C.O.P Lecture 3: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 1)

Lecture 3: The History of Type – Production and Distribution (Part 1)

-       “all that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another”

-       it cant just be something that the sender understands, but the receive has it understand it as well.

Type is what language looks like – it is a visualization of language. It has tone, pace, weight.

Typography:

-       the art and technique of printing with moveable type.

-       The composition of printed material from moveable type.

-       The arrangement and appearance of printed matter.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

“the written word endures…the spoken word disappears” – Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death.

Logotypes – 7000BC

Type is speech made visible.

Development of language, how they expand and create other languages.

E.g. Europe – Alphabets in Europe: Greek, Greek + Latin, Latin, Latin + Cyrillic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian.

3200 BCE(ish) – Mesopotamia –middle east. Occidental side (western).

Trade and Communication:

-       The rosetta stone – 196 BC (discovered 1799) – Egyptian, Demotic, Greek. – Represents those languages. – They were direct translations, gave us the opportunity to know how to translate languages.

The first true alphabet was the greek alphabet – pictograms.

We can understand something even if it isn’t spelt out correctly – we interpret what letters are saying without it actually saying it.

Use the recognition of shapes and piece them together to understand what it is.

Origins of type:

-       language doing one thing, production doing another.

1870 – William Foster:

-       Elementary education act – all children ages of 5-12 in England and Wales must go to school.

-       Learning to read

Production methods changed – things were still written but mass production needed something quicker – print.

Writing became a hobby instead of necessity.

Anything informative was printed.

1919 – 1933 - Walter Gropius – Bauhaus. – Industrialization – design as a discipline.

-       First point in time typography was born.

-       Type was a language that had a heritage but was also shaping the future.

“since typography is a communication method that utilizes a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics and so much more”

We navigate our whole lives using words – change and improve the words and I believe that we can change and improve life.