Printing Comes to Europe
"Xylography is the technical term for the relief printing from a raised surface that originated in Asia. Typography is the term for printing with independent, movable, and reusable bits of metal or wood, each of which has a raised letterform on one face."
The invention of Typography ranks near the creation of writing as one of the most important advances in civilization. Writing gave humanity a means of storing, retrieving and documenting knowledge and information that transcended time and place. Knowledge spread rapidly, and literacy increased as a result of this remarkable invention.
The slow and expensive process of bookmaking had changed little in one thousand years. A simple 200 page book required four or five months' labor by a scribe, and the 25 sheepskins needed for the parchment were even more expensive than his labor.
In around 1424, the value of a book was equal to the value of a farm or vineyard.
The steady growth of demand in books, required people to go about it more professionally, by hiring specific workers like some for typography, decorative initialing, gold ornamentation, binding and so on. Even with all these extras working, it was still not enought to meet the demand.
Over 600 years had passed before papermaking, which spread westward from the pacific ocean to the Mediterranean Sea.
When it came to typographic printing, there were a number of steps involved in doing this. A style of letter had to be selected. Gutenberg made he choice of the square, compact textura lettering style commonly used by German scribes of his day.
Next, each character in that particular font, small and capital letters, numbers, punctuation, ligatures and so on had to be engraved into the top of a steel punch. This was then driven into a matrix of softer copper or brass to make a negative impression of the letterform. The key to Guttenberg's invention was the type mold, used for casting the individual letters. Each character had to be plane parallel in every direction and the exact same height.
The word Renaissance is normally referred to the Renaissance art period between the 15th and end of the 16th Century. The word renaissance literally means 'rebirth'. This was showing how art had become great again with artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.
However, the word is now generally used to encompass the period marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world. When it comes to the history of graphic design, the renaissance of classical literature and the work of the Italian humanists are closely bound to an innovative approach to book design. Type design, page layout, ornaments, illustration were all rethought by Italian printers and scholars.
Like in the art renaissance, without the Medici family nothing would have been possible. These were a very wealthy and well known family who commissioned a lot of works which made art and design what it is today.
The prototype roman alphabet designs of Sweynheym and Pannartz and the coarse decorative borders of early French books were the first big steps toward unique Renaissance book designs.
Many early printers designed trademarks to identify their books. These emblems bear witness to the revived attention to Egyptian hieroglyphics were errouneouusly believed to be entirely ideographic and not phonetic.
This resulted in the design of symbols and heraldry that are forerunners to those used in modern graphic design.
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