Part 4: Reserach -The history of printing

The woodblock printing is technique which originated from China and was later widespread throughout the East Asia. It is considered as beginning of world print culture. This technique was used for printing images, text or patterns on textile, and after a while, they began to print on paper too.

Neat hand copy script on thin transparent paper was stuck on thick smooth wooden block which is then carefully carved and coated with ink. This technique was revolutionary and marked the beginning of the printing era although it has apparent drawbacks. First of all, it required so much work and material, it wasn’t easy to store all those blocks and it was very difficult to correct mistakes. However it was enabled to create a hundreds of copy which was very valuable at that time.

Movable type, as a system of printing, emerged in China as a more practical technique comparing to woodblock print and was shortly after adopted in Korea where was made the first extant movable metal print book Jikji in 1337. Just as with woodblock print technique, this appeared as something expensive and difficult because it required a lot of effort to create metal tablets and to store them. It also wasn’t practical because of Chinese language system which has so much characters.

Speaking of Europe and its alphabet, situation was less complicated and movable type system was more convenient. The fact that alphabet has a limited numbers of characters eased this process so the first movable type in Europe was invented around 1450 by Johannes Guttenberg, a German blacksmith, goldsmith printer and publisher. This system was based on matrix and hand mould where he used the same components that are still in use today. This technique was proved to be more durable that woodblock printing and letters was more uniform which was a base for creating fonts. After the introduction of movable type printing by Gutenberg and William Caxton, this technique was widespread across the Europe to Italy where everything got a new sense through the period of Renaissance. These new Roman typeface made a base for modern fonts.

Part 4: Research - History of alphabet

Typography is a crucial part of graphic design which essential role is to make spoken language visible. The importance of typography lays in the fact that it communicates to a viewers both in written and visual language.

History of typography is strongly related to history of language, writing and printing development. Writing symbols proceeded from ideographic to logographic to phonetics.

The earliest known form of creating spoken language visible were through pictograms. Those were the series of drawing objects which together had formed the messages. Pictograms are still in use nowadays especially in some non literate cultures in Africa, America, and Oceania. It is also considered as an art form such as Rock art of a Chumash people, part of native American history of California.

Ideogram is symbol which represents idea or concept. They were used by Native Americans and Egyptians. In southern China, Naxi people use Dongba symbols which are pictographic glyphs and without Geba decoration are good example of ideogram as well as pictogram. Ideograms are still in use today. A good example is No Smoking sign. Their purpose is to convey the meaning of the certain message which is the same in any language. The cigarette is actually pictogram while red circle with bar represents the general symbol for something that is forbidden.

Ideograms are often used to describe logographs which represent the word or a morpheme. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and Sumerian cuneiform are all based on logographic writing system.

Sumerians started to experiment with writing at fourth millennium BC in Mesopotamia. In the beginning they wrote pictograms by carving it into soft clay. They soon started to developed symbols for something that was more abstract, so the simple pictograms was accompanied with a pictures that represented sounds as well so the Sumerian cuneiform comprised approximately 1500 pictograms.







Image above represents early Sumerian Cuneiform which comprised simple pictograms. With further development Cuneiform became more abstract and this example bellow shows Proto-Cuneiform which was actually some kind of transition between simple pictographic form and later more abstract forms.




The influence of Sumerian Cuneiform is still felt today. Their conquerors adopted Cuneiform signs and this form of writing was in use until the 5th century AD.

Chinese is an example of the language where picture or a grapheme represent an object or an idea. The advantage of this form is that the different Chinese dialects which are spoken differently stay the same in the written form.

Egyptian hieroglyphs represent combination of ideograms with alphabetic elements. Just like with Sumerian Cuneiform, The Egyptians started with a simple pictograms but over the time they developed pictures which represented sounds as well. Egyptian hieroglyphs came in several forms depending on purpose for which they were written, medium upon they were written and audience they were intended to.




These pictograms evolved into style called hieratic that was written more easily and contained more ligatures.



Discovery of clay tablets provided the evidence of the first form of alphabet which consisted of sorted signs. This was a cuneiform which comprised 30 simplified signs (letters). This written form is called Ugaritic script and was discovered in Syria.



Around that time, another writing form emerged. This one was influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs. It consisted of more abstract pictograms which represented sounds and it was a form of alphabet with pictographic consonants. This proto – Sinaitic alphabet is considered as a forerunner of modern alphabet.



The first alphabet which consisted exclusively of letters was Phoenician alphabet which was later adopted and modified by Greeks. It is considered as a beginning of a modern alphabet. Phoenicians were traders who had an empire of city-states along Africa, Spain and Sicily and they created the practical script which was quick and easy to read during the boat trips. This was a form of alphabet of consonants where pictograms were out of use, so it served as a base of today modern alphabet.



Greeks later adopted much of Phoenician form of writing and entered the vowels. Apart from its use in writing language both ancient and modern forms of Greek alphabet are still in use as technical symbols and labels in science and mathematics.



Roman alphabet was developed from western variation of Greek alphabet called Cumaean alphabet which was adopted and modified by Etruscans who ruled the early Rome. Etruscan alphabet was later modified by ancient Romans and turned into Latin alphabet.



Latin alphabet was later adopted by Romance languages but also by Germanic, Celtic, Baltic and some Slavic languages. Along with colonialism, Latin script was later spread overseas and applied to indigenous American, Australian, African, Austronesian, Austroasiatic languages.

As for the archaic Latin alphabet, Romans adopted 21 letters from the Etruscan alphabet which was consisted of 26 letters. After the conquest of Greece, Romans adopted their two letters: Y and Z, so the new form of Latin alphabet had a 23 letters. The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct which was used as a word divider.





Old Roman cursive script known as majuscule was a everyday form of handwriting which was used for writing letters, bussiness accounts and schoolchildren. Unlike the Roman square capitals which was used for formal writing and was a base of today capital letters, cursive was more informal and quick form of writing, however it is very difficult to read to modern people.





New Roman cursive known as a minuscule evolved from Old Roman cursive and was more similar to nowadays alphabet. Letters had a recognizable shapes and was proportianal to each other. It was later developed into medieval script known as Carolingian minuscule. It was caligraphic standard for the Europe of that time. Carolingian script was quickly spread all across the Europe. Some found codices, christian and pagans book as well as educational material was written in Carolingian minuscule. During the period of Renessance it was changed and became a base for a modern lowercase letters. Carolingian script was a base for Gothic style which was more condensed, angular, darker and ligature-ridden. Early gothic script was in form of formal book hand and it later developed into model typeface used in Bible. The image below shows transition between Carolingian script and Gothic style.



There is a belief that unicial and half unicial scripts had derived from Carolingian minuscule.



Unicial is majuscule script which means it is consisted only of capital letters. It was used in Greek, Latin and Gothic languages. The name unicial came from fact that earliest form of letters were uniformmed in height. Romans used unicia as a measure for height, but as script was developing so the unicial became far from uniformed height, but name remained the same. Letters were round shaped made of broad single stroke written in new parchment. The script had changed over the time and letters had become more complex. Although some of the evolved unicials created the base for more compact and simplified scripts, it was originally still in use for copies of the Bible. The Romans adopted this style from Greek and letters became more curved so it made writing much easier.



Due the fact that unicial was very widespreaded, there were many slightly different forms of this script such as African, Byzantine, Italian, French, and Cyrilic.

North African form of unicial is more angular than other forms. Bows of letters were sharp and pointed. Use of this script was related to period of history of North Africa during Classical Antiquity (c. 8th century BCE - 5th century CE) which includes history of Egypt in the east and history of Ancient Libya in the west.

Bizantine Unicial has a two form. One which was in use in 4 th and 5th centuries with a „b-d unicials“ feature which was close to half-unicial. The other one was in form of „b-r unicials“ where letter b was twice larger than other letters, and r had bow resting on the baseline while stem is extended below the baseline.

Italian Unicial had round letters with flatters on the top and sharp bow. It had almost horizontal stem in d and forked finals like serif.



Insular unicials had definite word separation, accent marks over stressed syllables. This form of unicial was probably the most specific due the fact that Irish didn’t speak the language that was derived from Latin. They also used abbreviations and had a wegde shaped finals on letters and connected „pendant i“ with m or h if it was at the end of the word. Animals and dots as decoration was characteristic of this style as well.



French Unicial was characteristic for the period of Merovingian dynasty. This style used thin descenders, an x whose lines crossed above the middle and d with curled stem like with apple). Like with insular unicials, this form of script used decoration such as bird, fish and trees.

Cyrilic manuscript derived from Greek unicial and replaced in late ninth century Glagolitic alphabet known as Glagolitsa (the oldest known slavic alphabet from the 9th century). It was used in writing the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language. The earliest form was know as ustav which was later developed into poluustav script.



Half uncial, like uncial, derived from Roman cursive and it was first used in 3th century and it remained to be in use until the 8th century. Its name points to similarity and origins from uncial, however both scripts has characteristics inherited from the ancient source.

Half uncial was brought to Ireland in 5th century from where it was carried to England and remained to be in use until 8th century. After that period it was further developed into insular script.





On the image above: The Book of Armagh: Symbol of John the Evangelist, the 9th century. It is notable characteristic oc form of letter a.