Research: Victoriana!

As a quick summary, the word Victoriana is used to describe design, furniture/fashion etc that was designed in, or is designed to represent the Victorian time period (1837 - 1901) and remind people of the general style that was of that period - e.g. the dresses, scrolls tainted with ink in calligraphic writing and smartly dressed men in top hats. info from

The Victoriana design style is very similar to Steampunk, just with a less metallic/industrial/steam engines/robotic look etc. Here are some examples I found on http://designspiration.net/tag/victorian.

Both of these examples are very text heavy and very sparse with their colouring  In the Victorian era there were no colour photographs or film, so in this way these designs represent that and what someone my age may think of and relate to with the Victorian era.

The text features a lot of serifs, and some is in a "medieval" style. The large "ears" off of the N and D in the 2nd example portray a fancy, elegant and typical "victorian" look.

The alignment and shape of the text is different in both. In the first example it is designed so it is displayed as a banner - in Illustrator it would be positioned along a path - and it is evenly spaced to create a mirrored effect, which again makes the design look neat and elegant (combined with the swirls and flowers coming off of the banner design). In the 2nd example, the text is aligned in a "justified" style so each edge of each line is in line, so create a column of text - this is commonly used in newspapers. And then within this there is use of, what it is called in Photoshop, Text Warping, combined with the justified alignment and a bit of experimenting. You can see on the left how the words "Todays specials" are warped, and the word "Bright" has been warped to fill the gap, with the rest of the text following to create even spacing and alignment.

I did some more research into Victoriana design and found some advertisement posters from that time. To the left is an advertisement by Brooke's Soap, advertising their product. The first thing I notice is the lack of saturated colour and the large image that takes up most of the page. The image of the woman and the small child looks relatively realistic, and is framed by a description of the product and a title. No part of the woman and child that are featured is covered in text, so they are clear to see and from this the target audience is clear - Mothers. The creamy white border frames the advertisement, with a quote and some info at the very bottom in a black that contrasts it.

The image of the mother and child is of an obvious "old" style photograph that is not in colour. Based on the images I've already analysed I would say that this is a general thing in a lot of Victoriana design. Its not necessarily all grey, black and white, but I haven't seen many works that contain really bright colouring - compared to a style like Pop Art.

Main things I noticed about Victoriana

• Typography is very prominent, and the majority of fonts contain Serifs and have "ears" (e.g. the large swirls off of the 'N' in the 2nd example. There seems to be a running theme in this style of typography.
• There seems to be a theme of stacking words one on top of the other, so it reads in a column.
• Colours are not intense, and borders (particularly of lighter, creamy-white colours) are common to frame the image. The borders provide a sense of elegance which is true of the Victorian era and provide a place for other information to be written in. 
• Real images of people - have not seen many "cartoon"/"animated" style images.
• A lot of text means generally there's quite a lot of information on posters.
• Logos are quite large and obvious (e.g. "brooke's soap")