From the course: Graphic Design Foundations: Typography

Where type begins: The mark of the hand

From the course: Graphic Design Foundations: Typography

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Where type begins: The mark of the hand

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- If you really want to understand typography, you have to look back to where writing began, with the human hand. Everything began with handmade marks, which evolved into our familiar alphabetic forms. History tells us that drawing came before writing. So first there were pictures, and pictures became pictograms. We have evidence of drawings etched in bone, drawn with soot on cave walls, and carved into clay. But pictographs were limited in their ability to tell a story, so ideographs evolved. Ideographs showed actions and ideas. Eventually, ideographs were associated with certain sounds, and their forms evolved into pictograms, the precursors of letter forms. The letter forms were combined into what we now know as words. For hundreds of years, before pieces of type became physical objects, every letter of every word was carefully and slowly written, stroke by stroke, by hand, on papyrus, on parchment, or on paper. It's interesting that hand lettering and calligraphy are currently enjoying great popularity. You can see it everywhere, on book jackets, food packaging, beauty products, advertising. It seems to permeate our visual culture. Perhaps it's a reaction to the computerization and mechanization of forms to the technology that surrounds us. Whatever the reason, hand-drawn letter forms and typefaces designed to look like hand-drawn letter forms are everywhere. Today, if we look hard enough at a typeface, we can imagine the mark of the hand behind it. So it seems fitting that drawing is still at the core of type design today. Every type designer still starts the same way, with sketches. Here are some examples of the sketches of typefaces in their early stages done at Cooper Union's type design postgraduate program. Students are using a variety of tools, from pencils, to ink, to markers, to get their ideas down on paper before they take them into a digital environment. This is the beginning of a lengthy process that we'll talk more about later in this chapter. Whether you want to design a typeface from scratch, or you're simply happy to know that there are over a million, yes, way over a million digital typefaces available for your projects, it's important to understand what goes into designing a typeface. I want you to imagine and appreciate the underlying structure of the letter forms and how they are all interrelated and interconnected.

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