China's Dynasties

Xia ca 2205 – 1766 B.C.

Shang ca 1766 – 1122 B.C.

Zhou

Western ca 1122 – 7771 B.C.

Eastern ca 771 – 256 B.C.

Qin 221 – 206 B.C.

Han

Western 206 B.C. – A.D. 9

Xin (Wang Mang) A.D. 9 – 23

Eastern A.D. 25 – 220

Three Kingdoms period 220 – 265

Jin

Western 265 – 316

Eastern 317 – 420

Northern

Northern Wei 386 – 534

Eastern Wei 534 – 550

Northern Qi 550 – 577

Northern Zhou 557 – 581

Southern

Song 420 – 479

Qi 479 – 502

Liang 502 – 557

Chen 557 – 589

Sui 581 – 618

Tang 618 – 907

Five Dynasties

Later Liang 907 – 923

Later Tang 923 – 936

Later Jin 936 – 947

Later Han 947 – 950

Later Zhou 951 – 960

Song Northern 960 – 1127

Southern 1127–1279

Yuan 1279 – 1368

Ming 1368 – 1644

Qing 1644 – 1911

Republic of China 1911 – 1949 (maintained in Taiwan)

People's Republic of China 1949 – present

A Concise Graphic Design Chronology, Part 3

1958

Margaret Calvert

South African typographer and graphic designer Margaret Calvert, along with Jock Kimneir, designed many of the road signs used in Great Britain. The signs feature simple pictograms to inform people, such as using a cow to denote farm animals. She also created fonts for Linotype, including the eponymously titled Calvert.

1960s

Psychedelia and Pop Art

Culture went pop in the 1960s as music, art, literature and design became more accessible and reflective of everyday life. Purposely obvious and throwaway, pop art developed as a reaction against abstract art.

The psychedelia counter culture that developed during the same period fused different genres and mediums, breaking down traditional boundaries. Pictured is a Milton Glaser poster that features a Marcel Duchamp style silhouette combined with calligraphic swirls. Over six million were printed.

1961

Letraset

The creation of Letraset dry transfer lettering allowed anyone to become a typesetter. Rubbed directly onto artwork or virtually any substrate, it was often used to headlines and display type while body copy was supplied via a typewriter.

1976

Frutiger

Typographer Adrian Frutiger is prominent in the pantheon of typeface designers due to the grid numbering system he developed for Univers. Frutiger completed the expansion of the Frutiger font family in 1976, a project he began in 1968 while designing signage for the Charles de Gaule airport in Paris. Pictured is the character set of Frutiger that demonstrates the rounded forms and low stroke contrast of the font.

1977

I Love New York

Created by Milton Glaser, the iconic 'I Love New York' is one of the most famous and recognisable examples of a rebus. Its simplicity, balance and dramatic burst of red, combined with a rounded slab serif typeface, ensured its success.

1981

Bitstream

Founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter and Mike Parker. Bitstream was the first digital type foundry. The production of digital fonts further separated the type design from type manufacturers. The company developed Charter, which had open letterforms for low-resolution printers and created Verdana for screen use, with its curves, diagonals and straight lines rendered in pixel patterns, rather than drawn.

1981

The Face

Graphic designer Neville Brody revolutionised magazine design with his unabashed love of typography. This was nowhere more apparent than one the pages of The Face, a style magazine covering music, design and fashion. Old and contemporary type was exaggerated in scale and proportion, was exploded and distorted, and complemented with Brody's own computer-generated fonts as he challenged the notion of legibility.

1982

Completion of The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall, Washington

The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall is a monument that honours members of the US armed forces who served in the Vietnam Way. Comprising three parts, the wall is carved wih the names of all those that were killed in the conflict, and is the most recognised part of the memorial.

1984

Apple Mac

The 'Mac' revolutionised the personal computer by making computer screens user-friendly and hiding the operational programming from the user. Control in type production migrated away from professional typesetters to designers, and extended to amateurs as we as industry professionals. The low resolution of early personal computers called for new fonts to ensure legibility.

1985

Fontographer

Typeface customisation became available to anyone through the advent of the Fontographer design program, which allowed existing fonts to be manipulated and reshaped. Cheap Fontographer-produced fonts entering the market initially caused concerns for traditional typography companies, although this was tempered by the amount of work required to create an entirely new typeface.

1984

Emigré

American graphic design magazine Emigré was one of the first publications to use Macintosh computers, and influenced graphic designers to shift to desktop publishing (DTP). The magazine also served as a forum for typographical experimentation.

1990

New Wave

As the 1990s began, graphic designers reacted to the international style and sought to break away from the constraints of grid patterns in favour of experimentation, playful use of type and a more handmade approach. Type use became more subtle and expressive - to be part of the message rather than just its conveyor.

A Concise Graphic Design Chronology, Part 2

1916

Dadaism

An artistic and literary movement (1916-23) that developed following the First World War and sought to discover an authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms. Dadaism brought new ideas, materials and directions, but with little uniformity. Its principles were of deliberate irrationality, anarchy and cynicism, and the rejection of laws of beauty. Dadaists lived in and for the moment. Pictured is the cover of the first edition of Dada, which was published in Zürich in 1917 and edited by Tristan Tzara.

1916

De Stijl

Dutch for 'the style', De Stijl was an art and design movement that developed around a magazine of the same name founded by Theo Van Doesburg. De Stijl used strong rectangular forms, employed primary colours and celebrated asymmetrical compositions. Pictured is a the Red and Blue Chair, which was designed by Gerrit Rietveld.

1918

Constructivism

A modern art movement originating in Moscow in 1920, which was characterised by the use of industrial methods to create non-representational, often geometric objects. Russian constructivism was influential to modernism through its use of black and red sans-serif typography arranged in asymmetrical blocks. Pictured is a model of the Tatlin Tower, a monument for the Communist International.

1919

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus opened in 1919 under the direction of renowned architect Walter Gropius. Until it was forced to close in 1933, the Bauhaus sought to initiate a fresh approach to design following the First World War, with a stylistic focus on functionality rather than adornment.

1925

Herbert Bayer

Austrian graphic designer Herbert Bayer embodied the modernist desire to reduce designs to as few elements as possible, an repeatedly experimented with typography to reduce the alphabet to a single case. He created Universal, a geometric sans serif font. Pictured is Bayer Universal, a font that has an even stroke weight with low contrast and geometric forms.

1928

Jan Tschichold

German typographer Jan Tschichold was a leading advocate of Modernist design as expressed through Die neue Typographie (the new typography), which was a manifesto of modern design that promoted sans-serif fonts and non-centred design, in addition to outlining usage guidelines for different weights and sizes of type. Pictured is Sabon, a font named after Jacques Sabon that typifies the Modernist approach pioneered by Tschichold.

1928-1930

Gill Sans

Typographer Eric Gill studied under Edward Johnston and refined his Underground font into Gill Sans. This was a sans-serif font with classical proportions and graceful geometric characteristics that lend it a great versatility.

1931

Harry Beck

Graphic designer Harry Beck (1903-1974) created the London Underground map in 1931. An abstract work that bears little relation to physical scale, the stations are relatively evenly spaced as Beck focused on the user-defined needs of how to get from one station to another and where to change, rather than accurate and proportional representation.

1950s

International Style

International or Swiss style was based in the revolutionary principles of the 1920s such as De Stijl, Bauhaus and Die neue Typographie, and it became firmly established in the 1950s. Grids, mathematical principles, minimal decoration and sans-serif typography became the norm as typography evolved to represent universal usefulness more than personal expression.

1951

Festival of Britain

A national exhibition in London and locations around Britain that opened in May 1951. The festival was intended as 'a tonic for the Nation' as Britain sought to lift itself from the ruins of the Second World War. The festival also marked the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

1951

Helvetical

Created by Swiss designer Max Miedinger, Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It has clean, no-nonsense shapes that are based on the Akzidenz-Grotesk font. Originally called Haas Grotesk, its name changed to Helvetica in 1960. The Helvetica family has 34 weights and the Neue Helvetica has 51.

1957

Vorm Gevers

Dutch graphic designer and typographer, Vorm Gevers is known for his posters and exhibition design for Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. Gevers designed several fonts, including New Alphabet (1967), which was an abstract front based on a dot-matrix system so that it could be easily read by computers.

A Concise Graphic Design Chronology, Part 1

1476

The Printing Press

English merchant and diplomat William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476 and was the country's first printer. Amongst the achievements credited to Caxton is his standardisation of the English language by homogenising the regional dialects through the printed word, which also helped to expand English vocabulary.

1447

Moveable Type

Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) invented moveable type printing technology in 1447 with a press that was similar in design to those used in Germany's Rhineland to produce wine. This was a revolutionary development that allowed the mass production of books at relatively low cost, which formed part of an information explosion in Renaissance Europe.

1799

The Rosetta Stone

The stone, carved in 196BC with an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, was found near Rosetta (Rashid) in 1799. The three scripts of the same text provided a valuable key that helped to decipher hieroglyphs.

1840

Penny Black

Create by Rowland Hill, the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued in 1840 as part of the British postal service reforms, and was a means of prepaying the delivery of letters. The stamp featured the profile of Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch, and letters in its bottom corners referred to rows and columns, which indicated the stamp's position on the printed sheet, such as 'a', 'AB' or 'GD', as pictured here.

1851

The Great Exhibition

Held at London's Hyde Park between May and October 1851, and at the height of the Industrial Revolution, The Great Exhibition featured displays of culture and industry and celebrated industrial technology and design. The exhibition was housed in a glass and cast-iron structure, better-known as Crystal Palace, which was designed by Joseph Paxton.

1886

Linotype

Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884, the line-casting machine produced a metal slug that contained a single line of type. Characters were input using a keyboard that was not dissimilar to a typewriter. The machine assembled brass character matrices into a line, which it then cast.

1886

Monotype

Tolbert Lanston developed a mechanical method of punching type from cold strips of metal, which were set (typeset) in Washington, USA. In 1896 Lanston patented the revolutionary monotype caster. It cast single letters in lead and composed them into a page. This allowed corrections to be made at the character level rather than having to recast a whole line, which had been the case previously with linotype.

1892

Aristide Bruant, Toulouse-Lautrec

French post-impressionist painter and art nouveau illustrator Henri Toulouse-Lautrec depicted in the seedy side of late nineteenth century Paris in paintings and posters that expressed a profound sympathy with humanity. Although lithography was invited in Austria by Alois Senefelder in 1796, Toulouse-Lautrec helped it accomplish the successful fusion of art and industry.

1896

Simplicissimus

Thomas Theodor Heine (1867-1948) another early proponent of lithography, co-founded and drew cover illustrations for German satirical magazine Simplicissimus. Heine's covers combined brash and politically daring content with a modern graphic style.

1850

The Industrial Revolution

The second of two phases of a major technological, socio-economic and cultural change that began in late eighteenth century Britain and saw the replacement of an economy based on manual labour with one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. The second phase began circa 1850 and saw the rise of the mechanical printing industry and its consequent demand for typefaces.

1910

Modernism

Modernism was shaped by the industrialisation and urbanisation of Western society. Modernists departed from the rural and provincial zeitgeist, prevalent in the Victorian era, rejecting its values and styles in favour of cosmopolitanism. Functionality and progress became key concerns in the attempt to move beyond the external physical representation of reality through experimentation in a struggle to define what should be considered 'modern'.

1916

Johnston Underground

This striking sans-serif font was created by Edward Johnston for use on the signage of the London Underground. Originally called Underground, it has also been called Johnston's Railway Tpye and Johnston, and features the double-storey 'g'.

Bauhaus

An art and design school opened in 1919 under the direction of the renowned arcitect Walter Gropius. The baubau aimed to provide a fresh approach to design following the first world war. Bauhaus style is charateristic by economic and geometric forms. Teching staff include Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Breuer.

In 1923 Kandinsky proposed that there was a universal relationship between the three basic shapes and the three primary cours. He believed the yellow triangle to be the most active and dynamic through to the passive, cold, blue circle.

Avant Garde

An artistic work that pushes the established limits of what is considered acceptable. Avant garde works often have revolutionary, cultural, or political connotations.

Art Nouveau

Rooted in romanticism and symbolism, art nouveau (the new art) describes a richly ornamental style of decoration, architecture and art that developed during 1894-1914. Art nouveau is characterised by undulating lines, sinuous curves and the depiction of leaves, flowers and flowing vines and is embodied in the work of protagonists such as Gustav Klimt, Henru de Toulouse-Lautrec, Antonio Gaudi and Hector Guimard, who was the architect and designer of the Paris metro entraces.

Called Jugendstil (in Germany), Sezessionstil (in Austria), and Modernismo (in Spain), art nouveau rejected historical references in favour of creating a highly stylised design vocabulary that unified all arts around man and his life. Architecture was the focus for art nouveau as it naturally encompasses and integrates every art, but the style was also used extensively in posters and jewellery design. The ornate typeface used here is Benguiat.

Art Deco

Named after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which was held in Paris, Art Deco describes a decorative design style that celebrated the rise of technology and speed via geometric designs, intense colours, and the use of plastic and glass. Forms became streamlined as the principles of aerodynamics became better understood resulting in an elegant style in both architecture and objects.

Abstract Expressionism

An American art movement that developed in New York City following the Second World War, and featured forms not found in the natural world as a means of emotional expression. Abstract expressionist works were characterised by large canvases with uniform, unstructured coverings that projected power due to their scale. Leading figures in this movement include Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.

MoMA: The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934

While I was looking up on El Lissitzky I came across this site - an exhibition by MoMA in 2002 - I like the bright warm red on a soft cool blue.
Check out this online exhibition and learn a bit about graphic design history.