CHAPTER 1

I always begin my classes by reassuring the students that computers are a tool, much like a pencil, a paint brush, an airbrush, a typestting machine or process camera. Computers can imitate so many other tools, because mathematicians, engineers and programmers have succeeded in creating a computer that is a general purpose machine, making it much more than the sum of its parts.

Before 1985, it required access to a slew of expensive equipment in order to produce the artwork necessary to print a 4-page college newspaper: typesetting equipment, process camera equipment, a large darkroom, chemistry, and the trained personnel to operate all of the equipment. Equipment alone, conservatively would have run about $20,000-25,000, not including hazardous waste permits and other taxes and incidentals. Today you could do the same 4-page paper on a setup that would run about $2,500, a mere one-tenth the cost, and you can set it all on a single desktop.

If we've learned anything from the past, we know that the present is fleeting and the future is bearing down upon us. The day will most certainly come when we plug a chip into our brain, or take a nanobot gelcap with breakfast to tune into the latest in holographic information updates, entertainment, or pleasure tours. It will happen because we imagine it will.

If this is so, then what of computers, now that people with an average income have true publishing capabilities? In 1985, consumers and entrepreneurs were first introduced to desktop publishing, but printing and distribution was relatively expensive then, and remains so today. It's only in the last five years that the internet has enabled just about anyone with access to a personal computer and an internet connection to send messages that span the globe almost instantly. Print costs are dropping fast and considerably now that many printer's are buying into new technology that circumvents traditional film and plates on many 4-color printing jobs. Today, we are able to reach out with our text, images, sound and video to connect with people in far away places in manners hertofore unknown.

But it wasn't always so.

By examining the major contributing events in past history, one can conclude that mankind has always sought ways to process incoming information in order to become more knowledgable and to effectively communicate with fellow human beings. According to Dean Falk, an anthropologist at the State University of New York:1

If we wish to identify one prime mover of human brain evolution...it is language...Human technology and social acheivements required conscious thought, which is, and probably was, dependent on language.

Part of the beauty of language is the transmission of meaning, sometimes bold and obvious, others times conveying subtle nuance. I know what I think graphic design is, but I always like to know what other people think graphic design is, and what, if any relationship it has to computers and computer graphics and desktop publishing.

I asked Steven Heller, art director of the New York Times and editor of The Education of a Graphic Designer, to present his defininition of graphic design.

NH: I'd like to know your definition of graphic design and [do you have] any comments about graphic designers in the year 2000.

Steven Heller: A graphic designer is an expert in the manipulation of type and image as a means to order information, present ideas, and sell messages. This will not change in the year 2000. What will change, however, are the tools, environments, and languages of design. Style will also shift, but style is the covering not the content. Design is a vehicle for conveying content.

NH: Do you consider "desktop publishing" a separate field, and if so can you say what makes it different.

Steven Heller: Desktop publishing must be seen as a component of the design experience. Sure, in the past it was THEM v. US. But we are all using computers. This is our tool and it belongs to others. There are good designers and bad designers whether they call themselves desktop or not.

Graphic design is about information, ideas, and messages successfully communicated to a target audience. Whether language is unique to humans is a question that scientists debate with fervor. We know that animals relay messages to each other and to other species in various ways. A cat may meow longingly, and its owner knows to scratch its back or behind its ears, or the cat may arch its back and hiss, and that means back off. Whales across the globe sing variations of the same song over and over, communicating, who knows what, with other undersea creatures. "Comparative evidence suggests that animals can associate concepts with arbitrary symbols but have only a limited mastery of syntax."2

Language is based on the ability to attach meaning to arbitrary sounds, and allows us to communicate about things outside of our immediate experience. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that alarm calls in vervet monkeys work much the same way. It has long been known that when one monkey spots a predator and gives an alarm call, other members of the group take flight. Vervets give acoustically distinct calls when they encounter snakes, eagles, and leopards. They also respond differently to each of these predators. When they see a leopard, they rush up into a tree; when they see an eagle, they dive into dense bushes; and when they see a snake, they look down at the ground around them.þTo find out whether the alarm calls convey specific information to the vervets, Seyfarth and Cheney conducted a playback experiment. They recorded examples of alarm calls given to snakes, eagles, and leopards. Then they played one of the calls to the monkey from a hidden speaker. When monkeys heard the alarm calls given to a leopard, they generally climbed into trees; when they heard an eagle alarm call, they most ofen ran into bushes or looked up; and, when they heard a snake alarm, they usually looked down. The results demonstrate that vervets attach meaning to an arbitrary symbol.

Communication may not be reserved for humans, but we are unique in our use of language and symbology to convey subtle meanings. The propensity for language may have originated early in human evolution and continued to mature in anatomically modern humans, or it may only have appeared with modern humans about 100,000 years ago. The bottom line is that scientists do not have enough physical evidence to come to an agreement, leaving unanswered the question about when language first began.

While scientists may be uncertain exactly when language first developed in human evolution, they surmise that in the beginning, only word-sounds were spoken--heard by the receiving brain as a combination of abstract sounds that blend to form the whole word. Abstract sounds means that there isn't anything about the sound of a word that would make a person associate with the object or concept it represents.

Scientists estimate that anatomically modern human beings whose bodies were very similar to modern humans may date back even more than 100,000 years ago. The fragmentary find of a modern skull found in Ethiopia caused some scientists to surmise that anatomically modern humans may have lived 30,000 years before that. The earliest anatomically modern fossil of a complete skeleton is dated at 90,000 years old, and was found in Israeli caves at Qafzeh and Skhul. Another way of putting it would be to say that our species was "born" approximately 128,000 to 88,000 B.C.E. (before the common era). Fossil evidence suggests that Neanderthals and other ancients, who preceded modern humans on the evolutionary timeline, probably co-existed with modern humans until they became extinct in approximately 34,000 B.C.E.3

The earliest evidence we have that humans used graphic, symbolic communications can be found in the cave paintings at the Le Chauvet Cave in France which are about 30,000 years old. The paintings depict daily life. They tell a story and even teach others of the species how to use the most modern technology available at the time--tool making. Over 1500 cave paintings, consisting mostly of animals, are dated to 17,000 years ago. "Lascaux [France] may be the most beautiful Paleolithic painted cave in the world," according to Guillaume Pierre, Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. People from this time period also sculpted pieces of ivory and carved directly into the walls of the caves, indicating the desire to communicate with others not necessarily present at the time of communication.

Writing began in Egypt around 4000 B.C.E., quickly spreading to Babylon. Egyptian and Babylonian messages might be encoded with pictures of objects (pictograms). Egyptian standardized their pictures (ideograms) with each hieroglyph representing a concept or object. Other cultures, such as those found in China and Japan still use ideogram-based writing systems to this day.

A language based solely on ideograms faces obstacles. Specifically, such a language requires a large and complex set of symbols to convey language's subtleties and nuances, making it inherently less efficient than a smaller, more arbitrary set of symbols that are wholly abstract concepts, like our alphabet's distinct symbols that have no obvious pictorial relation to the sounds they represent. An alphabet such as the English alphabet, containing a fixed 26 abstract symbols, plus punctuation, is well-suited to be boiled down into its binary, digital counterparts. Humans figured out a way to encode the individual sounds made by words around 1700 B.C.E., yielding the first written alphabet. Though writing differed from region to region, it began to spring up about the same time in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China, known as the "four cradles of civilization."4

The 1400 years after writing was born yielded hundreds of thousands of books, each one an original, penned by a scribe. The books found their way by any means, including the spoils of war, into the library in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The library at Alexandria was co-founded in 332 B.C.E. by Alexander the Great and Demetrius of Phalerum, the "minister of culture" for Hellenistic Egyptian king Ptolemy, who is attributed as the person who first proposed that all the books of the world be brought together in a single location.5

Less than a century after its inception, the library at Alexandria became the intellectual capital of the world. After Alexander the Great's death and the partial destruction of the library, Cleopatra aligned with Anthony, nephew of Alexander, to once again rebuild the library. The library continued to grow for 400 years, until it reached approximately 200,000 important literary works and treatises. Each was individually handwritten by scribes on scrolls up to 30 feet long. In 389 A.D. on order of Emperor Theodosius, an angry Christian mob burned and sacked the library destroying most of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, including much of it science and mathematics, perhaps leaving some mysteries yet to unfold. Attacks left only a fraction of the collection, which survived another 252 years until 642 A.D. when Muslim marauders burned and destroyed the remains. This latter act of destruction has come to symbolize the beginning of the Dark Ages.þIn those days it was rare for there to be more than a single copy of a book in existence. Much of it would not reappear for over 1,000 years.6

Of course, books were not the only form of written communication. There was also the equivalent of a notepad for recording daily notes and communications not intended for permanence. University of Pennsylvania's Professor of Classical Studies, James O'Donnell says:7

There was already a humbler form of information-processing tehcnology at hand for day-to-day purposes: the wax tablet. In its simplest form, this was a slab of wood, hollowed out in the center and filled with melted wax. A dry stylus would incise letters which the thumb could then erase at will. These tablets were excellent for memoranda, transient bookkeeping, and daily business. Several of them bound together by thongs made something roughly the equivalent of a small notebook.

The duties of creating the written communications of the times, temporary notes as well as books, were carried out by scribes. Additional duties performed by scribes included tax accounting and collecting. Charles Jonscher maintains that the digital (convertible to binary code) encoding of the alphabet and numbers consisting of a manageable quantity of discrete symbols was a giant step forward in information processing.8

Since humans had discovered a digital way of communicating ideas, with letters and numbers, early Pythagorean philosophers believing 'all things are numbers,' worked furiously to formulate a set of logical rules one could implement in the processes of daily life. In the 6th century B.C.E., 100 years before the time of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras of Samos formed the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a society of skilled mathematicians who believed that reality was, at its deepest level, mathematical. This belief generated the mathematical concept of the numerical, logical proof, contributing significantly to the development of Western rationalist thinking. By this point in time, humans had become more sophisticated, using words, writing, and finally and symbols, to communicate ideas in such a way as to provide a sound and logical rationale to support content.

Each new means of proliferating the human messages has been a supplement to the human voice, or the printed word, and each has heralded a new era of civilization. Douglas S. Robertson of the University of Colorado said:9

The invention of language is associated with the very beginning of the human race, the invention of writing with the beginning of civilization, and the invention of printing with the beginning of modern civilization.þThe most important dividing points in the history of civilization were each accompanied by an invention that caused an information explosion.

Just as the written word did not supplant the spoken word, but supplemented it, when printing developed writing not only continued, but increased as human society became increasingly literate. If one were to examine the objective of evolution, one might conclude that it shares many the same goals as graphic design. In his book, The Global Brain Awakens, Peter Russell says:10

With drawing and writing came the ability to transfer information across time. This was as significant for the speeding of evolution as was the development of sexual reproduction, also an information transfer, in the single cell. The later invention of printing and the more recent developments of photocopying, computing and telecommunications, have likewise played a major part in accelerating the evolution of civilization.

Johann Gutenberg is probably the first person that comes to mind when we consider the origins of printing, but printing and moveable type existed for more than 600 years before the 44-year-old German entrepreneur discovered a better way to reproduce printed sheets.

The Chinese had been using movable type characters made from clay as early as 1041 AD. The Koreans were casting type in bronze two centuries later in the 1200s.

Because Eastern cultures used ideograms numbering in the thousands, manipulating that many movable type characters proved to be cumbersome and therefore the use of movable type in the East didn't have a huge impact on printing at that time. While its possible that Gutenberg could have been aware of developments in printing in China and Korea, there is no evidence to support the theory.

When Gutenberg entered the printing business, around 1439, in order to create reproductions, a printing form had to be carved out of a wooden block. Each time the information changed, a new block had to be carved, making setup for printing labor intensive and dreadfully slow by today's standards. In the 1400s, Gutenberg created movable type characters cast in metal, and made vast improvements on the existing printing press technology. Gutenberg was ultimately responsible for developing movable type in the West, modifying a wine press and creating a suitable ink for transferring the image from metal to paper. Johnann Gutenberg was named person of the [15th] century for the impact his contribution had on Western Civilization.11

Up until the mid-1400s, literacy was known only among scribes and the aristocracy, but printing's rapid spread throughout Europe made books more available and accessible. Subsequently literacy and accessibility to the knowledge of the human species was no longer reserved for an exclusive class of society. "In the first fifty years after the invention of printing, around 80 million books were produced. The philosophies of the Greeks and Romans were distributed, the Bible became widely accessible, and through various 'how to' books the skills of many crafts were made more widely available, paving the way for the Renaissance."12

Printing begot redundancy, and no longer could the destruction of a single library wipe out the sum total of the knowledge of mankind. Books became the predominant way of encoding information, which was handed down from one generation to the next. In the style of evolution, information that was inaccurate or unreliable was not worthy of reproduction, and the best of the best survived reprinting down through the generations. Graphics were reproduced from wood block carvings, and color took the form of illuminations, carefully hand-painted illustrations that used vivid inks and gold-leaf painting.

As seen by examining historical records, some incarnation of "graphics" has been around since the beginning of writing in ideograms and pictographs. Unlike graphics, the alphabet, with its arbitrary assignment of sounds and meaning came some 3000 years later supplementing communication by contributing words to convey subtle variations in meaning. The destruction of the library at Alexandria, for all intents and purposes, wiped out the totality of information recorded in books in the Western World, which was a massive setback for human civilization. Relative geographic isolation meant that technological improvements took a long time to spread from one part of the world to another, or sometimes technological developments occurred independent of their development elsewhere. Guterberg's movable type printing press produced a massive explosion in the amount of information being recorded and distributed, accelerating the pace of communications and the subsequent rate of change.

Four hundred years after Gutenberg's press, the 19th century industrial revolution created an unparalleled quantity of products and goods that had to be sold. Consequently, advertising was born and resulted in the proliferation of Victorian era illustration and graphics in printing and a demand for new and unique typefaces.13

The invention and subsequent evolution of computers and the internet account for the speedy distribution of massive amounts of information, both textual and graphical. The internet with its ability to display moving graphics and sound will forever change the way we communicate with one another. Computers and the internet are enabling an accumulation of world knowledge that, in turn, nurtures a rapidly evolving society.

1 How Humans Evolved, Boyd & Silk, W.W. Norton and Company, 1997

2 Ibid

3 Ibid

4 The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization, Douglas S. Robertson

6 The Evolution of Wired Life: From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip--How Information Technologies Change Our World, Charles Jonscher, John Wiley & Sons, 1999

7 Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, James J. O'Donnell, Harvard University Press, 1998

8 The Evolution of Wired Life: From the Alphabet to the Soul-Catcher Chip--How Information Technologies Change Our World, Charles Jonscher, John Wiley & Sons, 1999

9 The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization, Douglas S. Robertson

10 The Global Brain Awakens, Our Next Evolutionary Leap, by Peter Russell, Global Brain Inc., 1995

11 Time Magazine, "Person of the Century," December 31, 1999

12 Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, James J. O'Donnell, Harvard University Press, 1998

13 Typology, by Steven Heller, Chronicle Books, 1999