History Of Design

Renaissance
Lecture 4
Prof.Abhik Sarkar
• Italian scholar and printer Aldus
Manutius the Elder founded his Aldine
Press in 1495 to produce printed
editions of many Greek and Latin
classics. His innovations included
inexpensive, pocket-sized editions of
books with cloth covers. About 1500
Manutius introduced the
first Italic typeface, cast from punches
cut by type designer Francesco Griffo.
• Because more of these narrow letters
that slanted to the right could be fit on
a page, the new pocket-sized books
could be set in fewer pages.
Nicholas Jensen’s type
In September 1480 printer and typographer
Nicolas JensonOffsite Link (Nicholas Jenson)
died in Venice. His detailed will made
provisions for the continuation of his printing
business, and is therefore significant for the
history of printing. Among Jensen's bequests
were his punchesOffsite Link and
matricesOffsite Link for casting type fonts.
His will is the first concrete reference in a
document of the existence of matrices for
casting type fonts, as there were no manuals
on printing published until the seventeenth
century.
Griffo’s typeface
• Inventor of first humanist
typeface; the Italic type
Regiomontanus’s 
Calendarium

Over time, typographic books developed

their own design vocabulary. By the mid-
15th century, printers combined
woodblock illustrations with typeset text
to create easily produced, illustrated
printed books. They printed woodblock
decorative borders and ornamental
initials along with the type, subsequently
having colour applied by hand to these
printed elements. The first complete
printed title page—identifying the book
title, author, printer, and date—was
designed for Regiomontanus’s 
Calendarium in 1476.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , called in
English Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a
Dream or The Dream of Poliphilus, is
a book said to be by Francesco
Colonna. It is a famous example of an
incunable (a work of early printing).
The work was first published in 1499
in Venice by Aldus Manutius. This first
edition has an elegant page layout,
with refined woodcut illustrations in an
Early Renaissance style.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presents a
mysterious arcane allegory in which
the main protagonist, Poliphilo,
pursues his love, Polia, through a
dreamlike landscape. In the end, he is
reconciled with her by the "Fountain
of Venus".
• During the 16th century, France
became a centre for fine
typography and book design.
Geoffroy Tory—whose
considerable talents included
design, engraving, and illustration,
in addition to his work as a
scholar and author—created
books with types, ornaments, and
illustrations that achieved the
seemingly contradictory qualities
of delicacy and complexity. In his
Book of Hours (1531), he framed
columns of roman type with
modular borders; these exuberant
forms were a perfect complement
to his illustrations.
Claude Garamond
• Typeface designer and punch-
cutter Claude Garamond, one of
Tory’s pupils, achieved refinement
and consistency in his Old Style
fonts. Printers commissioned
types from him rather than casting
their own, making Garamond the
first independent typefounder not
directly associated with a printing
firm. Works by Tory, Garamond,
and many other graphic artists
and printers created a standard of
excellence in graphic design that
spread beyond France.
• The 18th-century Rococo movement,
characterized by complex curvilinear
decoration, found its graphic-design
expression in the work of the French
typefounder Pierre-Simon Fournier
• Fournier designed a wide range of
decorative ornaments and florid fonts,
enabling French printers to create
books with a decorative design
complexity that paralleled the
architecture and interiors of the
period. Because French law forbade
typefounders from printing, Fournier
often delivered made-up pages to the
printer, thereby assuming the role of
graphic designer.
Rococo period
• Rococo, style in interior design,
the decorative arts, painting,
architecture, and sculpture that
originated in Paris in the early
18th century but was soon
adopted throughout France and
later in other countries, principally
Germany and Austria. It is
characterized by lightness,
elegance, and an exuberant use
of curving natural forms in
ornamentation. The word Rococo
is derived from the French word
rocaille, which denoted the shell-
covered rock work that was used
to decorate artificial grottoes.
Neo-Classical Graphic
design
In the second half of the 18th century, some
designers tired of the Rococo style and
instead sought inspiration from Classical art.
This interest was inspired by recent
archaeological finds, the popularity of travel
in Greece, Italy, and Egypt, and the
publication of information about Classical
works. Neoclassical typographical designs
used straight lines, rectilinear forms, and a
restrained geometric ornamentation. John
Baskerville, an English designer from the
period, created book designs and typefaces
that offered a transition between Rococo and
Neoclassical.
• Giambattista Bodoni, (born Feb. 16,
1740, Saluzzo, Piedmont [Italy]—died
Nov. 29, 1813, Parma, French Empire
[now in Italy]), Italian printer who
designed several modern typefaces,
one of which bears his name and is in
common use today.
• The typeface that retained the Bodoni
name appeared in 1790. Of the many
books that he produced during this
period, the best known is his Manuale
tipografico (1788; “Inventory of
Types”), a folio collection of 291
roman and italic typefaces, along with
samples of Russian, Greek, and other
types. A second edition of his book
was published by his widow in 1818.