1 Typography in Graphic Design Typography is a word that has its origins in the old Greek language; typos means form and graphe means writing in Greek. So typography is a technique and an art in the same time that helps us to communicate visually our language. In order to understand typography we have to know about typeface, point size, line length, leading, tracking, kerning. Therefor I will give a short description of these terms, bellow: • Typeface is a set of characters that have a similar design. They are so many typefaces existing on the market today and new ones are being developed continuously. The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design and the designers are called type designers. In the world of digital typography, which is so much developed today, the type designers are also called font designers or font developers. • Point size • Line length is the width occupied by a block of typeset text; it is measured in inches, picas and points. The text inside the line can be flush left (aligned to the left margin) and ragged right, flush right and ragged left or justified – all lines are equal in length and the text is aligned along both the left and right margin. • Leading is the distance between the baselines of successive lines of type. In our days, especially in word processing software, leading is known as “line spacing” or “interline spacing”. • Tracking means adjusting the space between groups of letters. • Kerning means adjusting the space between pairs of letters. • Letterform means the shape of a letter; also means the “study and design of individual letters”. Letterforms are designed for metal print or computer. The origin of letterform In the ancient time, people used pictures to transmit their messages or to communicate. They are called pictograms. A series of pictures found a couple of thousand years ago BC demonstrate that. 2600-1900 BC Writings from Indus Valley civilization The earliest script in India so far known is the Indus Valley pictographic script. Over 4000 symbol bearing seals have been discovered in the Indus Valley. 2 After a while, the pictograms were replaced by the ideographs. These are the symbols that represent an idea, a picture or a group of pictures. They were used especially by the Native Americans and Egyptians. Some say that Chinese alphabet is based on ideographs or pictographs. But this is wrong because most characters contain phonetic parts too. Therefore it is recognised today that Chinese characters evolved from “earlier form of hieroglyphs. For many years people used to communicate their ideas by drawing pictures called “pictograms”. “A San, or Bushman, pictographs found in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana. Some of the paintings have been dated as 24,000 years old, making this one of the oldest such sites yet discovered. 300,000 BC – 50,000 BC Paleolithic 70,000 BC – African Python God 70,000 BC – Python Worship 70,000 BC – African religion Predates Hinduism 38,000 BC – 32,000 BC tusk 3 In South Africa, in the remote Ngamiland region of Botswana, it was found the oldest cult object. This was a “mysterious rock” that looked like “the head of a huge python” and was “six meter long” by two-meter tall rock. On it they discovered also three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made. Hieroglyphs were first introduced by Egyptians and they represents objects, ideas but also sounds. Egyptian hieroglyphs typical of the Graeco-Roman period, sculpted in Relief. Glyphs: owl, viper, 3-strokes (plural), 'bread bun', cloth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyph 4 In Greek, hieroglyph means “sacred carving” as the characters were in craved in stones. Hieroglyphics are found on the wells’ caves, inside pyramids, crypts, burial chambers, on papyrus scrolls. It is said that the hieroglyphics were used in the Ancient Egypt for more than 3,000 years. However, they were difficult to make and learn and because of this, mainly royalty, scribes, priest and politicians used them. In the 1st century A.D. the hieroglyphics weren’t used any more. In 1799, during the Napoleon’s reign, his army found near Alexandria, in a pace called Rosetta, a broken piece of rock with carved text written in 3 different languages, but meaning the same thing. Two of those languages were Egyptian languages scripts-hieroglyphic and demotic (a cursive hieroglyphic style of writing) and one in classical Greek. This Rosetta Stone was created in 196 BC and not long after it was discovered by the French, the English took it to their country in 1802. Today it can be seen at the British Museum in London. The british scientist Thomas Young and the French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion were stydying the hieroglyphics craved on this stone, trying to decipher the principles of hieroglyphs writing. This stone is 114.4 cm, 72.3 cm wide and 27.9 cm thick, weighing almost 760 kg. It was supposed to be initially of granite or basalt but today they say it is made of granodiorite of a dark grey-pinkish colour. Image Rosetta stone at the British Museum London Image Rosetta stone close up 5 • Greek Alphabet “Below is a table listing the Greek letters, as well as their forms when romanized. The table also provides the equivalent Phoenician letter from which each Greek letter is derived. Pronunciations transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet 6 The Greek alphabet is over 2500 years old and it was borrowed from Phoenicians. While Greeks were trading with Phoenicians, they saw them writing things down and thought that was very clever so they decided to add a couple of vowels to the Phoenicians alphabet and start using it themselves. This is how the Greeks started their written language. They have left us wonderful fables, myths and legends, huge epics, stories and plays. They used to write to each other letters to share their daily life. What we use today from the Greek alphabet are the vowels. Even the word “alpha-bet” is made up of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. In our times, people changed the Greek alphabet so the letters we use today do not look the same as the one of the Greek alphabet and they are pronounced in a different way too. The order of letters is also different from the one of the Greek alphabet. Look at the picture bellow: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_Greek Facts about the Evolution of Alphabets (from “History of the Alphabet” taught by Prof. Robert Fradkin at University of Maryland) • The evolution of the Cuneiform character set “Sumerian pictures evolved into syllabic symbols used by many languages for almost two thousands years before the Phoenicians developed the single-sound symbols we know as an alphabet. “The cuneiform script underwent considerable changes over a period of more than two millennia. The image below shows the development of the sign SAG "head". Stages: 1. shows the pictogram as it was drawn around 3000 BC 2. shows the rotated pictogram as written around 2800 BC 3. shows the abstracted glyph in archaic monumental inscriptions, from ca. 2600 BC 7 4. is the sign as written in clay, contemporary to stage 3 5. represents the late 3rd millennium 6. represents Old Assyrian ductus of the early 2nd millennium, as adopted into Hittite 7. is the simplified sign as written by Assyrian scribes in the early 1st millennium, and until the script's extinction. Cuneiform tablet from the Kirkor Minassian collection in the US Library of Congress, ca. 24th century BC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform A list of Sumerian deities, ca. 2400 BC • The evolution of The Phoenician character set from the Prote-Sinaitic glyphs There are the pictographs found in the Sinai peninsula, ca. 1500 BC and are assumed to be the source of the sound symbols developed several centuries later by the Phoenicians. A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to Ba'alat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l bclt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bro nze_Age_alphabets 8 • The evolution of The Greek character set from its Phoenician roots 1. The eventual evolution of the Arabic Character set from its Phoenician roots 2. Not pictured are the developments of Aramic and Nabatean, which led to the modern Arabic script. • The Phoenician characters, which is Greek rotated 90 degrees, or the non- symmetrical characters that flipped horizontally when the direction of Greek switched from left to right. 9 • The evolution of the Square Aramaic/Hebrew character set from the Phoenician character set What we call square Hebrew certainly *was* the Aramaic script. http://www.ancientsudan.org/images/14_articles_ElephantinePa pyrusCol6cmh.gif The Hebrew alphabet is a descendant of the Aramaic alphabet, which is itself a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/22/the-beauty- of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-part-2/ 10 • The evolution of the Modern Cyrillic character set from the Greek character set Cyrillic script spread throughout the East and South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as the Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed hereafter. The early Cyrillic alphabet АБВ Г ДЕ ЖЅ Z З И К Л МНО П Р СТ Ȣ Ѹ І ФХѾЦЧ ШЩЪꙐЬ ѢꙖѤЮѦ ѪѨѬѠѺѮ ѰѲ Ѵ Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script • The evolution of the Latin character set ( http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html ) Some scientist said that Greek adopted the Phoenician alphabet at the beginning of the 8th century B.C.