Before Class, Chapter 9

The Industrial Revolution played a huge role on the expansion of productivity. During this time, many people saw the innovations of electricity and gasoline-fueled engines boom. Mass production was on the rise along with the supply/demand cycle. Due to the use of the supply/demand cycle, graphics were also booming, thus playing a very important role in marketing and business. We start to see the use of lithography and chromolithography come into play as posters were being developed. Lithography allowed designers to take a more illustrative approach into making their designs and communicating to the public. Innovations in typography were also on the rise. Larger scale and greater visual impact typefaces were in high demand during the Industrial Revolution because of the expansion of advertising and posters. William Caslon, Joseph Jackson, and Thomas Cotterell were three very successful type designers at the time. Most of the type that was designed during the Industrial Revolution produced fatter letters and the type became bolder as well. The invention of fat faces emerged and became a major category of type design. Along with all these innovations and inventions that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, the most important one, to me at least, was photography (that's also because I love it so much)!

Pictorial images and printing them was a very long process that was done all by hand until the new communications tool, photography, emerged. Thanks to Joseph Niepce, who was the first person to produce a photographic image, we have photography. Niepce was a lithographic printer with the motivation to find ways to make photography work. The earliest photograph he took was a picture of nature in which he exposed the pewter sheet all day long to the sun. After washing the image with lavender oil, sunlit buildings popped up on his pewter sheet. He kept on discovering new ways to capture pictures and images on light sensitive materials. Niepce then died and Louis Daguerre perfected Niepce's invention even further. As the camera kept evolving, a man named William Talbot then invented the process that formed the core for photography and photographic printing. As the camera kept evolving even further from there, George Eastman introduced his Koday camera to the public so people can discover this new innovation for themselves. Photography also became a great way to provide historical records and became a great tool for documentary and communications after the Civil War. Photography's popularity really took off in the nineteenth century and became a great way for artists to gain freedom and expression.

One thing that I learned and found very interesting was the photography portion of the book. It is very interesting to me that the back in 1665 people used the camera obscura and that whole concept then turned into the photography we see today. To think that someone discovered that back in 1665 blows my mind!