Letters are cheap, but they didn’t use to be.
Inscribed into the walls of turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula were the skeletons of the first alphabet in the world.
The Canaanites were master abstractors and the fruits of their labor were picked up, altered, adapted, and developed by a host of other peoples including the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Etruscans among many others. Proto-Sinaitic, as it is now called, was itself based on the forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Each symbol of their alphabet represented a consonant rather than a word: the basis of the Semitic alphabetic system, and the beginning of alphabets across much of the world.
I sought to create a unified system to illustrate the characters of the modern Latin alphabet by integrating them into a standardized, visually cohesive chart. I recorded the evolution of the letters of the Latin alphabet, narrowed down to those with the most illustrative origins, and cross-referenced with the evolution of letters in other language families than Romance or Germanic such as Hebrew, Arabic and Greek.
With limited online resources and some linguistics books, I used ChatGPT to direct the remainder of the research.
A (Aleph): Ox head (alp)
D (Dalet): Fish (dag)
E (Hay): Praising Man (hillul)
G (Gimel): Camel (gamal)
My rendition of the timeline of the system of characters. The hieroglyphs are modified from Unicode.
I designed this project to be an advertising campaign for an annual typographic conference. A system of four posters, accompanied by a logo, brand guidelines, and motion graphics resulted from the process; research, ideation, mapping out letters (and the corresponding 'characters'), compiling references, and sketching.
Character Workshop; students and professionals learn about and experiment with the mysterious ‘characters’ of the alphabets. Keynote speakers give lucid presentations revealing the history of writing, alphabets, linguistics, typography, and graphic design. Artists and designers lead workshops on developing skills surrounding letterforms. Students gain opportunities to broaden their expertise and explore new passions.
I learned a lot from Character Workshop, but I discovered two important lessons:
One, that formulas don’t create anything innovative or unique; they’re helpful only for structure.
And two, that the most important aspect of constructing a system is creating it non-destructively; each part must be mobile, deft, and versatile, able to sculpted and modified at will.