Tag: typography

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Class Recap: History of Letterform

• There are many different typefaces or fonts available for use. As the designer your will be responsible for selecting the typeface or font, the point size, the linespace (also known as leading). Typography is practiced by typesetters, graphic designers, art directors and even graffiti artists.
• How is letterform studied? Through epigraphy, paleography, and calligraphy.
• Letterform means a letter’s shape. It is also an synonym of the word glyph. Glyph = a specific way a letter or character is drawn. Let’s take a look at the evolution of letterform to understand how we got to our modern day 26 letter alphabet.
• Pictographs were used as the earliest known form of writing, examples having been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia from before 3000 BC.
• Ideographs are symbols that represent an ideal rather than just a word. Eventually, there were so many combinations of symbols that it became a problem to memorize them all. The term “ideogram” is used to describe logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.
• The evolution of our 26 letter alphabet—Phoenician alphabet, Greek alphabet, Roman alphabet.
• One of the reasons the capital letters didn’t have curves is because the writings were carved into stone or other hard surfaces.
• Originally, alphabets were only written as capital (majuscule) letters. Writing quickly with the pen is caused the letters to take on a curved shape and that is how small (minuscule) letters developed.
• The early writings of the Greeks and Romans had no punctuation—the words either ran together or were sometimes separated by a dot or dash.
• Punctuation was formalized with the rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries.

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