Christopher Navarrete Graphic Design History

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was an era that was believed to have started in England between 1760 and 1840. It is a famous time in history because it involved massive changes in society and economics. For example, society moved away from agriculture in order to adopt industrialization, and energy become a very valuable resource. As a result of moving towards industrialization, technology improved, demand increased and mass production was enabled.

Mass production is essentially a faster and cheaper way of selling and creating goods.

Therefore, mass production increased the availability of products, and decreased the price of products. This is reinforced by Meggs as he states that, “the cheaper, more abundant merchandise now available stimulated a mass market and even greater demand… graphics played an important role in marketing factory output.”

Unfortunately, the switch from agriculture to industry provided workers (which were a mixture of men, woman and children) with difficult working conditions. For example, Meggs states that workers “worked thirteen-hour days for miserable wages and lived in filthy, unsanitary tenements. This huge workforce… often suffered from shutdowns caused overproduction, depressions, economic panics, business and bank failures, and the loss of jobs to newer technological improvements.” Despite the social issues, there were however, innovations in graphic design, including typography.

Due to mass production, society demanded that advertising and posters have greater impact, larger scale and more expressive characters among others. Therefore, designers began to create an abundance of new type designs. Successful designers during this era include Christopher Navarrete Graphic Design History

William (the grandfather of this revolution) and his former apprentices Joseph Jackson and Thomas Cotterell. According to Meggs, “Cotterell began the trend of sand-casting large, bold display as early as 1765… Other founders designed and cast fatter letters, and type grew steadily bolder.” As a result of these new type options, new were created. The new typefaces used at this time are Robert Thorne’s Fat-face types (1821) and Egyptian type designs

(1821), Vincent Figgins two lines pica (1815), Henry Caslon’s Ionic type specimen (1840), and

Robert Besley’s early (1845).