Lecture 6 - Print Culture and Distribution

Print culture 2

There is a return to the mechanical techniques of printing, art and design. One example of this is the letterpress flyers used in the Leeds Print Festival, which showcase a traditional aesthetic to printing.

Carl Honore - 'In Praise of Slow' focuses on the traditional 'slow' approaches to design that is not very popular today due to the changes and advances in technology and resources.

3 factors of 'Slow Design'

• Individual
• Environmental
• socio-cultural

Anthony Burril - Lisbon, Portugal posters

Experimental Jetset - Statement & counter statement

The Printing Project

The Pink Milkfloat - to promote the traditional printing practice

Nicolas Bourriaud - Relational Aesthetics

Barbara Kruger - 'I Shop Therefore I Am' (1987) The designs from this project were used to promote products sold in Selfridges. 

Carston Holler - Test Site (2006) 

The Glastonbury Free Press - Uses a traditional printing press to publish Glastonbury newspapers to the visitors for free, each year.

Technological reproduction of art removes: creativity, genius, eternal value, tradition, authority, authenticity, autonomy, distance and mystery.

Lecture 5 - Print Culture & Distribution

'Late Age of Print'

• Malshall Mcluhan - the age of print began in 1450. This was with the Gutenburg's printing press.
• Art schools taught - Painting, sculpting, architecture, music and poetry. - The Beaux Arts
• only men were aloud to join art clubs.
• The industrialisation revolution of 1760 - 1840 demands more production, therefore more workers. In this way mass production begins. The segregated working class were finding their own art culture, through printing art using the machines available to them in the factories.
• People create engravings and etching of famous art and sell it for a fraction of the price to the masses who can not afford the real thing.

Mathew Arnold 'Culture & Anarchy'

• Their is a backlash of snobbish upperclass people, who believe that the lower-class are creating a culture that is going to be anarchy.
• Literature is created by the working class, for the working class. For example, Penny Dreadful.
• Schools of Design open around the UK
• Walter Benjamin - 'The work of art in 1936. The age of reproduction'

COP1: Chronologies: Type - Production and distribution - Part 2

"since typography is a communication method that utilises a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics and so much more..." - Shelley Gruendler.

A typographic timeline of classification -

• 1450 - 1700 - Classic/Oldstyle
• 1700 - 1790 - Transitional
• 1790 - 1870 - Modern
• 1870 - 1960 - Bauhaus/Swiss Modern
• 1960 - 2000 - Contemporary

Ways of thinking

Premodern - 'Because god put it there and that's the way its always been."

Modern - "Onwards and upwards with inevitable progress!"

PostModernism - complexity/contradiction/dystopian/appropriation.

Max Miedinger creates Helvetica typeface in 1957 alongside Eduard Hoffman, which revolutionises typography with its wide range of uses.

25 years later Microsoft came up with Ariel typeface which showed significant similarities to Helvetica. 25 years is also the maximum time that a design can be protected by copyright before it can be modified by others to create designs of their own. In this way Microsoft may have changed Helvetica to make Ariel.

In 1990 Steve Jobs introduces the Apple Macintosh that retails at less than $1000, which gives a never before seen approach to typography and how we communicate information, quickly.

In 1994 Comic Sans typeface is created by Vincent Connare, which today is seen as one of the most hated typefaces of all time.


In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web and offers its use to everyone for free.

In 1995 Bill Gates created Internet Explorer, which gave a new look to the layout of text in a template that over time still exists to this day in updated forms.

In 1977 Jamie Reid produces the visuals and typographic style that would be used on the album covers of The Sex Pistols. This style also showed it had taken inspiration from past art such as John Heartfield's in 1932, which consists of collage, cutout imagery and the recycling of text. Jamie Reid's style is then recreated again in 2014 by London Print Studio which uses his mockery style on Vladimir Putin, similar to how he had made his over the face of Queen Elizabeth for the Sex Pistols album cover.

In 1979 Barbara Kruger creates iconic images, using simple red and white text that reflects the context of the image. Most of which looks at the problems in todays society where body image is an important topic and how it is portrayed in the media as well as what effects it has on people.

When looking at todays forms of communication we can see that over time we have adapted to the wide range of options available to us. For example, we have gone from using email, phone calls and text messaging to using popular apps and social media sites as the primary tool for communicating. Some people believe that we are going back to the foundations of communication, through our use of symbols and emojis we are going back to a time when symbols such as Hieroglyphics were the only form of visual communication.