Evolution of the Written Language + Letterforms

Evolution of the Written Language + Letterforms
Written language evolved from literal
and conceptual representations into
sophisticated systems of symbols
representing spoken sounds.
The first graphic images that evolved
into our Western system of writing
began with simple shapes that
represented a basic vocabulary of
objects and concepts—Pictograms.
Pictograms allowed communication to move from an oral language to a
written language capable of sustaining messages through time. These were
drawings of fundamental objects and ideas such as man, woman, fire, food,
and shelter, that were combined to form stories, songs, and epics, which were
cut into or painted onto rocks and called petroglyphs.

Over time, symbolic drawings were
developed to express more complex
objects and concepts, Ideograms.
The next stage in the evolution of
written language is the Phonogram.
Syllabic signs and symbols representing
primary oral sounds, either syllables
(fa-mi-ly) or basic sounds (f-a-m-i-l-y).
Although diminished in resemblance
to their original forms, the letters in
modern Western alphabets are the simplified renderings of these beginnings.
The complete system of alphabetical writing was not the achievement of one
particular culture. It is the work of several gifted cultures of the ancient world,
as the development of efficiency in writing was taking place in a number of
countries at about the same time; through trade and travel, alphabetic systems
were passed to other societies who altered form and meaning to suit their
requirements.

The Greeks then embraced the Phoenician alphabet around 1000 BCE,
continuing the evolution of the alphabet and then passed it on to the Romans.
The Romans used 2 styles of writing, the Uncial and the Semi-Uncial. Originally
invented by the Greeks in the 2nd cen. BCE and adopted by the Romans.
The Uncial was written between 2 guidelines that were 1 uncial apart
=one Roman inch.
Freely drawn forms which allowied for quicker writing because the curves
added to the stroke of the letterforms reduced the number of strokes required
to draw the letterforms.
Semi-unicials were the first phase in the evolution of the lowercase letterform,
allowing for development of ascenders and descenders.
Uncials Semi-unicials

Asian Contribution c. 2000 BCE
Papyrus was invented by the Egyptians c.3500 BCE by the Eyptians
Paper was invented c.105 BCE by Ts’Lun.
This invention deosn't reach Europe until the 1200's
Wooden movable type was invented by a Chinese alchemist, Pi Sheng, c.1040 BCE
This invention deosn't reach Europe until the 1400's
Chinese Movable Type c. 1300 BCE

The Roman capital letters in our modern alphabet, were the formal
letterforms that were carved into ancient Roman monuments and buildings to
highlight Roman achievements.
Letters were first painted onto the
facades of buildings as a template for
the stone carvers to chisel.
ABCDE
FGHIJK
LMNOP
QRSTVW
XYZ
Trajan Typface designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly
for Adobe. The design is based on the letterforms of
capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals.
Monumental Capitals, Trajan Column 114 CE
TRAJAN THE MOVIE FONT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t87QKdOJNv8&feature=player_embedded

The Development of the Serif
Two theories:
1. It was hard to create a perfect end stroke with a paintbrush so the letterers
would lift their brushes at the end of each stroke, making a serif.
2. The serif was designed as a preventive measure to keep the carved area of
the primary strokes from cracking at the ends over time.
Capitalis monumentalis or Roman square capitals were used from 2nd cen. CE
until 5th cen. CE then the Barbarians conquered Rome in 476 CE, marking the
beginning of the Middle Ages.

Medieval (Dark) Ages c.5th cen.
Lasted for 1000 years until the
Renaissance in the 15th cen.
Typographic contribution(s):
1. Illuminated manuscript
2. Classification: Blackletter
Christian church was the controlling force
and established themselves as the center
for intellectual, cultural, and educational
affairs.
Most classical anthologies and artifacts were lost during the fall of the Roman
Empire so the Church decided to create illuminated manuscripts to ensure the
knowledge from that period could endure and survive.
The manuscripts were hand written under the guidance of monastic leaders.
Ornately decorated books, generally accompanied by illustrations, and usually
filled with sacred religious writings.

Caroline (Carolingian) Minuscule 8th C. (789)—1100's
Emperor Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800 and he decreed that a
standard style of writing be used across the Holy Roman Empire as a
means of unifying his reign.
Centuries later, during the Renaissance, the Carolingian handwriting was
mistaken for the original Roman and copied as a "Classical" type style.

For 1000 years the illuminated manuscript continued to be made until the
Renaissance. The invention of metal movable type in the 15th cen. rendered
the illuminated manuscript obsolete by the 16th century.
Prior to th 15th cen. there was little to read in the Western world and many
were illiterate.
Fewer than 50,000 volumes of writing extisted in all of Europe, and were only
accessable by the Church or the wealthy.
" Renaissance Humanism is the spirit of learning that developed at the end of
the middle ages with the revival of classical letters and a renewed confidence
in the ability of human beings to determine for themselves truth and
falsehood."
Italian scholars, centered in Florence, sought to restore their lost heritage by
reexamination of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome
The central feature of Humanism was the commitment to the idea that the
ancient world (defined effectively as ancient Greece and Rome) ... was the
pinnacle of human achievement, especially intellectual achievement, and
should be taken as a model by contemporary Europeans.

During this period:
• Collapse of feudalism
• Move from rural to ubam areas
• Growing middle class of merchants and tradesmen
• More opportunity to attend schools and universities
ALL = demand for knowledge and books
Johannes Gutenberg (Mainz, Germany) 1450, started experiementing with
metal-working techniques to develop a printing technology and printed his first
typographic book, the 42-line bible in 1455.
With the invention of movable metal type came the invention of the term
typography.
The prcoess remained unchanged until Industrial Revolution 400 years later.

Gutenberg’s System for
Casting Type
A steel punch is used to stamp
an impression of the letterform
onto a softer brass matrix.
The matrix is slipped into the
bottom of the two-part type
mold, the mold is filled with
the molten alloy to cast a piece
of type.
The lead alloys cools and the
lead type is removed.

The bible was printed in Textura, a
blackletter style; similar to the
calligraphic letter style of the hand
lettered manuscripts.
Gutenberg revolutionized the
distribution of knowledge by
making it possible to produce a
large number of copies of a single
work in a relatively short amount
of time.
The Western alphabet had a need
for movable reusable type that
could be perfectly aligned.
Woodblock printing was not an
exact arrangement, this suited
the calligraphic characters of
the Orient, but not the precision
required by the Western alphabet.

The process the spread to other German cities in the 1450s, Italy in the 1460s,
and then to France and the rest of Europe.
In Italy two printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, recovered
Caroline minuscule, dating from 9th cen. Thinking they had found authentic
Roman script, they set out to synthesis the Roman writing with the currently
used blackletter from the Medieval period.
They created a more cohesive
Roman alphabet that became
a model for today’s Roman
alphabet.

Italy 1495, Francisco de Bologna, AKA Griffo,
designed and cut a typeface, still used today,
Bembo.
It later became the inspiration for Claude
Garamond to design his namesake typeface,
Garamond, in the 16th century.
1501, Griffo designed the first italic typeface,
creating a new classification, Italic.
The style is based on a slanted handwriting style called Cancellaresca Script,
utilized by scholars for its quick and informal character of writing.

By the 16th cen. 3 classifications of type:
1. Roman/Serif, which develops into Humanistic/Old Style
2. Blackletter
3. Italic
France 1500’s/16th cen.
Building on Griffo’s designs, the Roman type
style continued to evolve in France. The most
noteworthy type designer of the time was
Claude Garamond.
His letterforms were influential in ridding
Europe (except Germany) of the Gothic
(Blackletter) style, which had existed since
Medieval times.
Garamond, a beautiful, light weight, and legible typeface, achieving more
precise letter-fit and closer word spacing.
The design reflected the changes that were starting to take place in the
language of the typography. Handwriting was a lessening influence on the
typographic form, while the printing press and the letterforms created from
Gutenberg's type casting system were becoming more influential and this was
reflected in Garamond’s work.

With the design of Garamond there are now 4 classifications of type:
1. Roman/Serif
2. Blackletter
3. Italic
4. Humanistic/Old Style
In the 1600's/17th cen. there was little motivation to design any new typefaces
or attempt anything innovative related to typography because of an abundance
of typographic material, such as punches, matrices, woodblocks, and
ornaments, surviving from the 16th century.
Thus, it wasn’t until the 1700's/18th cen., during the Rococo period in France,
that new strides were made in typography.

Rococo,1700's/18th century, France
An ornate period of art, architecture and typography, a style sometimes
considered frivolous.
The 1700’s “an epoch of
spectacular typographic
originality”.
The period contributed to the
concept of a “family of fonts”
by experimenting with casting
techniques to produce fonts in
larger sizes.
Typographic contribution:
New classification, Transitional.
Increased contrast between thick
& thin strokes, sharp horizontal
serifs.

The first Transitional typeface was designed, called the Romain du Roi, by Philippe Grandjean, in 1702.
The typeface was unique because of its construction.
To create the capitals, a square was drawn and divided into a grid of 64 units,
then subdivided into 36 smaller units, for a total of 2,304 squares.
Each letter was then plotted on the grid using a combination of mathematics,
drafting, and human judgement.
The lowercase and italic letters were drawn in a similar fashion

1700's/18th century, England
In 1722, Caslon designed the first size of his typeface Caslon Old Style with
italic, establishing his reputation as a successful typeface designer.
After that, England used Caslon fonts for almost all of their printing needs.
Caslon designed strong legible typefaces that became the dominant typographic
style throughout the British Empire for over 70 years, well into the 19th cen.

Toward the end of the 1700's/18th cen.
Renewed interest and return to classical inspirations of Greek and Roman
antiquity, due in part to the cultural and political changes occurring throughout
Europe, particularly in France with French Revolution.
Disdain for anything extravagant and ornate, thus a new typographic form was
needed in place of the outdated ornate Rococo style = MODERN
Giambattista Bodoni designed the first modern typeface, BODONI
thus solidifying a new category of roman type.
1. Roman/Serif
2. Blackletter
3. Italic
4. Humanistic/Old Style
5. Modern

The basic letterforms of the modern alphabet have changed very little since
the days of ancient Rome but the appearance of written and printed letters
have evolved over time.
These variations in style are due largely to changes in the applications of
written language and the tools used to create it:
• Stone-carved letters of ancient Roman monuments
• Hand-drawn illuminated manuscripts of gothic monks
• Hand-cut wooden type used in early printing
• The advent of acid-etched metal type
• Photocomposition
• Typefaces designed for modern digital output
Each advancement has contributed to the evolution of typographic styles.

Futurism, 1909-1944, Italy
Emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the
vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general. Glorified the new
technology of the automobile, the beauty of its speed, power, and movement
Futurist Manifesto - The history of Futurism begins on the 20th of February,
1909 in Paris with the publication of the first Futurist manifesto in, Le figaro,
written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
After an opening narrative describing an exhilarating car wreck on an industrial
road, Marinetti’s manifesto offers solutions to embrace speed, war, machinery
and danger.
Sparked by his manifesto, Futurism took a modernist stance, embracing
industrialization, mechanization, and acceleration in the name of patriotism. It
was geared towards an uprooting of Italy’s allegedly sedentary mind set of the
time, and maintained that total industry, violence, and war were the cure for a
stagnating nation.

The political and cultural schisms brewing in Europe fuelled rising feelings
of anxiety and marginalization among artists and writers, and culminated in
the violence and brutality of World War II. This helps to account for the often
extreme nature of the work: the Futurists’ glorification of violence and the
Dadaists’ nihilistic anti-logic.
The typographic experimentation of the early Futurists brought about a new,
more intense and expressive language of communication, neither literary nor
graphic, but a synthesis of both.
Futurist typography was the deconstruction of language, text and typography:
“Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of
the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over
the sensibility of men.” – Luigi Russolo, the art of noise

Marinetti despised the traditional grid.
His 1912 piece CHAIRrrrrrrRR is an early
attempt at breaking down the grid.
He attempts to fight conventional rectilinear
constraints in the piece, but is seen to
ultimately work within them.
This is a result of the use of letterpress,
on which letters cast into metal blocks
are set into a strictly rectangular frame to
print. This speaks of the reliance on certain
mechanical limitations that are inherent to
industrialization.

Zang Tumb Tumb is Marinetti’s 1912-14 poem
Illustrates for his “words in liberty” concept by depicting and glorifying the
sounds and experience of war, and shifts focus to the primal violence of sounds
and images rather than any literal meaning.
Illustrates a breakdown of grid in a more fluid manner. This is a result of the
use of the process of offset lithography, which used totally grid-free plates for
reproduction rather than letterpress’ perpendicular constraints, and allowed
the creation of cut-and-paste typographic composition.

Dadaism
A movement, that began in Zurich (peaked from 1916 to 1922) among avant-garde artists
who rejected the existing culture of post-World War I Europe on the grounds
that it belonged to the same society that had produced the war.
Dada stretched the visual vocabulary of Futurism and continued to push
typography further from it traditional usage. Releasing the letterform from
traditional phonic symbolism Dada pushed the concept of the letterform as a
concrete visual shape.
The Dadaists’ pamphlets, posters, and books employed free, abstract layout, a
great mixture of type sizes and faces, and an attempt to create mood through
typography.
Dadaism. Its absurd evokes the relevant reaction. Shocking destruction of the
forms, broken, confusing - DADA is impossible to be understand.

Kurt Schwitters, Small Dada Evening poster, 1922.

Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg, Scarecrow Fairy Tale, 1925.

Fortunato Depero, 1929.