Impulse

As an assign­ment in my typog­ra­phy class, we were asked to cre­ate an alpha­bet essen­tially from scratch. Each of us cre­ated a list of words begin­ning with each of the phonemes of the 26 latin char­ac­ters, then cre­ated pic­tograms of each. Then, emu­lat­ing a few thou­sand years of cal­li­graphic evo­lu­tion in my sketch­book, I mor­phed these pic­tograms into an upper & lower case alpha­bet. Then, just to see how it looks on the page, we each wrote a page in our new script, com­plete with fancy drop cap.

Here’s my alpha­bet & page. It looks like greek to me! The vari­ety of styles in the class was amaz­ing – some looked like medieval black­let­ter, some ara­bic, some egypt­ian. Mine was one of the least reg­u­lar of the bunch – prob­a­bly more to do with my barely devel­oped draw­ing and cal­lig­ra­phy skills than anything.

It was a very fun exer­cise that really taught me a lot about alpha­bet devel­op­ment. For instance, I had never really noticed that the Latin alpha­bet is strongly biased towards ver­ti­cal char­ac­ters: All cap­i­tals are gen­er­ally the same height, as are lower case (and ascen­ders and descen­ders are all uni­form in height). So, you can’t have a wide & thin char­ac­ter in the alpha­bet – it’ll look more like punc­tu­a­tion than a let­ter. If you make that char­ac­ter the same height as the oth­ers, it’ll look enor­mous because of it’s width.