Visual communication — is the mode of communication through the visual aids or is the communication of the ideas or information in the form that can be read or looked at. There are many types of visual communication. As we think, it all hasn’t started with the invention of television or at least not with the printer by Johannes Gutenberg. Visual communication can be dated back to when the man lived in cages and hunted with rocks. Yes! It is as old as that. But the inventions from televisions to world wide web has taken it to another level, so high and important that we can’t even imagine the world without books, pictures, paintings, televisions and so many other ‘can’t live without’ things!The main means of visual communication is the vision or basically the co-ordination of the sight and brain, which is the sight–seeing something and the brain – interpretation. The primary tool by which man has visualised ideas is through the usage of writing and, by extension, type: Writing/type is the visual expression of the spoken word. And language is what we communicate with. Thus it is no overstatement when we say that type is the essence of visual communication and by extension of visual communication design. Type, where it is present, is simply the single most important element that you put on a page, since it inherently carries the essence of communication and communication is what our subject of study as graphic/multimedia designers is all about. Thus, the history of visual communication, i.e. the history of the visualisation of the spoken word, will largely follow the development of typographic systems, given that this is the one that we are operating under.
So let us just go back in time for a few seconds to see the history of this technique. The history of visual communication can be broadly classified as:
1. Cave Writings
2. Pictography
3. First Stage of Language
4. Books - The Evolution
5. The Printing Press
6. Type – The Technique
7. Printing
8. The Avant-garde
9. The Modern Era of Printing
10. The Computer
Cave Writings:
Man has been using the technique of writing and painting using different colours and formants from his very early stages. The painting and symbols used by man in the early days of his evolution were found on the rocks and caves in different formats. Surviving early man artefacts include huts, cave paintings, carvings and antler-tipped spears. They had huts, constructed of rocks, clay, bones, branches, and animal hide/fur. These early humans used manganese and iron oxides to paint pictures and may have created the first calendar around 15,000 years ago. The early man must have come into contact with the Neanderthals, and are often credited with causing the latter’s extinction, although morphologically modern humans seem to have coexisted with Neanderthals for some 60,000 years in the Levant and for more than 1000 years in France. The paintings were drawn with red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first. Stone lamps provided some light. Abbé Breuil interpreted the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number of animals. As there are some clay sculptures that seem to have been the targets of spears, this may partly be true, but does not explain the pictures of beasts of prey such as the lion or the bear. It is identified that they used these pictures and symbols for communication purpose.
Pictography:
A pictogram or pictograph is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. It is the basis of cuneiform, is the script language used by early man around 3000 B.C and hieroglyphs (were logograms representing words using graphical figures such as animals, objects or people.). Early written symbols were based on pictograms (pictures which resemble what they signify) and ideograms (pictures which represent ideas). It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by a range of ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic (logo: specific symbol for a particular meaning) writing systems around 5000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols by most contemporary cultures. Even today it is used by most of the present day humans but in a simplified way as in traffic signals etc.
Alphabets:
The language or the communication media couldn’t be worked with just the pictographic writings. They needed a more stable and properly systemized form of writings as it is thought that the symbols used by them are vast and complicated. Hence they created some form of writing or a set of symbols, which could be used in many ways in different combinations. Hence the alphabet was created. The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery, or were directly inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet. Slowly the alphabets of different languages have evolved.
F Books – The Evolution:
The art of books has evolved so prominent that a ’book’ can mean from the holy scripts to magazines to present day Harry Potter series. Medieval Europe, as they say, struggle is the mother of creativity --- It all started in one of the darkest periods known to mankind: when epidemic and plague, darkness and fear, witch-hunts and illiteracy roam the land. It is a world where most people rarely leave their place of birth for any distance longer than 10 miles, where few people even live beyond the age of 30. In this inhospitable environment, isolated in the scriptoria of chilly monasteries, under the light of meagre oil lamps, braving the biting cold; some of the greatest book designers that ever lived, created some of the most beautiful books the world has ever seen. The colophons of their creations are testimony to their short lives since most of the books that they worked upon were only completed in several of their brief lifetimes, one scribe replacing the other over decades. We call these beautiful books Illuminated Manuscripts. Illuminated manuscripts are the most general item to endure from the Middle Ages. They are also the best surviving specimens of medieval painting. Indeed, for many areas and time periods, they are the only surviving examples of painting.
Printing:
Printing is one of the first technical ways of machine use in any form. The skill of printing is an evolutionary invention which gave path to many incredible inventions. An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe. These are usually very rare and fragile items whose nature can only be verified by experts. The origin of the word is the Latin incunabula for "swaddling clothes", used by extension for the early life or early stages of something. The first recorded use of incunabula as a printing term is in a pamphlet by Bernard von Mallinckrodt, "Of the rise and progress of the typographic art", published in Cologne in 1639, which includes the phrase prima typographicae incunabula, "the first infancy of printing". The term came to denote the printed books themselves from the late 17th century. There are two types of incunabula: the xylographic (made from a single carved or sculpted block for each page) and the typographic (made with movable type on a printing press in the style of Johann Gutenberg). Many authors reserve the term incunabulum for the typographic ones only. The end date for identifying a book as an incunabulum is convenient, but was chosen arbitrarily. It does not reflect any notable developments in the printing process around the year 1500. Incunabulum usually refers to the earliest printed books, completed at a time when some books were still being hand-copied. The gradual spread of printing ensured that there was great variety in the texts chosen for printing and the styles in which they appeared. Many early typefaces were modelled on local forms of writing or derived from the various European forms of Gothic script, but there were also some derived from documentary scripts (such as most of Caxton's types), and, particularly in Italy, types modelled on humanistic hands. These humanistic typefaces are often used today, barely modified, in digital form.
JohannesGutenberg
(1398 – 1468) he is the mastermind behind mass printing or printing press. As quoted in the wikipedia, He was a German goldsmith and inventor who achieved fame for his invention of the technology of printing with movable types during 1447. Gutenberg has often been credited as being the most influential and important person of all times, with his invention occupying similar status. The A&E Network ranked him at #1 on their "People of the Millennium" countdown in 1999. Block printing, whereby individual sheets of paper were pressed into wooden blocks with the text and illustrations carved into them was first recorded in Chinese history, and was in use in East Asia long before Gutenberg. By the 12th and 13th centuries, many Chinese libraries contained tens of thousands of printed books. The Chinese and Koreans knew about moveable metal type at the time, but because of the complexity of the movable type printing it was not as widely used as in Renaissance Europe.
The Renaissance was the intellectual and cultural movement that took place around the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more widely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe, this is a general use of the term. As a cultural movement, it comprehended of literature, science, art, religion, and politics, and a resurgence of learning based on classical sources, the development of linear perspective in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform. Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political turmoil, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man", as defined in wikipedia. In the 12th century a rediscovery of Greek and Roman literature occurred across Europe that eventually led to the development of the humanist movement in the 14th century. In addition to emphasizing Greek and Latin scholarship, humanists believed that each individual had significance within society, which had been opposed by many monarchs of that time. The growth of an interest in humanism led to the changes in the arts and sciences that form common conceptions of the Renaissance the 14th century through the 16th century was a period of economic flux in Europe; the most extensive changes took place in Italy. Europe itself slowly developed into groups of self-sufficient compartments. At the height of the Renaissance there were five major city-states in Italy: the combined state of Naples and Sicily, the Papal State, Florence, Milan, and Venice. Italy's economic growth is best exemplified in the development of strong banks, most notably the Medici bank of Florence. England, France, and Spain also began to develop economically based class systems.
The Industrial Revolution has a very prominent effect on the visual communication. It was the major technological, socio-economic and cultural change in the late 18th and early 19th century that began in Britain and spread throughout the world. During that time, an economy based on manual labour was replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. The labours did not have proper wage systems or the working hours, they had to give their full and yet suffer with lack of facilities. Then due to struggle and misery everywhere, painting and writing books became the main source of igniting people by socialists and humanists. It began with the mechanisation of the textile industries and the development of iron-making techniques, and trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and then railways. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries.
Breaking the Grid Printing techniques using movable type had restricted graphic design to an inflexible grid: Anything that was to be mass printed in great volume needed to adhere to a system whereby type was set in consecutive rows of parallel lines. Illustrations, maps and the like were hand drawn and engraved- only allowing for limited, costly editions due to the wearage of the engraving plates. The mass productive milieu of the industrial revolution manifested itself in a unique invention called lithography and this technique was to set type free from the bondage of the compositor. The term "lithography" dates back to the end of the 18th century, when Alois Senefelder invented the technique of printing with stone plates. This novel method - originally intended for the reproduction of music notation - quickly spread throughout the art world. Munich became the center of this printing technique, which was to be come extraordinarily important for 19th century art and for advertising of the age as well.
Photography
The beginning of the digital era of visual communication started with the invention of the camera or the photographic devices which greatly affected visual communication. Light plays an important role in photography. The basic principle was taken from the working of the eye. This is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as cameras. The very first photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter plate with a camera. The image required an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine. In partnership, Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined the existing process. In 1839, Daguerre announced that he had invented a process called the Daguerreotype. After reading about Daguerre's invention Talbot refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people.
The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for genuine and significant styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the diverse historicism of the Victorian era and to “soulless” machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but well-heeled patrons.
The beginning of the digital era of visual communication started with the invention of the camera or the photographic devices which greatly affected visual communication. Light plays an important role in photography. The basic principle was taken from the working of the eye. This is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical, chemical or digital devices known as cameras. The very first photograph was an image produced in 1826 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce on a polished pewter plate with a camera. The image required an eight-hour exposure in bright sunshine. In partnership, Niépce and Louis Daguerre refined the existing process. In 1839, Daguerre announced that he had invented a process called the Daguerreotype. After reading about Daguerre's invention Talbot refined his process, so that it might be fast enough to take photographs of people.
The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for genuine and significant styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the diverse historicism of the Victorian era and to “soulless” machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but well-heeled patrons.
Avant-garde
Avant-garde represents the innovation and the experimenting with works by a creative artist or a person, a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to post-modern artists such as the Language poets around 1981. This concept is applied to the work done by small bands of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow. Some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially when used to describe cultural movements. The term may also refer to the endorsement of essential social reforms, the aims of its various movements presented in public declarations called manifestos. Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with art for art’s sake, focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform. In our context the avant-garde will cover the avant-garde’s movements of the early 20th century that specifically focused on visual communication design and/or implemented it as a modus operandi.
Modernism
Modernism is caused by the development and changes in social, cultural and economical lives of the people. This is a fashion of thought which confirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation. The term covers a variety of political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Broadly, modernism describes a series of progressive cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the decades before 1914. Embracing change and the present, modernism comprehends the works of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.
F Post modernity: Post modernity is the period after modernism and the term used to describe the social and cultural entailments of postmodernism. The term is used by philosophers, social scientists, art critics and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th century and early 21st century life. These features include globalization, consumerism, the fragmentation of authority, and the commoditization of knowledge (see "Modernity"). "Post-modernity" is also used to demark a period in art, design and architecture beginning in the 1950's in response to the International Style, or an artistic period characterized by the abandonment of strong divisions of genre, "high" and "low" art, and the emergence of the global village. In graphic design, deconstructive gave its name to one of the major typographic movements, starting in the early 1980's and continuing into the late 1990's: Deconstructive Typography.
Taking on a more experimental approach to typography, the Dadaists and Futurists in the 1920s and 1930s, and later Concrete Poetry during 1950s and 1960s experimented with floating type compositions and fragmented typographic treatments, releasing type from its linear structure. Further developments of the deconstructive typography in the 1990’s shifted the typographic practice towards a spatial, non-linear process: ‘Communication for the deconstructive is no longer linear, but involves instead the provision of many entry and exit points for the increasingly over-stimulated reader.’ The graphic era started and the ‘page was more likely to be read than to be felt. . The end of the century, with the rising issues surrounding global economies, ecology and rising poverty in developing countries was a time when graphic designers took a long, hard look at the nature of their work; at its ephemeral qualities, its associations with consumerism/capitalism. The outcome took into account unexpected resources; the ordinary, the often-used, the soon to be discarded - as indeed is most of the output of graphic design itself.
Graphic Design at the end of the millennium was very rapid in growth and has come full life. The response to the increasing rigorousness forced by modernism and minimalist movements such as the Swiss Style on graphic design was slow but inexorable, resulting in new typographic probes and trends. Compounding this was the lack of expectation that designers and art directors increasingly felt towards the requirements and bland approach of the advertising sector by which they were largely employed.
An important point was where graphical requirement of almost every thing was aspired. The graphic designers became more expressive and bold. Any work without proper value was not accepted and they stated demanding, thus making value based service prominent. This was extraordinarily influential on a generation of new graphic designers and contributed to the founding of publications such as Émigré magazine. Today we may not understand the significance of the document which at the time caused dismay. It unambiguously re-affirmed the belief that Design is not a neutral value-free process. It protested against the consumerist culture that was purely concerned with buying and selling things and tried to highlight a Humanist dimension to graphic design theory. Thus it paved way to many talented designers as well as the whole new dimension of the visual communication. Now we are communicating through films, add campaigns, animation, graphics and many more.
We can consider ourselves lucky enough to witness the most amazing era of visual communication.
Avant-garde represents the innovation and the experimenting with works by a creative artist or a person, a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to post-modern artists such as the Language poets around 1981. This concept is applied to the work done by small bands of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow. Some people feel the avant-garde implies elitism, especially when used to describe cultural movements. The term may also refer to the endorsement of essential social reforms, the aims of its various movements presented in public declarations called manifestos. Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with art for art’s sake, focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform. In our context the avant-garde will cover the avant-garde’s movements of the early 20th century that specifically focused on visual communication design and/or implemented it as a modus operandi.
Modernism
Modernism is caused by the development and changes in social, cultural and economical lives of the people. This is a fashion of thought which confirms the power of human beings to make, improve and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation. The term covers a variety of political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Broadly, modernism describes a series of progressive cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the decades before 1914. Embracing change and the present, modernism comprehends the works of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.
F Post modernity: Post modernity is the period after modernism and the term used to describe the social and cultural entailments of postmodernism. The term is used by philosophers, social scientists, art critics and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th century and early 21st century life. These features include globalization, consumerism, the fragmentation of authority, and the commoditization of knowledge (see "Modernity"). "Post-modernity" is also used to demark a period in art, design and architecture beginning in the 1950's in response to the International Style, or an artistic period characterized by the abandonment of strong divisions of genre, "high" and "low" art, and the emergence of the global village. In graphic design, deconstructive gave its name to one of the major typographic movements, starting in the early 1980's and continuing into the late 1990's: Deconstructive Typography.
Taking on a more experimental approach to typography, the Dadaists and Futurists in the 1920s and 1930s, and later Concrete Poetry during 1950s and 1960s experimented with floating type compositions and fragmented typographic treatments, releasing type from its linear structure. Further developments of the deconstructive typography in the 1990’s shifted the typographic practice towards a spatial, non-linear process: ‘Communication for the deconstructive is no longer linear, but involves instead the provision of many entry and exit points for the increasingly over-stimulated reader.’ The graphic era started and the ‘page was more likely to be read than to be felt. . The end of the century, with the rising issues surrounding global economies, ecology and rising poverty in developing countries was a time when graphic designers took a long, hard look at the nature of their work; at its ephemeral qualities, its associations with consumerism/capitalism. The outcome took into account unexpected resources; the ordinary, the often-used, the soon to be discarded - as indeed is most of the output of graphic design itself.
Graphic Design at the end of the millennium was very rapid in growth and has come full life. The response to the increasing rigorousness forced by modernism and minimalist movements such as the Swiss Style on graphic design was slow but inexorable, resulting in new typographic probes and trends. Compounding this was the lack of expectation that designers and art directors increasingly felt towards the requirements and bland approach of the advertising sector by which they were largely employed.
An important point was where graphical requirement of almost every thing was aspired. The graphic designers became more expressive and bold. Any work without proper value was not accepted and they stated demanding, thus making value based service prominent. This was extraordinarily influential on a generation of new graphic designers and contributed to the founding of publications such as Émigré magazine. Today we may not understand the significance of the document which at the time caused dismay. It unambiguously re-affirmed the belief that Design is not a neutral value-free process. It protested against the consumerist culture that was purely concerned with buying and selling things and tried to highlight a Humanist dimension to graphic design theory. Thus it paved way to many talented designers as well as the whole new dimension of the visual communication. Now we are communicating through films, add campaigns, animation, graphics and many more.
We can consider ourselves lucky enough to witness the most amazing era of visual communication.
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