OUAN 401: Context of practice- lecture 3 : History of type ( Part 1 )

During this lecture , Fred introduced us to brief history of type spanning from 3200 BC to 1999 AD, which began with redefining what type is. Typography according to the dictionary can be translate as an organisation of letter forms. Type , for a more broader term , can be seen in 3 very close but distinctive way , first of which is what language looks like, second is speech made visible and the third and what I can relate more to in a designer mindset , is the craft of endowing language with a visual form. Ironically enough , before this lecture I'd always view typography as a form of producing images using letter forms ( which is what I did for my A-level typography project ) , not the other way around. When you think about it though , typography and letters truly are visualisations of a language and how they sound. As in my case , Vietnamese uses a Latin alphabet , but with the additional phonetic markings , for example ,  a has  Á, À , Ả , Ã ,Ạ. This might be a bit tricky to get across , but when you say it , the marking really makes sense , Á being a raised pitch so it leans forward while À is lower pitch. So it was really interesting to think about how other languages makes sense in the minds of the people who speak to them and to see for effective a visualisation the type of that language is .

After that came a brief history . We learned that trade played a huge part in developing and studying languages , this was demonstrated through the Rosetta Stone ( which I swear , I though it was a made-up thing for Final Fantasy before this ! )

                

That size difference !

Although probably the most interesting part was seeing the evolution of letters and the introduction of some of the classic fonts that we take for granted now, moving from the straight forward pictograms of ancient Egypt to the modern Latin alphabet.I still don't understand how an ox head was turned into a Roman A , but hey , it made visual sense , and if that was good enough for the ancients , then who am I to argue 

Seeing how the materials that are used to create type can also influence the visual form of the type is also interesting , such as how cuneiform was engrave on clay tablets and stones , so its has a harder form , while Arabic and Chinese being written using paper and brushes are softer and more curvy . Then there was the Latin alphabet and the printing press with its uniformity and standardisation , all very fascinating