the form and this was the benchmark of modernist type. However, 25 years later Microsoft released Arial because it is the maximum time that a design is protected by intellectual property before it lapses and Microsoft did the bare minimum to modify Helvetica. 

In 1990, there was a seminal shift in what we know today about type. Steve Jobs created the first Mac classic, which gave designers the opportunity to produce their work on something, it freed up the individual. Also in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, for free. To this day, he does not want to profit from this and turns down any money he may get including his profit for his London 2012 appearance.

The relationship between spoken and type is in a flux, this is due to the development of the digital age. Letters are now being replaced with emojis which is taking us back to the ancient letterforms, this works because it is understood by everyone and there is a common understanding of it. ANYTHING can be a typeface, language is fluid and in a state of flux. Community is now online, global and multi-cultural.

POSTMODERNISM- type has rules but we can change and develop them, it is complexity, contradiction, dystopian/non utopian/deals with the world on its own terms and appropriation.

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