Historical overview on origins of Latin Alphabet, major styles in typography and refections upon modern type-design.

Abstract

Each day thousands of people use or simply see letters. Letters all seem to be the same, “a” will always be the “a”. Yet, behind each step taken on the street by the unaware passer-by there are hundreds years of development, political infuences, mistakes and fnally craftsmanship. Obviously, the real reason for creating letters is that they communicate the message, not to praise the form. The task, perfectly fulflled since centuries infuences society’s understanding of the letters. As the letter-shapes become transparent so does typography. Letters simply exist, and this information is enough just as it is in case of many other aspects of everyday life, which at this point in modern world requires highly skilled specialists. Yet it used to be diferent. Letters played a important role in the hierarchy of early civilizations. Only the elite could use this ‘gift from gods’, and so it was long after the Latin alphabet was settled. Emperors and Kings would commission development of new typefaces. However the roots of Latin alphabet are still not fully understood, it is established that the very frst fully phonetical alphabet – meaning it consists of consonants and vowels was created by ancient Greek culture. Basing on the previous script of Phoenicians, Greeks done a breakthrough by adding vowels. The history of writing, and so the history of Latin script goes back probably thousands of years before. The Romans, who adopted the Greek script from Etruscan are probably responsible for it’s wide usage around the world – around 40% of population, and for fnal changes in the script. Since 2000 years the script remains rather unchanged. This shows an amazing power of those 26 letters – the power which pushed people to develop the writing further, and their infuences where often depended on the epoque they lived in. The development of writing styles is very important for the future of printing and therefore type-design. The history of printing, beginning with Gutenberg’s Revolution is mostly infuenced by the epoque. Because of that, Italian humanists had created a roman style – recent up to this days, as a opposition to Blackletter of barbaric Gothic. As the early roman type was created it was improved by designers for over 5 centuries, and it still is. Designers looked back and on the experienced coming from their observations, they redesigned previous designs creating new quality. The type-design remained rather unchanged until the Industrial Revolution, which brought in 19th century improvements to all aspects of life, and among those to letters. As the need of communication shifted from small metal-types into big wooden block-type the optically perfected shapes where not good enough. Therefore they became fatter, bolder – all attract viewer. Sans-serif letters where created, infuencing modern design and became probably the most important style in type-design, especially in the era of screen typography and personal computers. At this point, being aware of how the major styles in typography where created, there is time to refect upon modern typography, and issues of personal computers. The process was never easier – previous generations had to decide on specifc aspects of costly production, while nowadays we can loose results of our work within a second by accidentally deleting the fle. As the process got easier and design software more developed it allows to create for example fake italics as easy as a single click of a mouse. There is nothing wrong that type-design is more accessible to people from various backgrounds yet, such problems as fake italics could be avoided if the designers were aware of the discipline’s history. I believe that this awareness might improve the work, as one of the important aspects of type-design is observation – if you are aware of mistakes done by designers in the past, you may avoid them.