Typefaces: Mrs. Eaves italic and Superba RR Bold.

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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.

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I always wanted to make a typographic poster…  So I did.

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