Scripto. Histoire du graphisme avant la modernité.

Graphic artists, graphic designers and typographers seem to have emerged alongside the ever-complex notion of modernity, or at least alongside the movement towards a more self-aware industrialisation. This is the view of Robin Kinross, historian of typography and great defender of modernity, who places the beginnings of modern typography in the 17th century. But does this mean that we cannot talk about “graphism” before the establishment of this modernity and the practice of graphic designers and typographers designated as such? This is the untimely question that Thierry Chancogne, teacher and graphic design theorist, seeks to address by attempting to identify the moments of rupture in the long history of this discipline before it was even recognised as such. After an first phase and first movement of this ‘history of graphic design before modernity’ devoted to the age of dreams and myths, “Mûthos” (Franciscopolis, 2018), , Chancogne, who identifies three phases and five movements in this history, now presents the second movement of his second phase in some twenty chapters. This is why his entire contribution is entitled ‘History of graphic design before modernity in three phases and five movements. Second Phase. With writing. Second movement. Scripto.’ This Problemata line will draw on a wide variety of materials encountered by the author — artistic, technical, ethological, anthropological, psychological, archaeological, etc. — to consider writing with the new era of the emergence of writing and a new movement, “Scripto”. Author of the line: Thierry Chancogne