Graphic Design and the Industrial Revolution


The name of this post is the name of the first chapter we are diving into this year. Obviously the authors of this book realized that the industrial revolution wasn't boring enough in the junior grades of high school so they tried to jazz it up by adding "Graphic Design" to the term (seeing as that is what I'm studying) and force feed it to us again. I can honestly say that the only thing I could remember about the Industrial Revolution before starting this chapter is steam and a lot of child labor. Turns out that there was more to it than massive amounts of environmental pollution, the development of the first slums, socialism, imperialism and the inhumanely low wages of the employees who worked horrible hours.

All of the above started because of something called The Enlightment. This was a movement of the 17th and 18th century where reason, logic, criticism and freedom of thought were stressed. This contrasted with the leading religions and political parties of societies. With this movement came "thinkers" who started studying science and the environment. This is how a mass of new inventions was born as innovative ideas began to become socially accepted.
With this consumerism became an important term. For those who zoned out when this term was being defined, Consumerism is the theory that progressively greater consumption of goods is beneficial to the country, which is true if the industrial sector is managed correctly. (Nice to see my notes are coming in handy)

And that's as far as my notes go before I zoned out to my unbelievable schedule that was exhausting me.... But I think a logic conclusion to make is that that was when the importance of graphic communication arose with the main function of marketing, when new technologies lowered unit costs and increased production by eventually replacing manual labor, innovative typography was developed and printing was forced to evolve to accommodate the massively growing demands and this all lead to the vast development of typography - all of which I will blog more clearly about later on.

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