Light & Engineering Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 4-9, 2015 Svetotekhnika No. 3, 2015, pp. 31-35 THE HISTORY OF FORMING VISUAL-COMMUNICATIVE COMPONENTS OF A NIGHT CITY LIGHT MEDIUM Marina A. Silkina MArhI (SA), Moscow E-mail: smakmv@mail.ru Abstract The history of development of light and information illumination is considered, its separation into navigation, commercial and social lighting is traced. <...> The importance of its infl uence on forming a lightand-colour medium of a city is analysed. <...> Keywords: city medium, light-and-colour medium, visual communications, light-and-information illumination, light advertising, orientation, navigation visual-communicative systems The first attempts of designing city illumination as a comprehensive system can be traces to the 1960s and ‘70s. <...> Precisely during this period, the principles of the light-and-colour arrangement of the architectural medium, meeting functional and aesthetic requirements, were substantiated. <...> The fi rst devices for city illumination in Russia were gas street lanterns and number lanterns on houses (Fig. 1). <...> They provided functional and information (navigation) illumination of streets in the middle of the 19th century. <...> Later, light became a part of outdoor advertising, very quickly becoming a dominant feature of nighttime cities and outshining the functional and navigation illumination because of its luminance and dynamics. <...> In the latter half of the nineteenth century, following gas lanterns for street illumination, in St. 4 Petersburg, number lanterns with matte glass and black fi gs. appeared. <...> A requirement for advertising arises in Russia during Peter’s reform period. <...> And the development of this type of visual communication began in the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries [3, p. 13–15]. <...> Initially, advertising information was distributed using applied graphics facilities, the main forms of which were engravings and cheap popular prints. <...> Russian signboards were based, to a large extent, on the medieval European tradition. <...> The fi rst original signboards arose during the reign of Catherine II, with the appearance Fig. 1. <...> A number lantern, St. Petersburg, late 19 th – early 20 th century (illustration source: www.photoarchive.spb.ru) Light & Engineering of shop banners [4, p. 5–6]. <...> In the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no luminous signboards <...>