19th Century Graphic Design

Advertising in the 19th century

 This advertising flier from 1806 is for a traditional medicine called Kinseitan. Display in the Edo Tokyo Museum.

This is a 19th-century advertising poster for the hydrotherapic baths of Bagnoles de l'Orne (France).

This is a playbill for Perham's Opera Vocalists, 1856.

This poster from the second half of the 1880s advertises for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, advertising "Miss Annie Oakley, the peerless lady wing-shot".

Victorian posters

This is poster created for advertising Oxbridge Fair 1878. Typically with all examples of the Victorian era advertisements there is a mixture of different type faces. The use of large scale type and bold slab serifs in combination with the mixture of black and red, makes the image really yell at the audience. 

The Oxbridge uses Antique with a drop shadow, this is used multiple times in the poster, 'fair' again is  the Antique typeface. The poster also uses Caslon's English two line Egyptian and Thorne's Fat Face Roman. This poster uses classic strong contrasting colours and a mixture of Victorian typefaces to create a poster with the intent of yelling louder than its competitors. 

This poster again is a brilliant example of the communication methods of the 19th century. Key points are highlighted with large scale type, this draws the attention of the viewer to read the key promotional points such as price.

Again there a mixture of typefaces, and sizes the designer has used Fat Face Roman & Antique typefaces. The poster has been printed on basic paper in basic black its a low cost poster, probably so to be produced on a mass scale. 

The printing technology

      Lithography is a mechanical planographic process (printing from a flat surface, or plane) Water absorbing slabs were cut and made smooth the design would then be drawn into them.  Greasy ink would be applied to the design areas and the remaining are would be treated with gum arabic, the image would be transferred to paper pressed onto to the stone.

Mezzotint methods made printing images and text easier and with equal quality.

Powered lithograph machines were introduced in 1851, this is when metal plates started to emerge and replace limestone slabs. 

The first half of 19th century saw the boom in advertising typefaces inspired styles used by sign writers, British foundries led the way creating new types, this lead to positive use and massive amounts of competition. The designs of the posters can be seen as over crowded. 

Though metal type available the first type-casting machine didn't exist until 1838 before this it was created using a ladle into a mould. 

The Victorian age saw inks starting to be created through chemical combinations, where as before they had been produced from organic resources. 

The paper came from a French patented in 1799 the machine was used from 1803. In1850 Friedrich Keller created a machine that produced paper from pulp, however it wasn't of good quality. 1853 Hugh Burgess developed the production of paper from pulp by using chemicals to digest the paper, different chemicals improved this technology through out the century.