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.