Arts & Crafts (graphic design)

Arts & Crafts began as social criticism.

The intellectual founder was John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic whose chapter On the Nature of Gothic in The Stones of Venice (1853) argued that mid-Victorian factory labour degraded the worker by separating thought from making. The argument was political, religious and aesthetic at once. Ruskin’s reader William Morris, then a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate, took the chapter as a programme.

In 1861 Morris co-founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (later Morris & Co.) with the painters Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the architect Philip Webb and others. The firm produced stained glass, furniture, wallpaper, textiles and embroidery — all hand-made, all designed by the people who made them, all sold through retail showrooms. Morris & Co. became the commercial backbone of the movement.

The movement was named in 1888, when Walter Crane and others founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London. The first exhibition (October 1888, New Gallery, Regent Street) gave the movement its public identity. Six exhibitions followed between 1888 and 1916. By the 1890s the movement had become an international current, with branches in Glasgow (Charles Rennie Mackintosh), Vienna (Hoffmann and the Werkstätte), Munich (Eckmann), Brussels (van de Velde) and the United States (Stickley, Greene & Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft community).

The graphic-design wing was effectively founded on 15 January 1891, when Morris incorporated the Kelmscott Press at his Hammersmith house. Morris had been irritated by a 1888 lecture at the Arts and Crafts Society on printing — the standard industrial books of the day were, he thought, illegible compared with their Renaissance ancestors. He commissioned Joseph Batchelor to make hand-made paper, drew his own typeface (Golden Type, derived from a 1476 face by Nicolas Jenson), and bought a hand press from the Reading firm of Albion. Between 1891 and 1898 the Kelmscott Press issued 53 books in 66 volumes, including the Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) — the movement’s masterpiece.

Morris died in October 1896. The Kelmscott Press wound up in 1898. But the model — a small private press, hand-set type, hand-made paper, custom typeface, total integration of text and ornament — was already replicating. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker founded the Doves Press in Hammersmith in 1900. C.H. St John Hornby founded the Ashendene Press in 1895. Charles Ricketts ran the Vale Press from 1896 to 1903. Lucien Pissarro ran the Eragny Press from 1894. The English private-press tradition — completely outside the industrial publishing system — produced more than five hundred books between 1891 and 1939.

The American branch was different. Daniel Berkeley Updike founded the Merrymount Press in Boston in 1893. Frederic Goudy designed Goudy Old Style (1915) and other types. Bruce Rogers worked at the Riverside Press from 1895 and designed Centaur (1914). The American figures took Morris’ principles and applied them to commercial publishing rather than to private-press limited editions; the result was a twentieth-century American book-design tradition that was handsome, well-typeset and broadly distributed.

The First World War effectively ended the movement as a living practice. The Doves Press shut down in 1916. Morris & Co. closed in 1940. The Bauhaus — itself partly a German Werkbund response to Arts & Crafts — became the new centre of design pedagogy.

Arts & Crafts had a clear set of operating principles, derived directly from Ruskin and codified by Morris, Cobden-Sanderson and Crane in lectures and essays.

“I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few or freedom for a few.” — William Morris, The Lesser Arts, 1877

Honesty of construction. A book should look like the object it is — printed sheets, sewn signatures, bound covers — not like a machine-finished commodity. Materials should be visible: rag paper, leather, vellum, hand-set metal type. Industrial finishes that disguise the underlying construction were rejected.

Hand-made over machine-made. Industrial mass production was the antagonist. The press should be operated by hand, the type set by hand, the paper made by hand. Morris was explicit that this was not a question of style but of social organisation: the worker should think while making.

Integrated design. The same designer drew the typeface, the ornamental initials, the marginalia, the illustrations and the binding. Morris drew Kelmscott’s three typefaces (Golden, Troy, Chaucer) himself. Cobden-Sanderson supervised every Doves Press page. The principle survives intact in the Bauhaus “total work of art” pedagogy.

Custom typefaces. Each press had its own typeface, designed to be set on its own press, for its own books. Golden Type (Morris, 1890), Troy Type (Morris, 1892), Chaucer Type (Morris, 1893), Doves Type (Walker / Cobden-Sanderson, 1899), Subiaco Type (Hornby, 1902), Vale Type (Ricketts, 1896). These faces reset Western typography after a century of industrial decline.

Reference to medieval and Renaissance models. Morris studied fifteenth-century Italian incunabula and revived the Jenson and Subiaco faces. Cobden-Sanderson studied Nicolas Jenson directly. The argument was that Western typography had peaked around 1490 and declined thereafter; the Renaissance models were the reference point.

Anti-industrial polemic. Morris was a committed socialist from the early 1880s. News from Nowhere (1890) is an explicit utopian-socialist novel. The movement’s social criticism was as important as its aesthetic; Morris’ lectures The Lesser Arts (1877) and Useful Work versus Useless Toil (1884) are foundational political documents as much as design texts.