Graphic design – Private Press, Morris, Arts & Crafts

During the 19th century, one by-product of industrialism was a decline in the quality of book design and production. Cheap, thin paper, shoddy presswork, drab, gray inks, and anemic text typefaces were often the order of the day. Near the end of the century, a book-design renaissance began as a direct result of the English Arts and Crafts Movement. William Morris, the leader of the movement, was a major figure in the evolution of design. Morris was actively involved in designing furniture, stained glass, textiles, wallpapers, and tapestries from the 1860s through the 1890s. Deeply concerned with the problems of industrialization and the factory system, Morris believed that a return to the craftsmanship and spiritual values of the Gothic period could restore balance to modern life. He rejected tasteless mass-produced goods and poor craftsmanship in favour of the beautiful, well-crafted objects he designed.

In 1888 Morris decided to establish a printing press to recapture the quality of books from the early decades of printing. His Kelmscott Press began to print books in 1891, using an old handpress, rich dense inks, and handmade paper. Decorative borders and initials designed by Morris and woodblocks of commissioned illustrations were cut by hand. Morris designed three typefaces based on types from the 1400s.

The Kelmscott Press recaptured the beauty and high standards of incunabula (texts produced when books were still copied by hand), and the book again became an art form. The press’s masterwork is the ambitious 556-page The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Four years in the making, the Kelmscott Chaucer has 87 woodcut illustrations from drawings by renowned artist Edward Burne-Jones. For the single work, Morris designed 14 large borders, 18 smaller frames for the illustrations, and over 200 initial letters and words. An exhaustive effort was required by everyone involved in the project.

The influence of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press upon graphic design, particularly book design, was remarkable. Morris’s concept of the well-designed page, his beautiful typefaces, and his sense of design unity—with the smallest detail relating to the total concept—inspired a new generation of graphic designers. His typographic pages, which formed the overwhelming majority of the pages in his books, were conceived and executed with readability in mind, another lesson heeded by younger designers. Morris’s searching reexamination of earlier type styles and graphic-design history also touched off an energetic redesign process that resulted in a major improvement in the quality and variety of fonts available for design and printing; many designers directly imitated the style of the Kelmscott borders, initials, and type styles. More commercial areas of graphic design, such as job printing and advertising, were similarly revitalized by the success of Morris.

The Kelmscott Press’s influence became immediately apparent in the rise of the private-press movement: printers and designers established small printing firms to design and print carefully crafted, limited-edition books of great beauty. Architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee founded the Essex House Press in London, and bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson joined printer Sir Emery Walker in establishing the Doves Press at Hammersmith. Books from the Doves Press, including its monumental masterpiece, the 1903 Doves Press Bible, are remarkably beautiful typographic books. They have no illustrations or ornaments; the press instead relied upon fine paper, perfect presswork, and exquisite type and spacing to produce inspired page designs. The Ashendene Press, directed by Englishman C.H. St. John Hornby, was another exceptional English private press of the period. Following the example of Morris, these private presses believed strongly in the social value of making attractive and functional visual communications that were available to citizens of all walks of life.

In the United States, typeface designers, in particular Frederic W. Goudy and Morris F. Benton, revived traditional typefaces. Also inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, American book designer Bruce Rogers played a significant role in upgrading book design. By applying the ideals of the beautifully designed book to commercial production, Rogers set the standard for well-designed books in the early 20th century. An intuitive classicist, Rogers possessed a fine sense of visual proportion. He also saw design as a decision-making process, feeling that subtle choices about margins, paper, type styles and sizes, and spatial position combine to create a unity and harmony. Type historian Beatrice Warde wrote that Rogers “managed to steal the Divine Fire which glowed in the Kelmscott Press books, and somehow be the first to bring it down to earth.”

Art Nouveau was an international design movement that emerged and touched all of the design arts—architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic, and product design—during the 1890s and the early 20th century. Its defining characteristic was a sinuous curvilinear line. Art Nouveau graphic designs often utilized stylized abstract shapes, contoured lines, and flat space inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Artists in the West became aware of ukiyo-e prints as trade and communication between Eastern and Western nations increased during the last half of the 19th century. Building upon the example of the Japanese, Art Nouveau designers made colour, rather than tonal modeling, the primary visual attribute of their graphics.

One of the most innovative posters of the Art Nouveau movement was artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 poster of the dancer Jane Avril, who was then performing at the Jardin de Paris. In this poster and others like it, Toulouse-Lautrec captured the lively atmosphere by reducing imagery to simple flat shapes that convey an expression of the performance and environment. Although Toulouse-Lautrec only produced about three dozen posters, his early application of the ukiyo-e influence propelled graphic design toward more reductive imagery that signified, rather than depicted, the subject. He often integrated lettering with his imagery by drawing it in the same casual technique as the pictorial elements.

Alphonse Mucha, a young Czech artist who worked in Paris, is widely regarded as the graphic designer who took Art Nouveau to its ultimate visual expression. Beginning in the 1890s, he created designs—usually featuring beautiful young women whose hair and clothing swirl in rhythmic patterns—that achieved an idealized perfection. He organized into tight compositions lavish decorative elements inspired by Byzantine and Islamic design, stylized lettering, and sinuous female forms. Like many other designers at the time, Mucha first captured public notice for poster designs, but he also received commissions for magazine covers, packages, book designs, publicity materials, and even postage stamps. In this way, the role and scope of graphic-design activity steadily expanded throughout the period.

Will Bradley, a self-taught American designer, emerged as another early practitioner of Art Nouveau. His magazine covers, lettering styles, and posters displayed a wide range of techniques and design approaches. Bradley synthesized inspiration from the European Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements into a personal approach to visual imagery. By the 1890s, photoengraving processes (making printing plates from original artwork) had been perfected. These allowed much more accurate reproduction of original artwork than hand engraving, which was often only the engraver’s interpretation of the original. Bradley’s work, in which he integrated words and picture into a dynamic whole, was printed from plates using this new technology.

Art Nouveau rejected historicism and emphasized formal invention, and so it became a transitional movement from Victorian design to the modern art movements of the early 20th century. This sense of transition is quite evident in the work of the Belgian artist and designer Henry van de Velde. After turning from Post-Impressionist painting to furniture and graphic design in the 1890s, he used lines and shapes inspired by the natural world and abstracted them to the point that they appeared as “pure form”; that is, they appeared as abstract forms invented by the designer rather than as forms from nature. In works such as his poster for Tropon food concentrate (1899), undulating linear movements, organic shapes, and warm-hued colours combine into a nonobjective graphic expression. Although this poster has been interpreted as signifying the process of separating egg yolks and whites, the typical viewer perceives it as pure form.

Similarly exploring issues of form, and inspired in part by the theories and work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh and J. Herbert McNair joined artists (and sisters) Margaret and Frances Macdonald in a revolutionary period of creativity beginning in the 1890s. This group in Glasgow, Scotland, combined rectangular structure with romantic and religious imagery in their unorthodox furniture, crafts, and graphic designs. In a poster it made for the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts (1895), for example, the group’s emphasis upon rising vertical composition is evident.