week 1

Illustrated Tutorial: on the History of Printing.
Tutorial: on Victoriana and the Industrial Revolution.

Design History Lesson One:

Technological advances drive the development of Design History.
Before printing technology came to Europe books were copied by hand one page at a time. Scribes in monasteries did all the time consuming job of book copying. Because of the time and effort involved very few existed. Books that were copied were of a religious nature.

Although book printing had not arrived in the 15th century the woodblock print was quite popular. It is essentially the same as today’s rubber stamp technology, except the art was carved out of wood instead of rubber with a chisel and hammer. There no detail or tones and the lines are coarse.

The first major technological innovation in printing was the “punch and mould” system.
Individual letters were carved out of steel to make a punch and a brass matrix (mould) was made from the punch. The molten lead was poured into the matrix and when the lead hardened an exact duplicate of the punch design was created. This process allowed for the creation of many copies of each letter in the alphabet. The result was “movable metal type”. This was Guttenberg’s’ contribution.

Casting type by hand was laborious but because the type was reusable the process was more efficient than copying books by hand.

Once the metal type is cast, lines of type can be composed, one letter at a time. This is called typesetting. A line of type would be composed on a “composing stick”. Individual lines of type are then put together to form a page. Once the page is printed, the form is taken apart and the type is then cleaned and sorted in preparation for composing the next page.

Guttenberg’s invention spread like wildfire throughout Europe. Soon every town had a print shop. In the early years a printer was not just a printer, he needed to be a metal smith, typographer, designer, editor, proof reader and publisher as well.
As books became affordable, literacy levels in Europe rose dramatically.

Papermaking:
In the beginning parchment (sheepskin) and vellum (calfskin) were the preferred material for printing books, since they lasted longer. Sometimes one book required the skins of 300 sheep.

As demand for printed books increased, so did the demand for cheaper material, so paper became popular. Up until 1860, paper was made of rags, other material, like grass was used until wood pulp became the preferred material.

The next major invention was called intaglio or gravure printing. Artwork was carved into copper plate. Ink was pushed into the indentations and then squeezed out onto paper. This process was used mostly for illustrations and was often combined with movable type by sending a sheet of paper through two different presses.

Lithography
In the beginning lithography artists drew on porous stone using a grease pencil. Because ink and water don’t mix, the printer was able to apply ink only to the greasy area of stone. The inked area is then transferred to a sheet of paper. Sometimes lithographic posters, like those of Tolouse Lautrec, were made life sized in 8 or more colours. Each colour had to be drawn on a separate stone in perfect registration with the other stones.

The job cases in a printers workshop contained individual pieces of metal type. These cases had an upper portion and a lower portion. The capital letters were kept in the uppercase and the others in the lowercase.