Lecture 3

Chronologies 1: Type – Production and Distribution.

Type Timeline

3200BEC (ish) – Mesopotamia. The first cities, villages and towns started to appear all over the globe, due to trading languages and ways to record them started to be used. 

Adapted from the phonetical alphabet, the greeks were the first to create the first true alphabet.

1450 – James Gutenbery invented the printing press. Books and texts such as the bible were now able to copied and written quicker, moving away from the previous timely hand written texts.

However 300 years prior to the press China were using stamps to create the same effect.

1870 – William Foster created the Elementary Education Act; everyone between 5 and 12 by law had to attend school, they were to be taught to read and write, luxuries they were previously only available for the the wealthy. Due to this the reproduction of books was needed.

1919–1933 – Bauhaus; producing the possibility to mass produce and industrialise arts and crafts.

1957 – Max Miedinger designed Helvetica. During this time it was a design break through as its lack of serif was a rare. It was used a lot in advertising and in films. The first font to be dictated by function. 

1990 – Steve Jobs invented the Apple Mac Classic. This was the beginning of the digital print process being available for everyone, not just the rich. This was not the first computer.

1990 – Tim Berners–Lee created the internet and made it free to everyone. 

1995 – Bill Gates adopted internet explorer. Type and language now had to be adapted to suit the web. For example long texts don't wont on the web, twitters having a character count.