The traditional evolution of writing systems to alphabets have been from pictographs, to phonetic rebus depictions of those pictographs, to abstracted reductions of the forms while retaining the phonetic attributes, then to final alphabet letters. The end result is a letterform that has the sound of the original pictograph’s subject, but is no longer representationally recognizable, nor tied to a literal thing it once represented. The letters then become arbitrary and their sounds and meanings need to be learned.
A visual writing system therefore, can be comprised of almost any collection of images and/or graphic marks, as long as there is agreement of meaning by a particular group of people. The marks most often start out recognizable, then become abstract, and may be graphic, photographic, and/or illustrative.
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Your first class project is the design of a visual writing system for a cultural activity of your choosing. The final characters should be simple and formally consistent, but may be comprised of and/or have their roots as pictographs, entoptics, letters, and/or abstracted signs.
Begin by choosing a particular cultural activity that you are interested in and very familiar with. It can be something like cooking, designing a logo, golfing, etc. This activity will be associated with all of the design projects that you will work on in this class this semester, so choose something that you are knowledgeable and interested in.
Next, in five or six sentences, write a concise description of a particular event tied to the activity. For example, it might be a description of shooting a bogey on a four-par golf hole.
Create an extensive visual research board of images related to all aspects of the activity, such as participants, equipment, tools, physical context, actions, expression and communication, etc. You might want to use the Adobe App SPARK to create your board.
Test the images by putting them in a visual order that matches the syntax of the written description of the activity event. Do the images viewed in a verbal syntax order convey the meaning of the event? If not, compose them in a way that visually structures the meaning.
Next, using your images as reference, design a dozen or so simple pictographs/icons which when put in a visual arrangement will describe the event. For example, in the activity of golf, the icons might comprise a golf ball, a tee, a fairway, a driver, an iron, a putter, a hole, a green, grass, out of bounds, a swing, etc.
The Pictographic Writing System is du Tuesday, January 28th
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Here are some examples of student work for a similar, but different, visual writing system project:
They are here for reference purposes only and are not indicative of your final design project.
Your writing system will be used to create a visual statement about your event, as well as an eventual identity and branding system for your activity.
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