Texting, typing, jotting notes with ink – we’re so used to having a written means of communication, that it’s near impossible to remember back to a time when the only way to communicate was face to face. (These days, we sometimes have the opposite problem!)
For as long as we’ve had people around, we’ve needed a way to communicate, and to record history. But where did it all start?
Forever Ago
The beginning of written human communication was with basic drawings called pictographs. These represented images you could find around you in every day life. A cow represented a cow, etc.
Over time, however, pictographs had to develop to encompass abstract ideas. Hence, the ideographs were born. Though still using pictures to communicate, these could now represent abstract ideas, such as a start for heaven. You may have seen this sort of communication with Native American and Egyptian writing – or the Chinese, who still use this method today.
Sounding it Out
It was the Egyptians that first began to represent sounds as images in their hieroglypics. The Phoenicians further developed this idea, creating their own alphabet entirely composed of “letters” or pictures that represent sounds.
As time passed, letters were refined. The Greeks added vowels, while the Romans refined the letters, and resurrected letters the Greeks had discarded (such as F, Q, and Z). The Romans also refined letter forms with serifs, as well as thick and thin lines.
Finishing Touches
Scribes eventually developed lower case letters, since they needed a simpler form of the letter to help them get their meaning across faster.
Strangely, spacing between words wasn’t common until the eleventh century, and punctuation marks that we now use everyday (and sometimes use solely to express emotions such as confusion (?) excitement (!) or silence (…)) weren’t standard until the 16th century when the printing press was established.
Now
Now letters are so universal and standardized that we have dozens of different types, from serif, to sans serif, italics, cursive, etc. To learn more about the modern history of typography as well as how and why new letter forms were created, check out this video that sums up Typography’s hundred years of history in just five minutes!
What’s your favorite Typeface?
