The History Of Type

                  THE HISTORY OF TYPE

Cave paintings: Cave paintings is one of the most earliest forms of text. A good example would be the ‘Chauvet Cave’, which is one of the most famous prehistoric caves with rock art in it. It is located in Southern France. This cave was only discovered recently in 1994 by a group of cavers lead by jean-Marie Chauvet. The paintings in the cave are dated back to 30,000 and 33,000 years ago. Although in this cave there were no letters or things that could possible be used as letters, it does show that they may have used imagery to communicate which Is the soul purpose of type.

 

Pictograms: Pictographs are pictures, which are used to show what they signify. There is also Ideograms which are symbols used to demonstrate ideas. An example being this picture which I quickly did in illustrator. Seeing a picture of this done online I decided to just quickly do one myself.  This Pictograph means mountains, were you got one at the front and two at the back. Pictographs like this were used to describe things.

Hieroglyphs: Hieroglyphs date back to 3200 BC and consist souly of symbols. Each symbol can mean a letter,a silent deteminative or even a sound. It was used by the Ancient Egyptians, but they also used Heratic which is a less formal type of writing they used for everyday writing, were as Hieroglyphs is a more formal writing used on tombs and Columns. Out of all the different type in history I have looked at Hieroglyphs is my favourite. This is because I like how each picture can not only mean a letter, but a sound or a silent determinative. I also admire the effort on which the people who had to write all the Hieroglyphs which we see in tombs and pyramids today, for us and future generations to see. The amount of effort which they must have put into it is amazing.

Manuscripts:


Manuscripts are hand written information. People had to use this method because block printing did not yet exist. This meant all documents were to be written by hand which made having a book more valuable than it would be today. Manuscripts in my opinion are much more detailed and beautiful than a normal book you would get today. This is because when writing the scribe would have to take much care and detail not to make any mistakes. Also the look of each letter looks much more interesting than you basic Arial typeface. I also like the detail on the pictures and the gaps in-between the Columns, again something you would not see in books in our generation.