mortiz004

Charles Parsons was appointed art director of Harper and Brothers in 1863. He assisted in raising the standard of pictorial images in the company’s publications as he had an outstanding eye for young talent. Charles Dana Gibson was not brought on board because he shared a name with the art director. Actually, his images of young women and square-jawed man established a principle of physical beauty in the mass media that endures for decades. Fletcher Harper passed away in 1877. The magazine’s reigns were taken over by a more conservative editorial staff. Charlse Dana Gibson, poster for Scribner's, 1895. Although the exquisite beauty of the "Gibson Girl" was captured with facility and control, Gibson was unconcerned with the design type and image as a cohesive whole. In this poster the printer added text in incompatible typefaces. Charlse Dana Gibson, his wife Irene Langhorne , 1909. His wife and her sister, Nancy Astor,   served as the  inspiration for the famous Gi...

Brother James and John Harper launched a magazine in New York in 1871. Their brothers Wesley and Fletcher joined the company in 1823 and 1825 respectively. The name of this publication was dubbed Harper and Brothers . By the 1850s this magazine had become the largest printing and publishing firm in the world. Fletcher Harper was assigned the role of senior editor and succeeded in shaping American graphic communication for half a century. Innovative designs for books wasn’t a priority for most publishing firms in the 19 th century. They were more bothered with large press runs and modest prices. You know, the “more for less” principle.  But during the 1840s Harper and Brothers launched a mammoth project that developed into being the finest achievement in graphic design ever to be reached in the young nation. Their new additions to the company, Harper’s Illuminated and New Pictorial Bible , was printed with custom designed and made presses and contained just about 1 600 wood engra...

Another thing the Victorians were appreciated for was how they developed a more tender attitude towards children. Before the Victorian era, Western cultures had a tendency to treat children as “little adults”. The Victorians expressed their nurturing approach to children with the development of toy books. These were colorful books for pre-school children. A handful of English artist produced books showcasing a restrained use of color. These books represented an approach to children’s graphics that’s still in use today. One of the earliest, and the most influential, designers of children’s books is Walter Crane. As a teenager he apprenticed at a wood-engraving firm. When he was only 20 years of age in 1865 he published his Rail Road Alphabet . His long series of toy books broke away from the conventions of printing material for children. These earlier conventions of graphics supported didactic or moral causes and always sought to teach children a lesson in life. Not Crane. He only soug...

With the progression of the Victorian era came the major increase of ornate elaboration in typeface and lettering design. The elaborated types of the early 19 th century were based on letterforms with traditional structure. Shadows, outlines and embellishments were applied while the classic lettering structure was maintained. The second half of the century presented advances in industrial technology that allowed metal-type foundries to push elaboration, which included fancy distortions of basic letterforms to an extreme degree.  In an attempt to push type design to a more intricate level, punch cutters cut their designs in soft metal and then hardened them with electroplating. These hardened punches were able to stamp designs into brass matrixes. The uninhibited lettering of Chromolithography served as a significant inspiration to foundries and letterpress printers that sought to maintain their share of the fiercely competitive industry of Graphic Design. Herm...

Chromolithography spread like a wild fire to other nations after it ignited in Boston. By 1860 about 80 chromolithography firms employed 800 people. That figure grew to 700 firms employing over 8 000 people by 1890. Letterpress printers and admirers of fine typography and printing were appalled that the design of a chromolithographic printing block was done on the artist’s drawing board instead of the compositor’s metal press bed. Chromolithography was free of traditions and lacked the restrictions of a letterpress. For this reason designers could exploit an unlimited palette of bright, vibrant colors and invent any letterform that tickled their fancy.  The liveliness of this revolutionary printing process stemmed directly from the imaginations of the talented artists who created the original designs and the competent craftsmen who translated these originals onto not only one stone, but up to 20 separate color plates. The colored inks that were applied to these stones were overprin...

The word lithography is derived form the Greek term “stone printing.” A Bavarian author Aloys Senefelder invented the first lithography process in 1796.  He searched for a cheap way to print his own dramatic works. He started to experiment with etched stones and metal reliefs. Eventually he came up with the idea to etch a stone away around grease-pencil writing and make into a relief printing plate. His continuous experimenting lead to the invention of lithographic printing, in which an image is neither raised nor incised. Rather, the image was formed on the flat plane of the printing surface. The process of printing from a flat surface is called planographic printing.   Lithography is based on the concept that water and oil repel each other. The process proceeds as follow: An image is drawn on a flat stone surface using an oil-based crayon, pen or pencil. Water it spread over the stone to moisten all areas except for the image, which will repel the water. Using a roller, an ...

So I got to learn that there was more to the Victorian era, which refers to the reign of Queen Victoria from 1819 to 1901, than amazing dresses and extravagant parties.  Apparently this was a time of strong moral and religious beliefs, proper social conventions and optimism. A popular motto of the society was “God is in heaven, all is right with the world.” This seems to slightly contradict the superficial values portrayed by Oscar Wilde’s drama named The Importance of Being Ernest , which is set in the Victorian age. But it also turns out that the Victorians searched for a design spirit to express their eon. The surfacing of multiple contradicting designs and philosophies that were mixed together in a dispersed fashion lead to an unfortunate aesthetic confusion. An English architect A.W.N. Pugin nurtured a fondness for the Gothic, which suited the pious Victorians.  There are two dictionary definitions for pious. The first being "Devoutly Religious" and the second "Maki...

Let’s go into a tad more detail about Mathew Brady; the gentleman who took the “Freedmen” photograph. He dramatically proved the ability of photography to provide a historical record and define human history. When the American Civil War began, Brady set out in a white duster and straw hat carrying a handwritten pass from Abraham Lincoln. Brady invested $100 000 to send assistants to help document the War. From his photography wagons a great national trauma was etched forever in the collective memory of the American society. Brady’s intense documentary of the War altered society’s tendencies to romanticize war, dramatically. After this war, photography became an important documentary and communicative tool. It became common for photographers to be hired to accompany expeditions into the unexplored western territories. Eadweard Muybridge was another adventurous photographer. He photographed Yosemite, Alaska and Central America. At some stage Leland Stanford, a former governor of Californ...

During the 19 th century, when inventors were working to develop the technicalities of photography, adventurers and artists explored its image making potential. But merely isolating a moment in time was not satisfying enough to some of these photographers. They defined and extended the aesthetic and communicative boundaries of the new medium. In May of 1843, David Octavius Hill made a new effort to explore the design potential of photography. He did this by attempting to immortalize the 474 ministers who withdrew their congregations from the Presbyterian Church and formed the Free Church of Scotland. To tackle this task he collaborated with Robert Adamson, who was making calotypes for a year at that stage in time. Hill placed the subjects in sunlight, using all the knowledge he gained form 2 decades of practicing portraiture, and exposed each for 40 seconds.  The calotypes produced from this operation were perceived as superior to Rembrandt’s paintings. Julia Margaret Cameron rece...

In the beginning of the 1840s the rising employment use of wood engravings, initiated by Thomas Bewick, fostered an effective use of images in editorial and advertising communications. Wood engraving dominated book, magazine and newspaper illustrations. The reason for this being that wood-engraving blocks were type-high, could be locked into a letterpress and printed with type, whereas copper and steel engravings or lithographs had to be printed as a separate press run.  Although wood engraving printing blocks were favored amongst printers, the preparation of these blocks were very costly. Due to this inventors continued their search for an economical and reliable photoengraving process for preparing printing plates; a process already begun by Niepce. In 1871 John Calvin Moss of New York invented a commercially achievable photoengraving process for translating line artwork into metal letterpress plates:  A negative of an art piece was made on a copy camera suspended from the c...