Johannes Gutenberg and the Printing Press

The earliest dated printed book known is the "Diamond Sutra", printed in China in 868 CE. However, it is suspected that book printing may have occurred long before this date.

In 1041, movable clay type was first invented in China. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith and businessman from the mining town of Mainz in southern Germany, borrowed money to invent a technology that changed the world of printing. Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press with replaceable/moveable wooden or metal letters in 1436 (completed by 1440). This method of printing can be credited not only for a revolution in the production of books, but also for fostering rapid development in the sciences, arts and religion through the transmission of texts.

Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Centre, Wisconsin in 1867 and died in Phoenix, Arizona in 1959. Frank Lloyd Wright is widely viewed as the foremost American architect of the 20th century. He designed more than a thousand buildings during his career.
Born in the Midwest, he spent much of his professional life there, though he also practised in California, New York and Japan. He married his first wife in 1889 and had six children. An irascible personality meant his life was peppered with personal scandal and financial worry.Furniture was integral to Wright’s design philosophy. He believed that architecture, interiors and furnishings must arise from the same conceptual principles

This chair is personally my favorite chair I could find online this is because I like the way the back of it curves in with the seat. The negative spacing on the back of the chair makes it a decorative piece around the home when no one is sitting on it as well as a comfortable seat for those who wish to use it. Detail to base has proven effective as it portrays itself as a comfy device although the hard back contradicts the idea of comfiness when in actual fact is more decorative than comfort related. I understand the concept to be of a clever idea although don’t think the biomorphic shape relates to my more rectilinear style. 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (7 June 1868 – 10 December 1928) was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. He was a designer in the post-impressionist movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had considerable influence on European design. He was born in Glasgow and he died in London.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh was born at 70 Parson Street, Glasgow, on 7 June 1868, the fourth of 12 children and second son of William and Margaret Mackintosh. He attended Reid's Public School and the Allan Glen's Institution. In 1890 Mackintosh was the second winner of the Alexander Thomson Travelling Studentship, set up for the "furtherance of the study of ancient classic architecture, with special reference to the principles illustrated in Mr. Thomson’s works.

This is the chair I think was the best I could find online the reason being the tall back to it and there being no arms, looks like it was made for a higher class person.This high-back chair is one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's best-known designs. The parts are carefully shaped so that they alter in plan or section: most extraordinary are the back legs which are rectangular in plan at the base and then curve and taper upwards until they are circular in plan at the top. An explanation of the chair's appearance and design sources is not simple

Michael Craig-Martin

Michael Craig-Martin (born 28 August 1941, Dublin, Ireland) is a conceptual artist and a painter. He is particularly noted for his influence over the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught.
Micheal Craig martin uses very bold colors and simple shapes and objects to create a complex image because all the objects are bright colors and are placed either on top of each other or close and most of the objects are not drawn to a realistic scale the image below shows what i'm talking about.
Through researching this artist i realized that Micheal uses allot of chairs in his work, however this image is my personal favorite out of all of his work because i like the way the colors complement each other and that none of the objects are painted in a realistic way, Its a classic Micheal Craig Martin image.

Certainly we see that in the way that the alphabet comes into being in the Mediterranean region within the 1700 BC period. Though writing systems exist in the ancient Middle East, in the 3000 to 2700 BC period, that’s when we see the emergence of hieroglyphics and cuneiform systems, the alphabet itself was formed out of trade route activity about a 1000 years later. There’s a wonderful bit of research by a British archaeologist named Flinders Petrie, from the early twentieth century, in which he actually traced the movement of the various symbols and signs that come to constitute the alphabet through that region. He argues that they are simply a limited set of encoded elements that become agreed upon because they’re relatively simple, they’re easy to make, and they can be made in a lot of different materials. They function well enough to be traded in between different language systems and different cultural systems. He really sees the alphabet coming about partly because of trade, mercantile reasons, and other functions within that particular domain The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used forSemitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium B.C. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed inAncient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptianhieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Mainly through Phoenician and Aramaic, two closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BC, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia. Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads", and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while in an abjad each symbol usually stands for a consonant. In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from the Greek.

Jamie Reid

 (born 1947) is an English artist and anarchist with connections to the Situationists. His work, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note, came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK. His best known works include the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and the singles "Anarchy in the UK", "God Save The Queen" (based on a Cecil Beaton photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, with an added safety pin through her nose and swastikas in her eyes, described by Sean O'Hagan of The Observer as "the single most iconic image of the punk era"), "Pretty Vacant" and "Holidays in the Sun"

He was educated at John Ruskin Grammar School in Croydon. With Malcolm McLaren, he took part in a sit-in at Croydon Art School.

Reid produced a series of screen prints in 1997, the twentieth anniversary of the birth of punk rock. Reid has also produced artwork for the world music fusion band Afro Celt Sound System

Jamie Reid created the ransom-note look used with the Sex Pistols graphics while he was designing Suburban Press, a radical political magazine he ran for five years
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