Aa gH nO Uu bC IiJj
aBbCcDdEeFf HhIiJjKkLlMm OoPpQqRrSs uVvWwXxYy CcDdEeFfGgH jKkLlMmNnO
FeEdDcCbB MlLkKjJiIh SrRqQpPo YxXwWvV gGfFeEdDc nNmMlLkK
A g n U b JiI
CONTENTS
Introduction The History of The Alphabet
01 Mesopotamia 02 Cuneiforms 03 Hieroglyphics 04 Greek 05 Roman 06 Modern 07 Cave Paintings
/oo5
18,000 - 10,000 BC
/oo7
3,100 - 2,800 BC
/o11
2,500 BC
/o14
1,450 BC
/o21
1,000 BC - AD 350
/o26
2,000 BC
/o33
To Date
/o40
Sources
/o46
“
Writing is words made visible.
In the broadest sense, it is everything - pictured, drawn, or arranged that can be turned into a spoken account. The fundamental purpose of writing is to convey ideas. Our ancestors, however, were designers long before they were writers, and in their pictures, drawings, and arrangements, design played a prominent role in communication from the very beginning. Alphabet: The History, Evolution, and Design of the Letters We Use Today, Alan Haley
pG /oo4
Typography Set In Stone / Introduction
”
The History of the Alphabet 34,000 - 1,400 bc circa.
AaBbCc
The evolution of letterforms and a system of writing has been propelled by our need to represent things, ideas, record and preserve information, and to express ourselves. The importance we place on being able to give our communication a degree of permanence produced the very earliest forms of picture making, an activity from which writing is ultimately derived. For thousands of years a variety of imaging, tools, and techniques have been used. Marks were made on cave walls, scraped and stamped into clay, carved in stone, and inked on papyrus.
Typography Set In Stone / Introduction
pG /oo5
Cave Paintings
/01
ave C Paintings The most dramatic examples of this early kind of information storage come from the prehistoric art of cave painting. Among the numerous examples of painting found in subterranean caves in western Europe, perhaps the best known are those from the caves of Lascaux, in the south-western France, which have been dated to between 18,000 and 10,000 BC. The origins of these examples of prehistoric art are obscured by their having been made so very long ago, but while we may never know exactly when they were made, or by whom, we can be more certain about their status as works of art. In spite of their obvious beauty, it is not clear exactly why they were made. Whether the hunters of the Stone Age were acting on the simple impulse to make pictures for their own sake – this is, to make art – or whether the images of bison and deer were meant to conjure mystical powers over the prey they represented, we cannot say for sure. Some scholars say they are the first paintings, or the first attempts at graphic communication. They could be anecdotal, they could be hunting instructions – we don’t really know.
pG /oo8
Typography Set In Stone / Cave Paintings
circa.
18,000 - 10,000 BC
The paintings were drawn with coloured earth, red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first. The simple methods used by our early ancestors to draw vividly recognizable images on stones, solved one problem only to create another. Cave paintings managed to free language from the single moment of interaction that limited speech. But in doing so they bound language to the physical limitations of the picture surface. Cave paintings on stone walls are fixed in one place and, whether to escape from predators or from the cold, such places are often deeply inaccessible. They may be permanent, but they are hardly portable.
The material that gave Stone Age man his name also presented him with other difficulties in the task of communication. In addition to painting on it, marking stone by carving it with another stone (the metal tools of the Bronze Age were at least 8,000 years away) would not have been easy. It would have required intensive labour by a skilled hand with specific tools at the ready. The need for a more adaptable method of communication would have increased when, after the invention of farming and metallurgy, more settled and socially complex communities had begun to be established. Each of the earliest examples of writing was an attempt to meet this need.
Typography Set In Stone / Cave Paintings
pG /oo9
/02
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia circa.
3,100 – 2,800 BC
The oldest civilization known to us appeared around the middle of the fourth millennium BC in the historical region called Sumer in the southernmost part of the larger historical region of Mesopotamia (Greek for ‘land between rivers’), which is now a part of modern Iraq. The rich and productive fertile terrain allowed stable surplus of crops to be grown and traded. The clay soil was also used to produce pottery which was also traded. It was upon this production and distribution that a reliable system was needed to record information. From as far back as 8,000 BC coin-sized clay tokens etched with simple lines had been used in Sumer and other parts of the Middle East as a kind of counting stone or receipt. The tokens’ shapes and markings were simple enough to be duplicated but distinct enough to be recognizable. Each combination of shape and markings related to an amount of a particular commodity, usually one of something (such as one sheep or flock of sheep). Quantities greater than one would be represented by the requisite number of tokens.
pG /o12
Typography Set In Stone / Mesopotamia
By about 4000 BC some tokens began to be encased in clay ‘envelopes’ called bullae (‘bulletin’ is derived from this word). Most of these hard, hollow balls of mud were then marked with a seal of ownership, though in some instances the markings gave a description of the contents. It is presumed that sealing the tokens and labelling the contents was a way of archiving a transaction, but this apparently benign step is thought to have led to the tokens’ extinction. By recording the contents graphically the tokens became redundant. The marks on the outside rather than the tokens on the inside could be used as a record for the initial transaction.
There is speculation that these new markings on the outside of the bullae then developed into, or at least influenced, a more graphically advanced set of impressions that began to be scratched onto larger flat blocks of clay. The shapes used to make up these numerical records fall into two groups, punched circular or crescent-shaped numerals, and incised symbols of the items being counted. It is possible to pick out several instances of a beer symbol which was made from a schematic depiction of an upright jar with a pointed base. Its inverted triangle shape is just one of at least 1500 pictographs or symbols that had been developed by this time.
Typography Set In Stone / Mesopotamia
pG /o13
Cuneiforms
/03
By around 2500 BC the range of Sumerian marks had merged into a homogeneous size, style and set of shapes – in short, a true script. The script is known as ‘cuneiform’, from the Latin for ‘wedge-shape’, since each of its characters (a catch-all term for any of the symbols, be they pictures, letters or punctuation, that make up the script) is formed out of a cluster of wedge-shaped indentations pressed into the clay by a sharp edge which had been cut at one end of a stylus usually made out of reed. The angles of the indentations were standardized according to what was easiest for writing with the right hand: most pointed down or to the right, none pointed up or to the left. It lent the cuneiform script an angular, geometric quality, which combined with the soft, pliable clay to produce some tablets of great decorative richness. This is a 5,000 year old example of the use of a grid system – using horizontal and vertical partitions to organize 2-dimentional space. Originally these surfaces were inscribed from the upper right hand corner in vertical columns. Eventually the scribes turned the tablets sideways to avoid smearing the writing surface, writing from left to right, horizontally, as we do today. Or, the opposite direction, presumably, if they were left-handed. Though clay was its natural medium, cuneiform was also carved into stone or inscribed on metal, ivory, glass or wax, or even written in ink, though the last of these seems to have been rare.
uneiform C nscriptions I pG /o16
Typography Set In Stone / Cuneiforms
circa.
2,500 BC
The cuneiform method of mark-making was straightforward and adaptable enough for it to be adopted by neighbouring peoples such as the Babylonians, Assyrians, the Akkadians, from northern Mesopotamia, and the Hitties. All were able to bring their own and, in some cases, quite different languages to it without having to change the script’s essential character. What also contributed to the script being so adaptable to so many different languages was the development of a phonetic component. At the same time as the characters were being abstracted away from recognizable pictures into stylized wedge shapes, so they moved from being tied to a particular object or idea to being tied to a particular sound. The idea that helped to bring about this important phonetic transformation was the rebus principal. It allowed the same characters to be used for words that sounded the same but had different meanings – so called homophones. An example of it applied to English would be, say, the pictograph of an eye, a can, the sea and a ewe, to write the sentence ‘I can see you’. Today rebuses appear only in children’s word games or as one of the graphic designer’s methods of visual punning, but around 3700 BC, at the very beginning of Sumerian writing, the rebus played a key part in the development of complete writing. The increased application of this and other kinds of phonetic elements to the Sumerians, very homophonous language culminated c.2500 BC in a uniform cuneiform script made almost entirely out of sound units. Over cuneiform’s near 3000-year long history, which is longer than the history of our own Latin alphabet, the script is known to have served as many as 14 different languages. In doing so it helped to sustain the largest and most culturally diverse empire of the pre-Christian era, the Persian Empire. Its widely spread adoption across the region cause the phonetic principle to spread both eastwards to the Indus and westwards to the Nile. It is even possible that the principle travelled much further afield, perhaps even as far as China and Central America, in which case we might be able to say that all of the world’s writing systems were derived from a single original idea – the Sumerians’ phonetic writing.
Typography Set In Stone / Cuneiforms
pG /o17
While it is easy to commend cuneiform for its usefulness, or its wicker-like beauty, we have to be more circumspect when crowning it with the title of the world’s first writing. Not only is the material evidence difficult to date but also, pinning down the point at which a group of symbols turned from being proto-writing used to supplement speech, to becoming complete writing used to supplement speech, is not easy. None of man’s early history can be plotted by a series of definite starting points. Like all other instances of early human activity, the first examples of writing can be taken only as indications of a process, parts of an evolving trend. Some palaeographers are satisfied that by c.3700 BC the pre-cuneiform proto-writing had evolved sufficiently for it to be accepted as complete writing, while others argue that recently dated Egyptian hieroglyphs from c.3400 BC are more certain examples of the first writing. While this is uncertain, what does seem likely is that it was in Mesopotamia that the seeds of writing were first sown.
/04
Hieroglyphics
Egyptian ieroglyphics H
The only great civilization to rival Mesopotamia in scale and complexity which had put down roots on the banks of the river Nile. The Egyptians considered writing to be a gift of the gods, they called the set of symbols that made up their script ‘god’s words’. The Greeks referred to them, similarly, as hierogluphika, meaning ‘sacred carvings’, though their description was inspired by having first found Egyptian hieroglyphs in ancient temples. The Egyptians developed their hieroglyphs from the set of forms established within their tradition of monumental or ceremonial art. Hieroglyphs were carved with the same care as pictorial illustration. Their orderly placement is as much a part of their appeal as their simple form, and yet their beauty is very different to that of the Sumerians’ cuneiform. Instead of relying on the patterning potential of a single wedge-shaped mark, the Egyptians used a range of shapes for their hieroglyphs: geometric ones, various lines and dots, as well as the iconic pictorial signs – kestrels, snakes, hands, ox heads and the like – that have since become emblematic of their civilisation. It is tempting to believe that the Egyptian scribes were guided by the practiced hands of their Sumerian cousins, for we have no better way of explaining how hundred of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared fully formed around 3400 BC.
pG /o22
Typography Set In Stone / Hieroglyphics
circa.
1,450 BC
Shortly before 2000 BC the scope of the rebus principle began to be limited so that only the first consonant of a word was represented rather than the whole word. This new phonetic device, was applied to 24 or so consonantal hieroglyphs. Of all Egypt’s considerable cultural achievements this small group of letters may have been the greatest, for it was with them that the first instance of alphabetic writing took place. This is not the same as saying this was the first alphabet. Because the hieroglyphs were restricted to signifying consonants, they were unable to map out all the sounds in the Egyptian language (the vowel sounds had to be guessed at by the context of the words). Moreover, in almost every instance this consonantal alphabet was used in conjunction with logographic hieroglyphs. For successive generations of historians the Egyptians’ hieroglyphs remained a fantastically compelling mystery. The hieroglyphs’ pictorial allure led many people to try and decipher them but most approached them as mystical symbols rather than the signs of a spoken language. It was only with the discovery of a remarkable, 1m high fragment of dark grey, quartz-bearing stone in a place known as Rosetta in the Nile delta, that the status of hieroglyphs could be firmly established and the language and culture they represented brought back to life.
Rosetta Stone
196 BC
The Rosetta Stone has since become one of the most famous pieces of rock in the world. The fragment was dug up by chance in 1799 by Napoleon Bonaparte’s soldiers, during the French occupation of Egypt. The craggy shape of the stone (or stela) is a product of chance breakages: the original edges of the stela survive along the left vertical edge, much of the right vertical edge and along the bottom. The surviving fragment features 14 lines of hieroglyphs, below this 32 lines of another Egyptian script, Demotic and at the bottom is 54 lines of ancient Greek (Egypt’s then language of officialdom). Each records the text of the same decree from 196 BC. The stone now resides in the British Museum and is the most visited single item with an immense capacity to evoke wonder. It was French scholar and philologist, Jean Francois Champollion (1790 – 1832) who deciphered the hieroglyphs’ in 1822. With the ancient language unlocked, a more informed study of ancient study of Egyptian culture could begin.
Typography Set In Stone / Hieroglyphics
pG /o23
Symbols such as these do not constitute writing as the term is usually understood because they do not belong to a set of forms that, together, could represent a spoken language. For logographic signs more generally, the range of things they can communicate is limited. For pictograms to approach any kind of completeness in a writing system, there have to be many of them and therein lies a disadvantage of a picture based writing system. In spite of the large number of logographic hieroglyphs needed to write the Egyptian language, which even at its fewest numbered about 750, logographic writing dominated the Egyptians’ writing system right up until the second century AD, when hieroglyphs began to be replaced by an alphabet based on Greek letters, called Coptic.
The emphasis on tradition within Egyptian society may have blinded people to the full potential of its alphabetic writing, but there is speculation that the alphabet’s potential was realized gradually through a whole sequence of influencing steps, which finally brought about some of the letters presented here on this page. Eleven of the letters in the modern Latin alphabet are thought to have Egyptian origins. The sounds may have changed significantly but some of the shapes have strong similarities. So while the idea of complete writing itself may have been Sumarian, nearly half the letters of the Latin alphabet were derived from the Egyptians’ alphabetic hieroglyphs.
Phoenician Alphabet circa.
1,500 - 1,000 BC
Similar kinds of pictorial, linear and consonantal writing were developed, known as Phonetician. It is around this time that a staple lettershape, a fixed sequence of letters and a single direction of writing was established. The pictorial quality of the letters had been replaced by an abstracted series of simple shapes, which for the first time approach the shape of our own letters. The Phoenician civilization that developed and consolidated Egyptian letterforms represented huge progress in processing and delivering information.
Typography Set In Stone / Hieroglyphics
pG /o25
Greek Alphabet
/05
Greeklphabet A
circa.
1,000 BC - AD 350
The successful trade and colonization is likely to have been achieved through their simplified alphabet of 22 letters, considered to be the mother of all Western alphabets. When the Phoenicians’ fledging alphabet made its way westward across the Mediterranean Sea to ancient Greece at the beginning of the first millennium BC, it coincided with and contributed to, a period of dramatic change in the way life was lived throughout the Mediterranean region. Over a 400 year period, from roughly 700 BC to 300BC, the Greeks laid the foundations for politics, philosophy, mathematics, poetry, drama and art on which Europe and much of the rest of the world were to build. The chief medium through which this cultural transmission was achieved was itself Greek in character. It was the first full alphabet.
pG /o28
Typography Set In Stone / Greek
This alphabet was not the earliest script in which the Greek language had been written. Perhaps even as early as 2000BC other non-alphabetic scripts had started to appear near the Greek mainland. Examples of a hieroglyphic script thought to have been used at around this time to write Greek have been found on the island of Crete. It is possible that writing from the Phoenician city of Byblos inspired the Cretan hieroglyphic script of Cyprus. Both scripts used pictorial rebuses to stand for syllables in their languages. The most notable and unusual of all the Aegean’s early scripts, known as the Phaistos disc was found in Crete in 1908.
Phaistos disc circa.
2,000 BC
As international merchants, Phoenicians were doing business with Mesopotamia in the west, using cuneiforms and Egypt is the south, using hieroglyphs. They needed a more efficient system for business transactions. The hand-sized disc of fired clay featured a spiral of symbols that were stamped into both sides of the disc. The discs 242 signs show Cretan hieroglyphs at their most elaborate and mysterious. Since the discs discovery over a century ago, there has been no settled view on the meaning of its symbols, and indeed some even doubt the disc’s authenticity.
The sceptics point to the fact that no other examples of this stamped script have been found – it would be strange to establish a tool of mass production without ever mass producing. If the script is authentic, then this circular document stands out as a singular landmark in the hazy terrain of early graphic design history. Though the disc is only made of clay, it would be the earliest example of printing with moveable type.
Typography Set In Stone / Greek
pG /o29
During the early stages of the westward spread of alphabetic writing, a number of regional variations developed, though each is thought to have derived from a Phoenician source. The oldest known example of Greek letters appears in 740BC. The primitive letterforms and shapes of the angular letters are similar to Phoenician letters and in reading from left to right they fit a convention that continues to this day. More telling of their Phoenician origins is that the names and the alphabetical sequence of the letters – alpha, beta, gamma, delta – are almost identical to those in the Phoenician alphabet – aleph, bet, gimel, dalet. This Greek script was the very first instance of full, vowelincluding, alphabetic writing. By 403BC a single variant of 24 letters, known as the Iconic alphabet was officially adopted as the standard Greek script, still used to this day. It is the world’s oldest alphabet. By the middle of the fifth century BC Greek letters had evolved from being little more than graffiti, roughly scratched in short lines to being carefully carved in longer chunks of text. The rise of the Athenian democracy during the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC contributed to this development. It created the need for a series of decrees and treaties to be displayed publicly. Various laws or the terms of peace with a neighbouring city-state, say , were inscribed in marble blocks in a manner considered to be commensurate with the status of the message. Athens was fortunate in having quarries of good-quality white marble close by, and there was enough of it to be used for inscriptions as well as sculptures and buildings. Since many people could not read, the inscription was made to be seen as much as it was to be read. This quest for a formal grandeur contributed to the development of an open and even layout called stoichedon, which required each letter to be arranged in a grid-like fashion, aligned vertically into columns as well as in horizontal rows. Despite not having punctuation marks, some Greek stone inscriptions do have small dots carved between words, or else small dashes called paragraphoi indicating a break in the sense of the writing. It is a condition rooted in their use; a visual record of an oral message which was meant to be read out loud.
Roman Alphabet
/06
Romanlphabet A
The word ‘alphabet’ is a story told in miniature: a Roman description of a Greek invention that had Phoenician origins. The word’s Latin root, alphabetum, was derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, which themselves had come from the Phoenician aleph and beth. This instance of the Roman adoption of a Greek invention was just one of the varied ways in which Romans lives their lives according to Greek example. The Roman conquest of Greece and its colonial territories by c. AD100 only accelerated a process of cultural adoption that was already three centuries old. The stamp of Greek cultural life on Rome was not total. Whereas the Greeks’ achievements had been predominantly conceptual and artistic, the Roman’s were more practical and structural. Constructions such as the Colosseum, Hadrian’s Wall in Britain and France’s Pont-du-Gard aqueduct are impressively large admirable complex feats of structural engineering. Within the art of writing Greek influence on Rome was absolute but indirect. During the eighth century BC, an early form of Greek alphabet from western Greece, known as Euboean, was adopted by the Etruscans, a culturally distinct group that earlier had settle in the region north of Rome. The Romans may have been introduced to their neighbours’ alphabet after a period of Etruscan rule towards the end of the seventh century BC.
pG /o34
Typography Set In Stone / Roman
circa.
2,000 BC
Early Roman writing looked similar to contemporary Etruscan writing; both were made with capitals scratched in crude diagonal lines. A period of adoption and adaption was needed for the Romans to establish some kind of standard shape and proportion, but by the first century BC, nearly every letter had acquired its own distinct form and sound, and by the fourth century AD, a official order of 23 Latin letters existed, all of which we can recognize today. Three letters are notable by their absence, J, U and W. All of them were later additions: J only began to gain common acceptance as a variant of I in the seventeenth century, U was first used as a letter distinct from V in the sixteenth century, and W was introduced after the Norman conquest of Britain in the eleventh century. The letters K, Y, Z appear so seldom in Roman texts that one could be forgiven for assuming that they too were among this list of absentees, but all were in fact part of the Roman alphabet. K was used for spelling some archaic words, and both Y and Z were adopted from the Greek alphabet for spelling Greek words.
Like the Greeks and Egyptians before them, the Romans established several styles of script. They developed form and cursive scripts. This greater diversity partly reflects the large variety of Roman writing materials and methods – metal tipped quills, and broad-edged lettering brushes, both invented in Rome were added to the range of inherited implements – and also the greater variety of uses Roman writing was put to. Letters appeared on wax tablets, papyrus, parchment, metal coins, stone walls, wooden boards, and leather booklets. Writing was an important method of commerce, not only on coins but handpainted shop signs, advertisements and public announcements which were brushed onto walls in large capital letters (this is where the Latin word ‘graffiti’ originates). The most visible and enduring examples of Roman lettering however were those that appeared on stone buildings and monuments. Such structures were built to impress on the empire’s citizens the power and glory past emperors had brought the republic. These inscriptions are a purposeful testament to the beauty and enduring power of the written word. These literally ‘monumental’ letterforms are what we now refer to as Monumental Capitals, and are the precursors of the ‘capital’ letters we use today.
Typography Set In Stone / Roman
pG /o35
The wide range of materials and uses involved in Roman writing fundamental to the appearance which have since become fundamental to the appearance of the Latin alphabet: the carefully modulated thick-and-thin parts of letters; the pointed ‘ticks’ and serifs and the establishment of the small letter form. The first point to be observed in regard to the general form of the Roman capital is its characteristic squareness. Although the letter as used to-day varies somewhat in proportions from its classic prototype, its skeleton is still based on the square. Next to this typical squareness of outline, the observer should note that the Roman letter is composed of thick and thin lines. At first sight it may seem that no systematic rules determine which of these lines should be thick and which thin; but closer investigation will discover that the alternate widths of line were evolved quite methodically, and that they exactly fulfil the functions of making the letters both more legible and more decorative. Arbitrary rearrangements of these thick and thin lines, have been often attempted; but such rearrangements have never resulted in improvement, and, except in eccentric lettering, have fallen into complete disuse. The original thickening and thinning of the lines of the classic Roman capitals was partly due to the imitation in stone inscriptions of the letter forms as they were written on parchment with the pen. The early Latin scribes held their stiff-nibbed reed pens almost directly upright and at right angles to the writing surface, so that a down stroke from left to right and slanted at an angle of about fortyfive degrees would bring the nib across the surface broadwise, resulting in the widest line possible to the pen. On the other hand, a stroke drawn at right angles to this, the pen being still held upright, would be made with the thin edge of the nib, and would result in the narrowest possible line.
pG /o36
Typography Set In Stone / Roman
The “serif”—a cross-stroke or tick—finishes the free ends of all lines used in making a Roman capital. The value of the serif in stone-cut letters seems obvious. To define the end of a free line a sharp cut was made across it with the chisel, and as the chisel was usually wider than the thin line this cut extended beyond it. Serifs were added to the ends of the thick lines either for the sake of uniformity, or may have been suggested by the chisel-marked guide lines themselves. Indeed in late stone-cut Roman work the scratched guide lines along the top and bottom of each line of the inscription are distinctly marked and merge into the serifs, which extend farther than in earlier examples. The serif was adopted in pen letters probably from the same reasons that caused it to be added to the stone-cut letters, namely, that it definitely finished the free lines and enhanced the general squareness of the letter’s aspect.
Various forms of script writing were developed and by the fourth century AD, a ‘New Roman System of Scripts’ has been created. Key to this system was the Roman uncial which for the first time hinted at the development of the small letters, or ‘minuscules’ of modern handwriting.
Typography Set In Stone / Roman pG /o37
odern oman R M Alphabet
circa.
AD 1,400
The small or “minuscule” letter that we now use in all printed books attained its modern and definitive form only after the invention of printing. The first printed books were made to imitate the handwritten work of the scribes of the early fifteenth century, and as printing was first done in Germany, the earliest book types were those modelled upon German scripts, and their condensed or blackletter variants. The Italian printers, of a more classical taste, found the German types somewhat black and clumsy and therefore, evolved a new form of type letter, based upon the Italian pen letters then in use, which though fundamentally Gothic in form had been refined by amalgamation with an earlier letter known as the “Caroline”, from its origin under the direction of Charlemagne. The “Caroline” was in its turn an imitation of the Roman “Half-uncial.” The close relationship of the first small type letter forms in Italy with the current writing hand of the best Italian scribes is well indicated by the legend that the “Italic,” or sloped small letter, was taken directly from the handwriting of Petrarch. The new Italian types, in which classic capitals were combined with the newly evolved minuscule letters, were called “Roman” from the city of their origin, and sprang into almost immediate popularity, spreading from Italy into England, France and Spain. In Germany, on the other hand, the national blackletter form persisted, and is still in use to-day.
pG /o38
Typography Set In Stone / Roman
abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz
“
…Although attempts have been made to tamper with letterform designs – to condense them or expand them, to equalize their varying widths, to electronically change their proportions – the consequences have not replaced the design principles set by the Romans and affirmed by their successors.
They have become the quintessential melding of art and information. History of the Alphabet, Alan Haley
”
Typography Set In Stone / Roman
pG /o39
/07 Modern
Around Cheltenham Stone carving techniques from Roman times continue to the present day with many formal signs, plaques, gravestones and building stonework still representing the skill and typography from its historical roots. Drawing letters for stone-cutting requires great skill. Techniques vary but modern tools include stone-cutting mallets of varying size, chisels of varying size with different cutting heads, rounded, clawed, flat and pointed which produce different effects in removing and marking the stone. The cutter draws the shape of the letterform into the stone. Each letter will have its own individual width but both the widths and the inter-character spaces have to be considered in combination. The guiding principle in drawing the letters is the search for consistency of letter pattern, evenness of line weight and spacing, uniformity of  stress – and logical word breaks. (a letter-cutter relies on kinetic memory as much as  eye).
pG /o42
Typography Set In Stone / Modern
The cutter works from just inside the keylines toward the ‘v’ cut centre line, ‘chopping’ away stone to create the letterform. The ‘v’ cut gradually deepens as it is worked from both inner and outer edge of the letter. The cutter must hold the chisel at a consistent angle to the stone to ensure an even depth. Once the central ‘v’ cut is fully established, the cutter concentrates on refining the edge of the letter. Other styles of typographic stonework where stone is cut away from the letterforms, are also evident. Modern decorative techniques include colouring or embellishing with gold leaf into the carved letterforms to enhance the design. Today, skilled stone cutters have combined their artistic talent to produce sculptural typographic works of art.
Typography Set In Stone / Modern
pG /o43
Listening Stones
2005
The Listening Stones are located in Hester’s Way Park, Cheltenham and consist of 9 large granite boulders. Their name originates from their proximity to GCHQ. Designed to capture the theme of communication and covered with content derived from code, cyphers encrypted messages, mysterious symbols, languages or prayer. Each stone has a different characteristic and has been worked and lettered in individual ways that refer to different forms of communication. Artist, Gordon Young worked with school children, sixthformers, GCHQ staff, residents and the local paper to produce ideas for the text, markings and symbols on the boulders. Gordon Young specialises in works for public spaces and has worked together with Designers, Why Not Associates on many typographic stone sculptures in public places throughout Britain.
pG /o44
Typography Set In Stone / Modern
Typography Set In Stone / Modern
pG /o45
Sources
Photographs taken at The British Museum, London Various locations around Cheltenham Spa Listening Stones, Hesters Way Park, Cheltenham Text from a variety of sources, including: The Story of Graphic Design, Patrick Cramsie The Rosetta Stone, Richard Parkinson - British Museum Press www.ilovetypography.com www.eyemagazine.com www.designhistory.org Typefaces Used: Body Text - Georgia Headings - Optimus Princeps Other - Theano Didot, Gill Sans Designer as Editor - Liz Wells, 2013
pG /o46
Typography Set In Stone / Sources
Aa gH nO Uu bC IiJj
aBbCcDdEeFf HhIiJjKkLlMm OoPpQqRrSs uVvWwXxYy CcDdEeFfGgH jKkLlMmNnO
FeEdDcCbB MlLkKjJiIh SrRqQpPo YxXwWvV gGfFeEdDc nNmMlLkK
A g n U b JiI