Book of Hours
The Book of Hours is a personal prayer set of books that was very popular in the Middle Ages because it organized religious information through the means of calendars, illustrations, decorated initials, prayers, etc. These visual elements were designed to help guide the reader through understanding the book. The Book of Hours was owned by a woman named Collette, and what made her book so unique was the inclusion of more content centered around women than in typical written manuscripts. This content included prayers to the Virgin Mary, female saints on the calendars, and the Hours of St. Catherine, all depicting scenes starring women. This suggests that personal interests or key features of a women's identity were adapted in order to present information included in a manuscript, emphasizing the transformation created by women over time throughout graphic design.
One thing that I took away from the readings this week was that information graphic design existed before the printing press began mass producing everything, people didn't really call it that, but it still existed. Manuscripts were created in order to organize a mass amount of data and information in a way that becomes easy for the general population to understand. In the Book of Hours specifically, the use of visual elements such as the inclusion of hierarchy, color, illustrations, calendars, and decorative initials helped create differences between the pieces of information in order to guide the reader towards a state of understanding. The organization of the book connected information to the hours that prayers were read, correlating imagery to timekeeping. To me, this places emphasis on the creation of infographics with true functions aside from decorative imagery.
This example connects to my semesterly research question about how femininity shapes women's personal interests and how those interests have redefined graphic design. I find it interesting that Collette's manuscript curates information to specifically depict women and connect to female religious figures. It makes me wonder what medieval designers chose to emphasize in their artworks and if having a female dominated audience influenced what they chose to include. In this particular book, her interests and personal identity seem to have shaped the content displayed that ended up being both informational and visual. To me, this shows an early version of a theme that is still relevant in graphic design today, that the interests of the audience or the created can influence what information gets communicated and how it is visually designed with purpose.
