In this lecture, I learned the history of type and unpicked some of its origins. I discovered some of the factors that impact language such as culture, society, aesthetics and technology creating the alphabet as we know it today. Typography is the art, technique, composition, arrangement and appearance of printing with moveable type. It is the craft of endowing human language with a durable form. Type is what language looks like. There are many chronologies surrounding type; it doesn't just exist now. We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present. Type is a modernist obsession, before which there were only a small amount of systems at that a font could be created and look like. Microsoft Word has a whole range of fonts on offer and there is a reason why we have these set typefaces. They haven't just happened or appeared, there is an entire history of the development of these fonts and why they look like they do. Chronologies is an underlying theme of the next two lectures. They are not necessarily linear, but it is beneficial to have an informed awareness and understanding of where things came from in order to shape the way they are perceived for the future. We can start to develop, redefine, innovate and change what has come before.
For any language to exist, whether text-based, spoken or visual, there has to be an agreement between a group of people that one thing stands for another. It is not something that is individual but something that will impact a whole society or a culture. For example, if Victorian people babbled in a certain way, not understood to the masses, they would have been ostracised and placed in an asylum. The sender and receiver need to understand each other using the tools of visual language to communicate ideas.
Type is what language looks like. When we talk about type we do not mean typography as an isolated form; we mean text-based language and its visual interpretation. Type is about language. It has pace, tone and weight. Type in a contemporary setting can be read in a whole range of different ways as we are the most technologically advanced generation. Type and typography are used interchangeably but mean different things. Typography is the mechanical process of words whether that be a print-based or screen-based delivery. It is the organisation and layout of letters. Typography is for the graphic designers. Type, however, is applicable to all creatives as it is about enhancing legibility and readability whether that is through image or moving image. Type will form a consideration in my practice.
We have physical evidence for the beginnings of written language charted and documented throughout our history. What began as a purely oral tradition began to form written words. The written word endures but the spoken word disappears, meaning that languages could have existed but we only know what has been documented. The earliest representation of language is hieroglyphics - this doesn't mean they were necessarily the first written words, but they were the first to be recorded. These were the hunter-gatherers where text-based language formed as an agricultural sector emerging through acknowledgment of commerce and trade. Receipts were needed to record transactions. People settled down, built towns, cities, cultures and societies. Later language became more descriptive. Type was speech made visible. We began with phonetics and words beginning with certain letters. Za meaning Zayan represented weapon which grew to become to letter Z in the alphabet. Derivation happened across every written language. It is complex, multidimensional and directional. The are histories and chronologies depending on location - the Occident has an entire different history of language as opposed to the Orient.
Occidental - West
Oriental - East
As societies blended, settled down and formed a language of trade and commerce Occidental alphabets formed. Writing developed from hieroglyphs to Proto-sinaitic scripts to Cuneiform, Ugaritic and the Phoenician alphabet. Pictograms were used as phonograms representing the first sounds of words moving into signs representing sounds. Descriptive images of objects and pictures moved through to more defined symbols which were understood throughout cultures and countries. The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 where multiple languages (Egyptian, Demotic and Greek) were carved and all alluded to the same thing. It was the same statement, same words and same meaning written in 3 different languages. It showed us that language had root origins through trade, travel, social and political development, wars and negotiations. The 3 major languages of the time already were conforming to a translated set of ideals and notified us of the element of translation.
In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet which was adapted from the Phoenician. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, is a further development of the Greek. True alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels positioned on an equal basis. The Phoenician Alef began as a symbol of an Ox head, developing into the Greek Alpha, Roman Ah and, eventually, letter A. We now have a strong and robust set of symbols to communicate visual language where people develop literacy and an understanding of words. It is strong and hard to break. The system is so ingrained in our language and literacy levels, socially and culturally, that we have the ability to play with this in a range of different ways. It isn't something that exists within isolation. We can develop a whole range of ways to break, remake and adjust those letter forms and still maintain a meaning.
According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without a problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the word as a whole.
As well as the development of the alphabet and language, the way in which the symbols looked physically was a factor in how it was communicated and distributed. This was effected by the location, the time period and the tools that were available. In Babylonian, for example, lines and triangles were pressed into clay or were chiseled into stone. The tools to make marks affected what the symbol would look like. In the Orient of Japan, China, Korea and Arabia, the production methods were different. It was entirely brush based, paper and inks were invented and thick sable brushes provided different ways of working and producing. For the early Bibles, bone nibs found in quills were used on deer skin to create letter forms as a production method which affected the quality of the line. Technological products, processes and distribution came together when Johannes Gutenberg's work on the printing press came to prominence in approximately 1436. In the West we moved away from the written word and into block type in a moveable process. Through travel, war, upheavals and developments, the process was brought forward and Gutenberg capitalised on that.
Type became a physical thing and a whole series of typefaces developed from that physical production of type. Hot metal type, letter press and wooden type affected the way type was presented and looked aesthetically. Suddenly ten pages could be produced in an instant, looking exactly the same, for mass distribution. The lineage of typefaces we now have represents 400 years worth of historical development that we have at our disposal. Modernist type and classical type can become commodities across a range of social, political and cultural contexts. Type can be categorised into different tones and voices.
Thanks to the Elementary Education Act, in 1870 by William Foster, it became mandatory to go to school and learn to read and write. Before this, reading was only available to a privileged few within the upper classes. Production methods changed, written words were changed into mass production of newspapers and books as we wanted things to read. Physical writing of words became less and less formal, becoming a hobby instead. Commerce and business came through mass production using printing presses and type writers presenting a more formal representation.
After the First World War, the role of the visual communicator changed - especially within the Bauhaus institution - where the drawing together of the arts and industrialisation began to form. There was a fundamental influence of industrialisation on design. Design became a discipline and the hand-crafted was being informed by mass production and the industrialisation of the West.
Type has a whole range of ways in which it could be distributed and communicated allowing us to be sophisticated. The principles of form follows function resonate out into our culture today. We navigate our life using words - language and the written word is the method of how we communicate with the world around us. From this point forward I need to look at not what is but what I believe type to be and explore what it can become.
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