The Invention of the Alphabet

A long time ago when the earth was green, there was more kinds of animals than you've ever seen. There were cats and rats and elephants and chimpanzees... and no one had the ability to keep track of how many of each there were, or which jars they were in. The earliest written records were made using clay tablets and pieces of reed carved to a point to scratch or carve small pictographic images into the tablets. It is believed that these may have first come about as a way of solving the problems of knowing which contents were in which sacks and pottery containers that stored food. Before alphabets were introduced, picture/image based symbols that represented animate and inanimate things were drawn to indicate information. The symbols gradually became more and more stylized until they were a very brief mark made to represent the animal or item that they represented. Alphabets evolved as attempts were made to represent sounds of speech with marks.

For this project, we were asked to make 10 shapes drawn using a single line. These marks were then repeated over and over quickly and loosely to see how the repetition "over time" could cause the mark to be stylized and possibly simplified.
Once the "evolved" shape had been determined, we were to use our new alphabet to make an "important sign". I decided to use some pretty modern materials to make my somewhat primitive sign; white reflective material for the background, and red reflective tape for the lettering. Below is a sign measuring 100 x 30 feet, and glows at night when lit by torch, flashlight, bicycle light, car headlights and so on. It advises the viewer to use caution ... just beyond the sign is the end of the earth! You wouldn't want to fall off now, would you?

Moveable type... a whole new look at potato prints!

Once Alphabets had been determined, and folks were used to seeing writing, getting messages and saving stories and information for future use, it was thought that there would be some value in being able to share the information. Big stories, like say the bible, had been copied over and over by the ink-stained hand of scribes for centuries. The problem with this was that there were so few copies, and they took so long to produce that the expense of purchasing such a thing was out of the question for most folks.

The Chinese appear to be among the first "printers" making ink rubbings from stone tablets that had been intricately carved with inscriptions. By 1300 BC they had invented moveable type, but with an astounding 44,000 characters it is no wonder this method did not take on at that time. Around 1450, with books in great demand, and an abundance of paper, and the knowledge of woodblock printing, European countries began seeking ways of mechanizing type. Although some mention is made of a French fellow and a Dutch fellow, who had experimented with some aspects of moveable type, Johann Gutenburg is credited with having created the printing press thereby being able to produce hundreds of books in a single year.

For this project we were to make some "moveable type"of our own. Enter: the mighty potato!

In order to get all of the "letters" to be the same height, I cut them using a homemade mandolin style cutter:

Once the letters had been cut into the surface of the cut potato, they were kept in a cold salt water bath so they didn't get all brown and gross and shrivelly.
The letters were then dried off a bit, and arranged (backwards) into the words they were to form.
I inked the potatoes individually so that they would be in varying colours... normally, the idea with moveable type is that they letters are inked all at once, and all the same colour. I couldn't resist though.

See? Resistance is futile!

Once all of the letters were inked and ready, I placed a large sheet of paper over them, and rubbed the back of the paper to make sure it made contact with the inked potato letters.

Pulled the paper off carefully, and...
rearranged the letters (the beauty of moveable type) into the new words (a fleecier snit suit)
and printed and printed and printed and printed...

until all I could feel was:

and then it was time to clean up...

This project was a LOT of fun... so feel free to email me if you want your wedding invitations or New Years Eve party invites printed this way. I don't come cheap, but it certainly is enjoyable work!

Broadsheet Newspaper

So now that the alphabet has been determined, and the moveable type has been made, the 1800s were seen as a time to make some typographic refinements. New fonts were created, considerations were made as to how legible letters were when arranged amongst their peers. A major change to previous methods of typeface design was to build the fonts using an intricate grid system of 64 units, each unit of which was divided into 36 smaller units for a total of 2304 little squares. New forms were achieved as they approached font formation from a more mathematical perspective, and tried to get away from the calligraphic shapes that were inherent in text written with a flat pen nib or chisel. Not only was this a time of great strides in font upgrades, it was also a time for some standardization of font sizes. Flourishes, ornaments, flowers and other decorated intials were also integrated into printed works.

Pinhole Camera... and some nifty photos

Photography began from experimentation by Joseph Niepce in 1822. He invented what he called a heliogravure, or sun engraving. Within the next decade, several others came forward with similar inventions. There were many years spent trying to make the process of preparing the plates more user friendly; this finally occurred in 1877 when gelatin-emulsion dry plates were invented by several firms. Photography changed graphic design in a huge way. Suddenly stories were lent more authority when a photographed picture was included with the text. More accuracy and detail could be achieved, and there was less room for interpretation by the artist who would have previously been drawing for the copperplate engravings that would sometimes be included with text.

So we come to the point of trying some of it ourselves. Mmmmm... another favourite project! While I make no claims to being any kind of photographer, save for the "hobby" type, I do love to make things with my hands... especially things that can otherwise be purchased for significantly more money.

Here is a photo of my pinhole camera, made from a small matchbox, a roll of film, an empty roll of film, some cereal box, some black electricians tape and a black permanent marker. I followed the instructions at this link if you are interested in trying it yourself: www.matchboxpinhole.com
(I didn't make the "clicker" part of it, and it still worked... just 1 1/2 turns per photo when advancing the film with a house key)


And here are some of the photos I took with the camera... pretty interesting considering how MacGyver the camera was. There is a rather mystical or mysterious quality to the pictures. Next time I will pay more attention to what the composition might be. The biggest problems I found with the pinhole camera were that I either had to hold the camera steady for too long for the shot (which no matter how still I thought I was holding it, it wasn't still enough) and that I forgot that whatever I pointed the camera at would be in the picture. Its a tricky tool to use to capture a particular composition... and there is no preview screen!

This is one of my favourite photos that I took with the pinhole camera...

Art Nouveau

I liked the photo of the angel statue in Ross Bay Cemetery so much that I used it as the reference for my next project... A piece on Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau came along shortly after the Arts and Crafts movement, and was a combination of Japanese influence, and a reaction to the traditional/historical art styles of years past. It has been referred to as the "bridge between Victorian clutter and modernism". One of the main visual qualities in art nouveau is the use of fluid, organic lines. Flowers, birds, vine tendrils and the female human form were frequent motifs, and were heavily stylized and often woven into the image by intermingling them with the wrapping vines.


This attempt of the Art Nouveau style is made in Illustrator.

Collage

Having read that the "Dadaists said they were not creating art but mocking and defaming a society gone insane", I decided to do the same. Theirs was a reaction to the carnage of World War 1; they claimed to be anti-art and concerned themselves with shock, protest and nonsense.

"Dada artists claimed to have invented photomontage, the technique of manipulating found photographic images to create jarring juxtapositions and chance associations." (Megg's History of Graphic Design) ...and I think I have managed to do that with my photomontage, too:

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a school devoted to the creation of a modern beauty. A beauty that embraces the use of the machine, that combines ideas and aspects of all modern design movements and applies them to create functional design. Bauhaus was a movement from which a modern aesthetic evolved, and in its wake, modern furniture, household products, architecture and graphics.

I chose to do replicate a work by Joost Schmidt, circa 1923, which demonstrates several previous art movements including constructivism and cubism. It is a fairly close replication, save the personalization of the facial expression, the text which has been changed to my school, and of course the dates. Oh - and I changed the signature icon to be a creation with my own stylized itintials.