Typophile

Cyrillic

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

Chris, what writing system do you not like?

> How are you going to change that?

Writing, I guess. (Sorry If I disappoint.)

BTW, please call me Hrant.

hhp

Does anybody know where I can find a good book
with the Cyrillic alphabet?

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

Instead of just a book with Cyrillic, what
about a book about Cyrillic type design?
http://store.artlebedev.com/books/design/kniga_pro_bykvy/

hhp

steve mehallo

Repeating a few, but these really resonate with me ...

Tamil
Telugu
Malayalam
Sinhala

Wish the way the lowercase "g" evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex "g"-like forms to play with today.

s.
mehallo.com

"Chris, but are you sure you wouldn’t feel the same about any other alphabet that you would happen to grow up with? And then stress its particularities as exactly the things you love about it?"

Actually, my first alphabet was Greek. With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart. The capitals were more influenced by Phoenician culture and the lowercase more Byzantine and Turkish so I can understand the disconnect. When it came to typesetting, Europeans had a predominant influence and brought the technology after the Greeks were free of the Ottomans. There was no original Greek type by native Greeks for years. The caps became very Roman looking but the lowercase is its own world. Gerry Leonidas does a brilliant job with describing the history and is far better the person to describe it than me.

Getting back to your point, Nina, I feel I am more in love with latin as a graphic designer and user of type than I am of its written script and early history. I like the pages it makes and the even texture. I like the way it adapts to so many typeforms and styles and not so fussy a tradition to follow. I don't see this with large quantities of very calligraphic scripts like Arabic or Chinese. To me, Chinese looks great in small quantities and is more lovable written with a brush than typeset. I must admit that Palatino Arabic, designed by Nadine Chahine, has really made me more of a believer in Arabic as a typeface rather than a written script!

I don't think a person can ever escape their early upbringing and feel a level of comfort with what they know best. Others can develop a hatred for type coming from a culture they blame for some wrongdoing. Blackletter has been given an unfair demonic label because many people equate it with the Nazis even though it was around for hundreds of years before there was such a group as the Nazis.

I quite readily admit to being a lover of letters or symbols and don't feel any need to dislike any in particular. I have grown to like Cyrillic even though it is just plain insane as a system that was designed as a whole. There are plenty of glyph pairings in Cyrillic that just look stupid together but I guess that is what happens when the king makes the decisions and nobody can say, "Dude, that really does not work" like we can here in the Critique forum. :-)

Writing and typesetting is an outgrowth of culture and therefore subject to strange combinations of thought or accident. I just accept this and take my job as a designer to just work with it rather than damn the whole culture for daring to differ from what I would have done if I were the supreme master, King, Czar, Clergy, Poet, Philosopher, Learned Teacher, or Tyrant.

ChrisL

exfish

Tengwar.

—Noam

"Wish the way the lowercase “g” evolved in Latin sort of also happened with the rest of the letters; whereas we could have ended up with more complex “g”-like forms to play with today."

Complexity? Bring it on!

(Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-) )

jlahham

Arabic... no question there. i have some amazing Arabic calligraphy samples if anyone is interested.

Sindre Bremnes

Mehallo asked for complex lower case forms, Nina. You suppplied him with complex upper case forms. That's unfair.

Edit: Er, not really, after re-reading. Withdrawn. Shame on me. Blush.

Malin

fuþark & Sinhalese. Discovered both when I was very young, fell in love with the looks of them. Thought sinhalese was the most beautiful writing I had ever seen, like little mice running over a paper :)

No, you're right, Sindre! Argh. Sorry. Shame on me!
I'll spare you the lowercase ;-)

Edit: OK, he said "with the rest of the letters"… :-)

steve mehallo

an a with a Laotian curl ...
an e with a small swash from Telugu ...
it would be blasphemy, but could be fun.

And look at all the new Latin parts we get to name!

(if you thought crotch was funny ...)

(Maybe we just take the accents we have and do something spectacular with them!)

s.
mehallo.com

Mehallo: So is anyone then supposed to read that? ;-)

Chris, that was a beautiful declaration of love. :-)
Sorry for letting you grow up with a different script than you did!

"With Greek, I find the capitals too distant in form from the lowercase. Granted, they came many years apart."
But isn't that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced, with much "softer" forms in the lowercase.

Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that's a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?

* But I guess sadly, there won't be all that many different styles designed for a script unless its "market" is large enough to enable a broad type design culture, which of course Latin is vastly benefiting from.

"But isn’t that exactly the case with Latin too? I agree though that in Greek the difference seems even more pronounced,"

Yes, Nina, The Greek is orders of magnitude different in its current state still while the Latin has grown more familial as time has gone by. There have been centuries of Latin type designers around to do many thousands of fonts since Guttenberg. The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.
The other issue is the number of native Greek type designers. How many type designers of Latin fonts can you name who are dead, even long dead? How many Greek type designers are from more than a century ago? Damn few if any. Almost all native Greek type designers are still alive today and most of them are young and just beginning their careers. I predict that their influence has not barely begun and will make its mark in the decades to come. Most type you have seen which has a Greek character set was not designed by Greeks. This will change. Gerry's young students will make their names known and there will be a fabulous era of Greek type to come soon.

ChrisL

@hrant

Ah, thanks for the link. book looks interesting
Its unavailable for the moment :(

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation -- which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script. By this standard I believe Chinese (and Japanese, which could be considered a variation of Chinese) would clearly come first, Arabic probably second.

AFAIK, nowhere in the world is the ratio between the number of professional (full-time) calligraphers versus painters nearly as high as in China. Same goes for the ratio between calligraphic versus typographic signs and logos (of course I'm not talking about signs that are written by hand because there's not enough money to pay for a printed one, I'm talking about signs featuring professional calligraphy that usually costs quite a bit).

That is indeed a fabulous book. I love it and learn what I can from it even if there is no English translation available. When I bought it, the shipping from Russia cost more than the book,

ChrisL

Quick question, is there a book
about alphabets from around the world?
If not? Why isn't there one?

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

Man, sometimes you just have to treat yourself.
Of course I have to run it by my wife first LOL.

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

"is there a book
about alphabets from around the world?"

Bunches, do a search on writing systems and alphabets on Amazon or your vendor of choice.

ChrisL

Nachos

How much do you think these alphabets benefit from the calligrapher's hand? How bland would they be if they were set in a Courier-like font and we saw them every day?

Henry, FWIW the Armenian alphabet is held in very high esteem by us (not least because it helps us fight assimilation). Pretty much every Armenian church shows it on one side of the altar, and every schoolchild learns poems etc. about it and its creator, Mesrop Mashdots.

Jesse: the trick is to see beyond instances of rendering (be they calligraphic, typographic or anything else) to what the script is really like.

hhp

guifa

Hrant, that reminds me, I spotted a bunch (well okay like 3 lines) of Armenian text at the Vatican. It had some interesting capital ligatures on it.... is this common in all caps inscriptions?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

David Yoon

Nina: Regarding the adaptability of Latin (vs. more complex scripts) to different styles, that’s a good point. But this would also hold true for other scripts that have a limited character set, limited complexity, and maybe somewhat disconnected lettershapes, no? Like Greek. Or Cyrillic. Or many others in fact.* Am I mistaken?

I think they could, potentially, but they often don't. My guess is that Hrant's comment about resisting assimilation has something to do with it. People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative. Even, ironically, when the style being protected is itself a product of past cultural hegemony. Cherokee script, for example, is locked into a model based on American typography of the early nineteenth century; if you tried to make a Garamond Cherokee or a runic Cherokee or a brush-stroke Cherokee, I don't think it would easily be accepted as culturally authentic.

John Hudson

Sindre: That Cherokee alphabet looks like an extension of the Latin alphabet to me. But I know it isn’t. The inventor just copied some of the letters, without knowing their value.

The story is a lot more complicated than that. Sequoyah's original design was quite different from the form of Cherokee that is most familiar to people. When the script was first cut in type, many of the forms were rationalised and, in the process of making them more 'typographic' made to resemble Latin letters.

John Hudson

Chris: The Greeks had to make do with what the Dutch and Brittish could do with existing equipment in Greece and this brought numerous limitations including using Latin punches for Greek capitals where possible. The Europeans had no malice in their actions, they were just making do with the tools available. Without the Latin-script-using Europeans, there would have been no Greek type at all for even more centuries.

Chris, you need to read Konstantine Staïkos' Charta of Greek Printing, which documents the fundamental role of Byzantine refugees and other Greek emigres in the development of Greek publishing, beginning in Italy and spreading across Europe.

Matthew, those actually I would call overlapping - which is actually not too common in Armenian. But cap ligatures are in fact common, especially in older inscriptions.

Now those are ligatures! :-)
Including triples. Taken at the Geghart monastery in the Summer of '07. I got lucky with the moody lighting (there are holes in the ceiling, since most of the monastery is carved directly out of the side of a mountain, so no windows).

hhp

Thank you

Guerrizmo+Design
No man is an island unto himself_John Donne

Thanks, John, I'll look for "Charta of Greek Printing"

ChrisL

Edit:

John, it costs $350, a bit pricey for me :-(

archaica,
"People using Latin script feel no need to defend it against the hegemony of some other culture, so they do all sorts of wacky stuff to it, but users of less dominant scripts are often very conservative."
Thanks – this is an interesting perspective. I hadn't thought about variety in type design that way (more in terms of "what the market allows for"). But I guess oftentimes the two overlap.

henrypijames,
"I think one objective measure for the aesthetics of a given script is how much the people who actually use it day to day care about its presentation — which in turn could be measured by how prominent, prevalent and well developed the art of calligraphy is for that script"
Don't you think it should be possible to consider the aesthetics of the basic structure of lettershapes without considering their case-by-case execution?
Besides, the aesthetic prevalence of calligraphy over other tools/executions really is in the eye of the beholder. FWIW, Burmese (which I mentioned) looks great to me (printed) even though –or maybe just because– it seems quite constructed and "abstract" in a way, not "written".
But I guess that's where personal taste comes in, since we're talking about aesthetics only. And that's one realm that I think has very few "objective measures".

Andreas Stötzner

The initial question is a nice provocation. How to measure beauty, apart from heralding one’s personal preferences?
You can hardly compare Sinhala to Runes to Latin. And yet – we do ;-)
For me, the most beautiful alphabet is the classical one. And there is a classical style in Arabic, in Chinese, in Latin a.s.o. It may be interesting to compare these particular renderings of different scripts. One is likely to find as common features: the grown rather than the constructed (which means not: the curly rather than the straight!), a subtle detailing and balance between strenght and liveliness. When some do claim here, that they find Runes for instance rather not appealing, it may have something to do with the fact that the script hardly reached a matured state of classicism (Klassizität) in history. Which does not mean that it can’t reach that level at all.

suzannelemon

Tibetan by a mile.

Khmer has a really nice alphabet too and I love the shapes in Korean, but Tibetan is just plain beautiful.

Let's hope the Chinese don't drive it into extinction, eh?

speter

Hrant, do you have larger shots of the Geghart monastery inscriptions?

Si_Daniels

>Let’s hope the Chinese don’t drive it into extinction, eh?

I think the opposite might be true. The Chinese government is very active in pushing support for the so called "minority languages" through standards such as GB18030.

Frode Bo Helland

Nina: Does that stuff exist digitally?

Frode, I doubt it (but hey, you never know –
that would be a digitization project! ;-) )

Steve, I have that shot in double that size, but I assume that's not good enough. I might have hi-res shots somewhere - I'll check - but I doubt it. What's on your mind? If it's important I can have my people* take some photos next time one of them makes the trip**. I don't know how the lighting is in Spring - if I took that shot mid-morning in Summer, what time in Spring would match?

* Literally and figuratively. :-)

** Or they might actually have good shots already.

> I think the opposite might be true.

Indeed - and I think the main thing that can really threaten the Tibetan script is Western: chauvinistic and/or penny-pinching lack of proper support in software*. That sort of thing has caused wholesale abandonment of writing systems (for example emailing in Armenian is typically done via ad-hoc Latin transliteration) as well as debasing of scripts (as happened with the original Linotype's Arabic).

* Noting that we're still suffering from ASCII-7!

hhp

Re Geghart, if it's any help (and unless it's urgent of course): I'll be there in July (insert very many smilies here!) and could take photos then.

speter

What’s on your mind?

Curiosity and appreciation of form. I studied Armenian for several years, but needless to say, we never encountered forms like these!

Steve, I didn't know you studied Armenian! (Or I forgot.) If you'd like the double-size one (as well as some other shots of Geghart) please remind me of your email - hpapazian at gmail dot com

hhp

@Hrant:

I was not talking about the Chinese being proud of their script -- obviously, most people in the world are proud of their respective script. I was talking about the Chinese giving extra emphasis to -- or one could say, being obsessed over -- the aesthetics of their writings. In other words, there's a difference between interest in the function and being interest in the form (not that the two were mutually exclusive), while the former is universal, the latter is quantitatively unique to the Chinese. An intense obsession over the aesthetics, multiplied with the ancient age of the Chinese script, would suggest that there has been more cumulative effort in improving this script's beauty than any other script.

Regarding the future of Tibetan, we should separate the social and the technical aspect of its development. Socially, the script is undoubtedly dying -- in that the number of people reading and writing it on a daily basis is decreasing. On the other hand, the vast majority of Tibetans were illiterate before the Communists came, so the number of Tibetan who're *able* to read and write Tibetan are most certainly a multitude of what it was back then.

Technically, as sii has noted above, the Chinese government has really done a lot of work for the development of "minority languages" such as Tibetan, both in classical terms -- building dictionaries, creating language education programs, etc. -- and in modern terms -- pushing for digital standardization and international accessibility. For instance, because a fairly recent Chinese law demands that all computer OS sold in China to have display support the full range of the GB18030 encoding standard, the Chinese version of Windows comes with an font named "SimSun (Founder Extended)" that can display Tibetan. (However, I believe one still needs to activate the system support for "complex script", which isn't activated by default in the Chinese version of Windows.)

John Hudson

I was talking about the Chinese giving extra emphasis to — or one could say, being obsessed over — the aesthetics of their writings.

The term ‘obsession’ is one that is also used to describe, not always uncritically, the Ottoman emphasis on the aesthetics of writing in the Arabic script. Our colleague Saad, for instance, regularly accuses the Ottomans of having made a ‘cult’ of calligraphic beauty.

Si_Daniels

>the Chinese version of Windows comes with

That would be Windows XP. Vista includes a stand alone font Microsoft Himalaya