VISUAL COMMUNICATION HISTORY BLOG

One problem when writing a post on Steampunk is how to label it correctly: Does one use the label "19th Century" or "21st Century" or both? Again, would this genre go under "Victoriana" or "Computer"? It seems to me that all of the above would have to apply: Although Steampunk , as an art and design movement is contemporary and is also often computer based through its wide usage in game design, the inspir…

Geofroy Tory (1480-1533), was one of a number of typographic masters who, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries invented the capital letter as we know it today. Thus, Tory created a link between the Italian printers of the fifteenth century, who first revived the antique Roman letterforms, with the work of those who adapted those designs as typefaces for letterpress printing in subsequent centuries. He had a substantial influence o…

A really good collection of Neville Brody's output put together by Peter Gabor can be found here: http://www.typogabor.com/neville-brody/ I am really happy to have found this, since decent sized online reproductions of Brody's work are not too easy to come across. In fact, I had a very hard time back when I was putting together the course website. So, this is really great! I am only linking one out of a huge collection of very well selec…

A brilliant collection of Dada periodicals: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/collection.html cover for 391, by Francis Picabia. 3 Above: Merz pages by Kurt Schwitters, the central image is a centerfold from issue 8/9, which was actually designed by El Lissitzky. Also on this site are lot of page reproductions of poetry books by Dadaist poets ranging from Eluard to Tristan Tzara; as well as pages from an exhibition catalog of Max Ernst's work (be…

A Flickr group, the description of which reads: "Officially, the phrase "littera antiqua", or "the ancient letter", was used by the humanists in the 15th century to describe a style of calligraphy or lettering found on the manuscripts which they wrongly believed had been written by the Romans. I've taken some liberties, with the phrase, but hope the spirit of the idea will remain. This group will be dedicated to lett…