As part of BBC Four's medieval season Stephen Fry presents a heartfelt tribute to the man who invented the printing press, Johannes Gutenberg. Part biog, part historical engineering experiment, he tracks the man himself to his hometown of Mainz and follows (as far as he is able) his personal story while early printmaking experts attempt to recreate the original press Gutenberg used to print his legendary and groundbreaking Bible. Despite protesting that he is cack-handed at every opportunity Fry tries his hand at carving the double helix screw mechanism required for the press as well as casting lead type and creating paper the 15th century way. His investigations about the life of the man reveal an engineer/entrepreneur supremely placed to capitalise on his ingenious creation by revolutionising the medieval church bureaucracy. The impact of printing was massive and formed the basis for the spread of knowledge that led to the Renaissance and modern life itself. The earliest machine of mass production was shrouded in secrecy and, in the end, failed to net its inventor the wealth he deserved thanks to his unscrupulous investor. It's fascinating to consider how immediate the influence of early printed text turned out to be. In a world where we are surrounded by printed material it's hard to imagine what it must have meant to make books commonplace and (relatively) affordable. It could be compared to the internet in terms of its reach but its probably more important and the fact that from 1450 to 1500 literally millions of printed texts were produced demonstrates how popular it became in a short space of time.
Really pleased with the tutorial on CSS in Dreamweaver that Simon gave us yesterday. Crystallized a lot of stuff about designing for the web in a very digestible way. Props! Just found a handy article in a mag called .NET that explains how to scale your page to suit the myriad browser and screen resolution options that are now out there. It uses the idea of setting type in em values and applies it to the other page elements so that when users employ the zoom tool it maintains the columns and box sizes that you have set for the design. Brilliant! This could turn out to be incredibly useful for my brief for Communication Design, From Paper to Screen.
Working towards my final piece in SL today I imported a texture I created in Photoshop. This I then applied to the logo I've been building that will sit in the middle of the 3D ad. Yay!! I had to figure out where to find special characters in the character palette so I could include the registered trade mark symbol. Hopefully my plan to import a texture with transparency will prove as easy as today's task *crosses fingers*.
I thought this looked like an interesting idea. Its a font building application that allows you to create handwritten type from scans. The possibilities for creating new and unique typefaces are amazing and there's even a handy automatic ligature feature which could turn out to be dead handy. There's no release date yet so we'll have to wait and see about price etc. After setting type the traditional way in my printmaking induction (and finding out how infuriatingly time consuming it is!) I appreciate just how much of a revolution computing brought to the world of typesetters. I also have a greater appreciation of the craft and skill it entails even now to bring text to life on page and screen.