Ephemera

Some things which stood out in particular during the lecture that were of interest to me included the beginning of the use of scale, the Victorian period's ideals (where trends are fickle and most everything is influenced by Queen Victoria herself), and how mass-production snuffed out true design and nearly killed the design of books. It's interesting to think that scale as we understand and use it today first began with posters in the streets of England, where advertising played such a large role in everyday affairs. The progression to such enormous, attention-grabbing signs such as billboards is one which, these days, is not seen too often anymore --- what with this digital age, all the communication designers try to get across are dealing with "new media", using the internet and its interactivity to reach people across the entire globe.

The Victorian Period expressed a new consciousness of the industrial era’s large middle class – their spirit, culture, and the moral standards. Queen Victoria controlled the whole fashion statement for women, much like the trends of today are affected by fashion, even though they're extremely temporary; ephemera.

Mass-produced books were of appalling quality – excessive ornamentation, sensational novelty. Type design and book design became casualties of novel graphic expressions for commercial consumption, which I'm glad to see is no longer the case in the modern world -- or at least not in this generation. Agencies and Publishing Houses take great care in the advertisement of books and with their design, lest they be overlooked and create a loss in revenue.