art forms of great harmony and beauty
“The Phoenician alphabet was adopted by the ancient Greeks and spreak through their city-states around 1000 B.C. . . . The Greeks took the Phoenician or North Semitic alphabet and changed five consonants to vowels. . . . .
From a graphic design standpoint, the Greeks applied geometric structure and order to the uneven Phoenician characters, converting them into art forms of great harmony and beauty. The written form of Greek . . . has a visual order and balance as the letters move along a baseline in an even repetition of form and space. The letters and their component strokes are somewhat standardized because a system of horizontal, vertical, curved, and diagonal strokes is used. In the inscriptional form, the letters became symmetrical geometric constructions. . . . [M]any letterforms, including the E and M, are based on a square, A is constructed from an equilateral triangle, and the design of the O is a near-perfect circle.
Initially the Greeks adopted the Phoenician style of writing from right to left. Later they developed a writing method called boustrophedon, from the words meaning ‘to plow a field with an ox,’ for every other line reads in the opposite direction. Line one reads from right to left; then the characters do an about-face, and line two reads from left to right. . . . Finally the Greeks adopted the left-to-right reading movement that continues to this day in Western civilization.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
North Semitic writing
“While the alphabet’s inventors are unknown, Northwest semitic peoples of the western Mediterranean region—early Canaanites, Hebrews, and Phoenicians—are widely believed to be the source. The term North Semitic writing is used for early alphabetic writing found theoughout this region. Because the earliest surviving examples are from ancient Phoenicia . . . these early scripts are often called the Phoenician alphabet. During the second millennium B.C. the Phoenicians became seafaring merchants. Their sailing ships, the fastest and best engineered in the ancient world, linked settlements throughout the Medterranean region. Influences and ideas were absorbed from other areas, including Egypt and Mesopotamia. . . .
The Phoenicians absorbed cuneiform from Mesopotamia in the west and Egyptian hieroglyphics and scripts from the south. Possibly they had knowledge of Cretan pictographs and scripts and may have been influenced by them. . . .
The writing exported by the Phoenicians, a totally abstract and alphabetical system of twenty-two characters was in use by 1500 B.C.
Although North Semitic writing is the historical beginning of the alphabet, it may have descended from an earlier, lost prototype. Early alphabets branched into multiple directions, including the Phoenician alphabet that evolved further in Greece and Rome, as well as the Aramaic alphabet, which gave rise to Hebrew and Arabic writing elsewhere in the region.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
the evolution of funerary texts
“The Book of the Dead was a third phase in the evolution of funerary texts. Beginning with the pyramid of Unas (c. 2345 B.C.), the walls and passages of the pyramids were covered with the pyramid texts of hieroglyphic writings, including myths, hymns, and prayers relating to the godlike pharaoh’s life in the afterworld. This practice was followed by the coffin texts. All surfaces of the wooden coffin and/or stone sarcophagus were covered with writings and often illustrated with pictures of possessions for use in the afterlife. Thus, high officials and noblemen could enjoy the benefits of funerary texts even though the cost of a pyramid was beyond their means.
The dawning of the New Kingdom, around 1580 B.C., saw papyrus manuscripts come into use for funerary texts. Even citizens of fairly limited means could afford to have at least simple papyri to accomany them on the journey into the afterlife. From pyramid to coffin to papyri—this evolution toward cheaper and more widespread use of funerary texts paralleled the increasingly democratic and secular aspects of Egyptian life.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
papyrus, a paperlike substrate
“The development of papyrus, a paperlike substrate for manuscripts, was a major step forward in Egyptian visual communications. . . . Eight different papyrus grades were made for uses ranging from royal proclamations to daily accounting. The finished sheets had an upper surface of horizontal fibers called the recto and a bottom surface of vertical fibers called the verso. The tallest papyrus sheets measured 49 centimeters (19 inches), and up to twenty sheets would be pasted together and rolled into a scroll, with the recto side facing inward. . . .”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
The design flexibility of hieroglyphics
“Hieroglyphics consisted of pictograpms that depicted objects or beings. These were combined to deignate actual ideas, phonograms denoting sounds and determinatives identifying categories. When the early Egyptian scribes were confronted with words difficut to express in visual form, they devised a rebus, using pictures for sounds, to write the desired word. . . . At the same time they designated a pictorial symbol for every consonant sound and combination of consonants in their speech. . . . By the time of the New Kingdon this remarkably efficient writing system had over seven hundred hieroglyphs. . . .
The design flexibility of hieroglyphics was greatly increased by the choice of writing direction. One started from the direction in which the living creatures were facing. The lines could be written horizontally or vertically, so the designer of an artifact or manuscipt had four choices: left to right horizontlly; left to right in vertical columns; right to left horizontally; and right to left in vertical columns. Sometimes . . . these design possiblities were combined in one work.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
Mesopotamian cylinder seals
“Mesopotamian cylinder seals provided a forgery-proof method for sealing documents and proving their authenticity. In use for over three thousand years, these small cylinders had images and writing etched into their surfaces. When they were rolled across a damp clay tablet, a raised impression of the depressed design, which became a “trademark” for the owner, was formed. . . . Many such stones had a hollow perforation running through them so that they could be worn on a string around the neck or wrist. . . .
The widely traveled Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Babylonians each wore a cylinder seal on a cord around their wrists like a bracelet. Prized as ornaments, status symbols, and unique personal signatures, cylinder seals were even used to mark a damp clay seal on the house door when the occupants were away. . . .”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
a divine scribe
“Cuneiform was a difficult writing system to master, even after the Assyrians simplified it to only 560 signs. . . .
The general public held those who could write in awe, and it was believed that death occured when a divine scribe etched one’s name in a mythical Book of Fate.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
The highest development of cuneiform
“Around 2800 B.C. scribes turned the pictographs on their sides and began to write in horizontal rows, from left to right and top to bottom. . . . About three hundred years later, writing speed was increased by replacing the sharp-pointed stylus with a triangular-tipped one. This stylus was pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through it. . . . This innovation radically altered the nature of the writing; pictographs evolved into an abstract sign writing called cuneiform (from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”). . . .
As early scribes developed their written language to function in the same way as their speech, the need to represent spoken sounds not easily depicted arose. Adverbs, prepositions, and personal names often could not be adapted to pictographic representation. Picture symbols began to represent the sounds of the objects depicted instead of the objects themselves. Cuneiform became rebus writing, which is pictures and/or pictographs representing words and syllables with the same or similar sound as the object depicted. Pictures were used as phonograms, or graphic symbols for sounds. The highest development of cuneiform was its use of abstract signs to represent syllables, which are sounds made by combining more elementary sounds.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
early pictographs
“The early pictographs evolved in two ways: first, they were the beginning of pictorial art—the objects and events of the world were recorded with increasing fidelity and exactitude as the centuries passed; second, they formed the basis for writing. The images, where the original pictorial form was retained or not, ultimately became symbols for spoken-language sounds.
The Paleolithic artist developed a tendency toward simplification and stylization. Figures became increasingly abbreviated and were expressed with a minimum number of lines. By the late Paleolithic period, some petroglyphs and pictographs had been reduced to the point of almost resembling letters. . . .
The leap from village culture to high civilization occured after the Sumerian people arrived in Mesopotamia near the end of the fourth millennium B.C. . . .
One theory holds that the origin of visible language evolved from the need to identify the contents of sacks and pottery containers used to store food. Small clay tags were made that identified the contents with a pictograph and the amount through an elementary decimal numbering system, based on the ten human fingers.
The earliest written records are tablets from the city of Uruk. They apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns. An abudance of clay in Sumer made it the logical material for record keeping, and a reed stylus sharpened to a point was used to draw the fine, curved lines of the early pictographs.”
—Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 2006.
two great type designers
“In the eighteenth century two great type designers drew English printing, at least temporarily, out of the depths of dullness and ugliness into which it had fallen.
The first of these was the Englishman, William Caslon, whose business was casting, or “founding,” type. Like Nicolas Jenson, Caslon had the skilled eye and hand of an engraver. . . . About 1724 he designed a type that came to be known as “Caslon Old Face,” based largely on the fine letter forms of Jenson but a little less black and heavy, showing the free work of a fine artist. . . .
The other style of roman type designed in the eighteenth century, which had an even greater influence than the “old-style” of Cason for a while, was what came to be known in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as modern. Its most successful designer, perhaps, was Giambattista Bodoni, an Italian printer working at Parma. Bodoni’s modern letters have no gradual shading of thick lines or curves into thin as have the oldstyle; the thicks are very thick and black and the thins are almost hairlines. The serifs, instead of rounding gradually into the stem, are squared off at the ends of the main strokes. Bodoni’s letters make an elegant, sparkling page but not so readable as one of Caslon’s.”
—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.