I’ll put 20 Obama-Galactic-Credits on some kind of gesture based short-hand - letterforms inspired by the iPhone and Natal-like interfaces.

I thin that we are turning back to humanist approach. Especially thanks to Dutch school of typography.
_

Sandro

I am of the opinion that changes to letterforms will be driven by digital technical considerations not evolutionary changes in handwriting.
We already see children being taught letterforms and language skills through computers.
This leads to reduced use of the handwritten form and consequently a reduction in the speed and occurrence of changes to those forms and leads to change beign the product of imposed will.
Interesting the same thing can be seen in the reduced speed of genetic change brought on by our current safe existence which will in time be surpassed by imposed changes based on desire and technical considerations.

Will

I think that Palm already nailed the gestural shorthand alphabet. Do their devices still use it, or did they just go to touchscreen keypads?

I really doubt that there will be much more evolution of the Latin alphabet; there’s too much inertia to overcome. It’s more likely that the way the alphabet is used will change in response to the way technology alters our methods of absorbing and processing information. I do expect to see diacriticals jumping from one language to another as people find themselves needing to display foreign words more often than in pre-internet days.

I think it’s that we’ll see an alphabetic revolution in China or Japan similar to what happened with the invention of Hangul in Korea.

In my opinion, there are two concurrent thoughts going on that will inevitably effect the development of the Roman alphabet:

1) The futurist “new is better” approach that brought us the Industrial Revolution is alive and well in the computer age. I agree with Sii that touch screen technology can/will play a role, but I fail to see the exact influence of that as of yet. I just hope we never evolve to “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

I disagree with James on the diacritics though. The massive prevalence of txt-type messaging has removed a lot of diacritics from colloquial usage. For instance, my friend Jené just uses Jene for everything now, since diacritics are a pain in the bottom to use efficiently.

2) Anti-futurist, eco tendencies also are highly prevalent. Walk into a Cost Plus World Market, or Trader Joe’s and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Ironically, this will only get better/more used as Opentype technology allows for greater “naturalness” of a typeset word.

I would suggest the next, or most recent, evolution in the alphabet the commercial at symbol, which is becoming closer and closer to becoming a letter. Pretty soon c@ will be an acceptable spelling for a feline pet.

Don, maybe not. I’ve never seen “h&” ...

(OTOH&, I’m not that much in2 texting either.)

Well we’re already seeing “Latin@” as a clumsy (IMHO) gender-neutral... (Latino/Latina)
_______________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.

@Ravel
I can see one definite influence of the Dutch School: Brush inspired letterforms. With digital type, created rounded or slightly rounded forms is much easier than it ever was in metal or phototype.

The new advance bézier curve tools will only push this trend forward, IMO.

Handwriting is drifting into being a solely historic medium. I can’t see it affecting the Latin script any more. I don’t feel we will go back in time to recreate Dutch type or any other historic form. I don’t see a new thing coming along until there is either a new medium or some other function based reason to make its way into the vernacular.

ChrisL

... some other function based reason to make its way into the vernacular.

Texting (per SMS) might fall into that category, doesn’t it?
I for one am hoping that it never makes it in2 the official dictionaries...

Dan: First we had scribal and monumental, the scribal evolved and combined with monumental into humanist which evolved into modern which evolved into industrial that in turn spurred on the development of geometric, then we had Geometric-Humanist-Industrial and Geometric-Humanist-Industrial-Post-Modern.

What you’ve described is the development of Latin script typography, not the development of the Latin alphabet.

Something that most people overlook is that scribes never stop inventing new writing styles; this is obvious in cultures with strong scribal traditions, but remains true even when ‘calligraphy’ becomes a marginal artistic activity. Typography evolves slowly between periods of radical change; scribes are continually inventive, experimenting with new tools, new ways of using them, new forms, both formal and expressive. If you want to know what the next evolution of the Latin alphabet is, subscribe to Letter Arts Review.

I think the next evolution in the alphabet will be further markup for emotion. In spoken language we have the ability to convey joy, sorrow, anger, and sarcasm by altering the way we say our words. There is nothing similar in written language. Emoticons are the first step in this process. Hopefully they’re not the last.

That too is not the alphabet.

ɐɓʂoɬʉƭɛɭɥ

There is nothing similar in written language.

Bullshit! Thoughtful writing is quite capable of conveying emotion. Most people are just too stupid or cannot be bothered to produce thoughtful writing.

Kevin: I think the next evolution in the alphabet will be further markup for emotion. In spoken language we have the ability to convey joy, sorrow, anger, and sarcasm by altering the way we say our words. There is nothing similar in written language.

If there is nothing similar in written language in the sense of systematic markup to indicate emotion — as distinct from all the numerous ways that good writers have expressed emotion in writing for hundreds of years —, why would you think that such a system would evolve now? The fact that over thousands of years and in many different cultures and writing systems no people ever developed a systematic markup for emotional content suggests to me that this is a very unlikely evolution of the Latin or any other script.

James: Thoughtful writing is quite capable of conveying emotion. Most people are just too stupid or cannot be bothered to produce thoughtful writing.

Yup.

PS. Complex emotions require articulation just like complex ideas. Simply holding up a flag that says ‘I am sad’ is not expressing emotion. It might be expressing emotional superficiality.

“Simply holding up a flag that says ‘I am sad’ “

Yes, Just like an applause sign in a game show or a laugh track on a sitcom. If it is funny, I will laugh even if there is no canned laughter. If it is not funny, the laugh track sounds stupid.

ChrisL

John, I agree that language is productive enough for a good writer to convey any emotion. But between email, texting, and social networks I see a huge increase in the amount of writing that conveys very little beyond basic emotional state. ’I am sad’ may not be deep, but it is a frequent communication.

Plus, it’s already happening. :0 :) ;) ^_^ These aren’t words. They are new marks that are are already being used to add tone to a sentence. A grammar is needed to grow around it: I miss John:) because he’s been away:( on an island all summer.

Kevin: I see a huge increase in the amount of writing that conveys very little beyond basic emotional state.

Yes, and words are totally sufficient to convey those basic emotional states. And people who learn to use words effectively are able to express more complex emotional states, which means that they’re also better equipped to understand those states and to engage with them in healthy ways. People who rely on pictographic symbols to express their emotions risk becoming emotionally stunted, if they are not already. This saddens me, because it seems futile to try to counter so prevalent a social phenomenon, but then in turn I am angered because I recognise that there are companies and individuals who are profiting financially from this phenomenon, in whose interest it is to convince me and other dissidents that it is futile to oppose such social developments, which are not in fact social in origin but carefully manipulated. And this particular sadness, and this sense of futility, and this anger, are also emotions that cannot be expressed in the Newspeak of emoticons, which discourage people from exercising their minds to describe their feelings and, in so doing, also rob them of the ability to register criticism and protest.

Kevin: A grammar is needed to grow around it.

If a grammar is needed, then a grammar will develop, organically. I think it is begging the question to say that a grammar is needed: grammars are evidence of need.

People who rely on pictographic symbols to express their emotions risk becoming emotionally stunted, if they are not already. [..] emotions that cannot be expressed in the Newspeak of emoticons, which discourage people from exercising their minds to describe their feeling ..

Well spank my bottom and call me Brenda. That’s spot on.

Kevin, emoticons are punctuation, not part of the Latin alphabet.

Are they used in Greek and Cyrillic?

John, isn’t an exclamation point the mother of all emoticons?!

I try to reserve the exclamation point for grammatical exclamations. How proper!

In the 2050’s McDonald’s will finally succeed in trademarking the letter M. All fonts will have their M removed or suffer dire legal consequence. Typophiles and McDonalds’ lawyers fail to agree on a letter to replace the M so most people use /\/\ .

Bad luck, Ray, another infringement notice coming to you: that’s a Woolworths logo upside down!

i miss will powers.

he would’ve had something interesting to say here.

-bowerbird

Woolworths? I think you may be safe there. But Motorola have /\/\ tradmarked...

I think there’s something very offensive about emoticons to people who love type, because to care about type is to see language as a serious business, a world where the preciseness of meaning is, well, meaningful. For those who think the flavor of the typeface used has a major bearing on the text, to reduce language to a series of winks, smileys, and frownies is agonizing.

That said, there’s something very sweet about seeing emails from my 89 year old grandmother that use smiley face emoticons, and in the Facebook updates from my 13 year old cousin (who you might call a core user and perpetuator of emoticons), something would be lost in the spirit of her excitement if there were any less OMGZ or :D going on. I personally never use emoticons, but my silent protest has no bearing on a ship that has sailed and landed at every port across the planet. In my experience, vendors in Asia use emoticons profusely, and in official business emails that open up with stuff like “Dear sirs...” and end with “Cordially Yours.” It seems slightly funny to Western eyes, having extreme formality mixed with what we consider tween’s pictograms, but they usually get their point across. You could consult the Chicago Manual of Style to write your emails and not get your point across at all.

I observe here that emoticons are used to remove ambiguity in written text, hurriedly and briefly put. I think that is the effect of the smiley, which is by far the most often used emoticon. It is also used in the context of addressing a particular person, where you know the emotional state of the conversation.

In writing where you don’t know the reader, these conditions don’t apply. So I would expect when the conditions apply, emoticons will persist, but probably not expand much. I don’t expect them to migrate to writing where you don’t know the reader.

> Simply holding up a flag that says ‘I am sad’ is not expressing emotion.

>People who rely on pictographic symbols to express their emotions risk becoming emotionally stunted,

:-(

The art of writing by talented authors has been with us since the beginning of the written word. The art and skill involves putting words together in a way that adds far more than what any emoticon can manage. Skilled writers don’t need extra signs to write beautifully. Emoticons are there for the casual use of the average Joe or Jane to deasciify hastily thumbed blurts. Their charm lies in the fact that they are made from pictogramatic constructions from assorted ascii characters. The charm dies as soon as we replace the ascii with a specifically drawn glyph.

ChrisL

Those with a love/hate for/of emoticons might want to follow the progress of the emoji encoding efforts in Unicode...

http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/20090730/proposed.html

I love you :) Carrot :)
I hate you :( Stick :(
Reminds me of Pavlov’s dogs: ring bell, give electric shock. Repeat.
Desensitize. Conditioned reflex. Not for me.

In Japan, if you don’t put emojii in your phone texts, it means you’re some kind of freakin’ weirdo. So I have been told.

“I think there’s something very offensive about emoticons to people who love type”

I’ve been thinking about this, and I still disagree. Why should loving type be == categorically worshipping the august seriousness of language? What’s wrong with playing with type?
I think emoticons are actually quite interesting – to observe how “normal” (non-type) people use type for the shapes, not the meaning, and have been attaching new meaning to the shapes. Do you still remember when people had to be instructed to tilt their heads? Now everyone knows what :-) means. (I agree they completely lose their charm when they’re replaced by specially-made smiley glyphs.)

BTW, so much for a new invention: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/10/20/emoticons-from-the-1...

John, Great point!

“Something that most people overlook is that scribes never stop inventing new writing styles; this is obvious in cultures with strong scribal traditions, but remains true even when ‘calligraphy’ becomes a marginal artistic activity. Typography evolves slowly between periods of radical change; scribes are continually inventive, experimenting with new tools, new ways of using them, new forms, both formal and expressive.”

You made the salient point I believe.

The stylus, the brush/chisel, the quill, the metal pen (chiseled or pointed) and their surface counterparts have been the determinants. Speed and medium also.

Now it is the mouse/wacom and the screen and/or the next incarnation.... oh for the days of paper, wait a minute, I am still using it :>)

And I do not think we have exhausted the “Latin Alphabets” ability to “express” even though there are gazillions of fonts. Or at least I am not done experimenting.

Michael

Saying only calligraphy advances the alphabet is like saying only people who play old music on traditional instruments (and maybe improvise a little) advance music.
If I had a hat, I’d bet it that the next step in the “evolution of the Latin alphabet” has sub zero to do with calligraphy. It’s simply not influential, important, or cogent enough anymore.

Not what I am saying Nina. I was pointing strictly to the tools that have had impact over the centuries.

Michael

I think there’s something very offensive about emoticons to people who love type.

I do not find them offensive and will sometimes use them to make it obvious that I am not flaming people without expanding a sentence into a paragraph that most people will not bother to read. But the notion that emoticons allow us to express things we could not have before is simply wrong.

While it is true that a great writer can convey emotion with out emoticons, you have to understand that many (most) people are not great readers.

I often use an emoticon when writing so that someone will know I am being sarcastic, since my writing is not great enough to be able to convey that to the majority of readers. (As I have learned long ago in online communications.)

:) is a useful sign in rapid communication, especially among people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds who might not understand each other’s sense of humour. It is not, however, an indicator of emotion, it is a sign which says ’I am joking’ or ’I get the joke’.

Nina, I think you misunderstand the point that Michael and I were making. The original message in this thread presupposed that the evolutionary history of the Latin alphabet in terms of typography. This history is one of long periods of conservatism between brief periods of radical change. But this is not the history of the alphabet, which includes also the scribal (not ’calligraphic’) history which is one of accumulated experiment and invention. I was drawing attention to the fact that this process has not ceased just because formal writing, in our culture, has become a marginal activity.

“I was drawing attention to the fact that this process has not ceased just because formal writing, in our culture, has become a marginal activity.”
But the question is, even if this process is ongoing, is it still of any relevance for the “evolutionary history of the Latin alphabet”, and its future (which is what this thread was asking about)? Or were you not referring to that at all?

@John
“What you’ve described is the development of Latin script typography, not the development of the Latin alphabet.”

I will concede that point, but I’ll add that Latin script typography is de facto the latin alphabet. It will be de jure when handwriting is demoted by law, a process that has already started in the use of typewritten prescriptions.

When schools stop teaching handwriting is when we know the battle is over.

@dez
deasciify. Not only did you invent a new word, “asciify” (which sounds dirty), you invented the reverse of that word. Kudos!

Nina,

I get what you are saying and agree with you. Hand scribed writing had a very profound affect on the development of the latin script just as the Lascaux cave paintings and Cuneiform tablets did but that part of history has passed and that influence has waned in favor of more recent influences having to do with modern technology and the greatly diminished amount of hand writing done today. We will always look back at historical benchmarks but the direct affect on future evolution has to be quite minor from now on of written script except for Arabic, Indic and Asian scripts.

ChrisL

Nina

Just an aside

Zapf did drawings well over 5 decades ago but the technology did not exist to bring his dream to fruition. Only 10 years ago did Lintype Zapfino hit the market and it is everywhere. So Technology AND calligraphy are alive and well in advertising, editorial, packaging etc. My point is calligraphy may not be on the leading edge but it is capable of more than some of the sterile work that is being pumped out now.

Michael

Nina and Dan. I’m a nominalist when it comes to writing systems: an alphabet is a set of signs, and the definition of that set and the forms that those signs take are all the signs and the ways they are made by people who use that alphabet, in whatever form. Indeed, such diversity is a precondition of evolution, which is why handwritten script evolves more easily and more steadily than typography: it is by its nature more diverse and more adaptable. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be pondering what the next evolution of typographic writing might be, and I’m not saying that this evolution will necessarily be influenced by handwritten forms (although I wouldn’t deny that possibility, because a lot of people designing type are also interested in writing). What I am saying is that there is an ongoing evolution that has been happening and is happening just outside of the consciousness of a lot of people who are interested in design and typography, and will continue to happen because this is one of the things that scribes do: they invent new ways of writing.

***

By the way, for the sake of clarity, we should say that the Latin alphabet isn’t going to evolve at all, because almost no one writes in Latin any more, and the two main conventions of writing Latin, classical and liturgical, are not evolving. That is what the Latin alphabet is: the set of signs used to write the Latin language. What we’re talking about in this thread is either something like the English alphabet or the Latin script, the former being a subset of the latter, which is a superset of all the signs, conventions and forms used to write all the languages, with their independent alphabets, that are derived from and have signs in common with the Latin alphabet.

I agree with Michael that the hand in motion will have a continuing impact on how type will look in the future.

This is for two reasons. First, new symbols will need to have some compatibility with existing scripts. For example the Euro was immediately adapted to faces with serifs. It’s design also related to older alphabetic characters.

The second is that people want to see humanity on the page, in letter design as well as the words themselves. We already have the kind of modular square alphabets like on a digital clock, made from two boxes with an X in them. They are clear, but people don’t want to read them.

Admittedly this is partly for reasons of the way the eye works, not the hand. But I’m not willing to concede that what the hand does and the eye likes are totally unrelated.

I’m a humanist. I want humanity in type. And the hand in motion can help give it.

There’s another thing here, and that’s a false idea of simplicity. The Bauhaus had the idea that simple geometric shapes are the simplist. But now with the ideas about fractals, we see that a very simple rule can result in very complex designs, with an underlying unity.

The best “simple” designs, like Futura and Frutiger, are in fact very complex and subtle.

I not saying that the hand will dictate future designs, but it won’t go away either.

@ Dan

“a process that has already started in the use of typewritten prescriptions.”

Proof that no writing is better than “killer” writing :>)

@ William

SOME designs!

Michael

Michael, I wasn’t saying the pen can’t do amazing things. What I was saying is its influence on “the evolution of the alphabet” is waning.

John: “this is one of the things that scribes do: they invent new ways of writing.”
They do, currently? And how does this influence the Latin script, generally? Because if you say there is an “ongoing evolution”, I’d say for it to qualify as an “evolution” it must be somewhat all-encompassing, i.e. actually transform common/general usage of the script, no?

William, I think you’re overgeneralizing and oversimplifying dramatically. Nobody wants to read books in digital clock faces, no. But not because they bear the Curse of the Missing Hand. But because they don’t read well.
It’s not as simple as chirographic == human == complex, and non-chirographic == simplistic == Bauhaus == functionalism == machines rule the Earth. :->

Nina:
“actually transform common/general usage of the script, no?”

Not necessarily. Experimentation by contemporary calligraphers/lettering artists do, in fact, influence new designs. P22 Peanut* was a total departure from the norm for me as a calligrapher/type designer. It opened my eyes up WIDE to the possibilities of the ruling pen as a type design tool... instead of a gestural tool. No, calligraphers are not changing the alphabet; but they do give different perspectives on the letterforms. Experimentation both in the U.S. and abroad is amazing. I just finished a piece of original work and it gave me insight into a “readable” ligature that I had never thought of and/or seen. It was a great “AHA” moment. I am definitely going to incorporate it into my forthcoming font.

Like I said, calligraphy is not the end all, but do not count it out as a force in the ongoing cycle of type design.

*Peanut may look simple, but if you study it you will notice it is abuzz with “tradition braking” and thought provoking ideas. May not be anybody’s cup of tea for an Annual Report but so be it. It’s niche, but different.

Michael

Nina, yes, scribes are currently inventing new ways of writing. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this is news to a lot of designers, because I guess it was news to me or, at least, something I hadn’t consciously considered until a couple of years ago. I first became conscious of it when looking at contemporary Arabic writing, but then realised, the same phenomenon can be observed within all scribal culture. It happens that the scribal culture in the west is now small and marginalised, but it still functions as a scribal culture, doing the things that scribal cultures do. One of these things is invention of new ways of writing.

Because if you say there is an “ongoing evolution”, I’d say for it to qualify as an “evolution” it must be somewhat all-encompassing, i.e. actually transform common/general usage of the script, no?

I think the phrase ‘ongoing evolution’ was poorly chosen. The key thing that happens in scribal cultures is ongoing invention and resulting diversity. In evolutionary terms, scribal cultures continuously produce a lot of mutations, whereas typographic cultures only sporadically produce mutations. But it is also part of the nature of scribal cultures that a mutation may have localised fitness, i.e. a new style of writing might be appropriate for very particular jobs that a scribe is doing, whereas the same style might fail utterly as a font because its uses are too localised and limited. But how useful and how true is this evolutionary model?

Dan’s original question is problematic because it mixes categories, switching from modes of creating letters (scribal) to styles of letters (humanist, modern, etc.) I don’t think it is describing an evolutionary process so much as changing fashions in letterforms. The development of ‘modern’, i.e. romantic, lettering is not an evolutionary change in the alphabet, it isn’t a mutation of humanist lettering. It is a new form based on new tools and new skills, invented by scribes and adapted by type makers.

So I’m going to conclude by suggesting that the Latin alphabet has never evolved, and that the development of writing systems is not an evolutionary process. It is, for want of a better phrase, a process of intelligent design.

Hey John

Marginalized may be a bit overzealous as a quantifying term. The number of active members in the Societies around the country far outstrips the number of type designers in this country. There are societies in LA, San Diego, San Francisco, New York, DC, Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Spokane, Santa FE, Raleigh, Winston Salem, Miami, Boston (just to name a few) and every po-dunk town and city and burb in between. Thousands and thousands of participants at all different levels... even the amateur level that James M. contends we are on Typophile. World wide... I would not even hazard a guess.

Nina, don’t equate the lack of interest of people to hand write a letter with a lack of interest in calligraphy and its potential impact on anything : )

Wholllllllle lot of creativity goin’ on!

Michael

>William, I think you’re overgeneralizing and oversimplifying dramatically.

Nina, you are misreading me. You wrote:

“If I had a hat, I’d bet it that the next step in the “evolution of the Latin alphabet” has sub zero to do with calligraphy. It’s simply not influential, important, or cogent enough anymore.”

“Sub-zero” and “not important” is your sweeping generalization. I am just objecting to it. My point is that people like to see the human touch, and that the hand, especially a trained one, with a sensitive brain behind it, can give that human touch. I never said that the future belongs to calligraphic fonts, but just that fonts with a touch of the hand will persist, and be one important strand and influence. And we see indications of that in sales right now.

It will become metric - reduced to 10 phonic characters and a multitude of emoticons.

Lots of people pronouce “a” as an short “o” sound so “a” will be eliminated. Long “a” can be an accented “e”.

“c”, “k”, & “q” willbe amalgamated,

“g” will become and accented “ckq” glyph, or, like a ’soft’ pronunciation of the “ckq” glyph.

“e” & “i” will be amalgameted.

“o” & “u” will be amagamated.

“h” and “j” will be dropped altogether.

“s” & “z” will be amagamated.

“b” & “d” will be amalgamated by PC crazed bleeding-heart do-gooders who want to make reading easier for dyslexics

“m”, “n” & sometimes “r” will be amalgamated because some of the time it’s hard to tell them apart anyhow.

“x” will be eliminate in favour of ckq s

“w” - it’s a double “u”. Get rid of it.

“v” it be eliminated in favour of an accented “f”

“y” - gone. For god’s sake, why is it still here?

Ummm.

I’ve lost count, but that’s about the gist of the future of the latin alphabet.

-=®=-

The Y can never be eliminated because it gives us the alphabetic fork in the road choice. The narrow path (the right diagonal), less travelled to great things, and the wide path (left diagonal) to... well, however you are going to spell hell in your world : )

Michael

P.s. The W should be a “u” with a superscript 2!

I was laughing so hard at you Russell I spilled beer on my keyboard and had to switch it out. Thanks for the grins.

Michael

Thanks, Russell, this was getting to be too grimacing a discussion :-)

ChrisL

Maybe I’m missing the irony/sarcasm/humor (whatever) in your post Chris but I think this has been very enlightening and made me think quite a bit. If any of my posts came across as cross or mean I did not intend them that way. Only you know who brings that out in me!

???

Michael

Micael, OK, “y” can be part of an emoticon of some sort, but I prefer to think you were laughing with me.

Sorry about that keyboard. :o) I’ve heard that with some care they can be washed in a dishwasher.

-=®=-

I WAS laughing with you Russell. But the beer still spilled. How will you spell beer in your new metric fashion? Hikup or Brp?

Michael

Who would have thunk it... washing your keyboard in a dishwasher. Why didn’t he just have it drycleaned :>)

Michael

Nina

“I wasn’t saying the pen can’t do amazing things. What I was saying is its influence on “the evolution of the alphabet” is waning.”

Of course it is.

We are only now at 578,931 variations of Helvetica. There is at least a quarter million more tedious minor variations left to go before the trend is over and we get back to beautiful, innovative and less sterile letter forms :>)

Michael

I agree that the human gesture of “the pen” is on the one hand, becoming less and less significant. I’m of a generation that saw a the change from 100% non-digital type to 100% digital type. My kids have little or limited knowledge of a non digital age, except as a historical era that happened before they became literate. Their connection with how letters were formed by hand is close to being an interesting historical factoid.

On the other hand, it has been becoming more and more significant, if less subtle at another end of a spectrum of type design. People want to say, yeah, I use a computer - My hand-writing has gone to the dogs, I may have no idea about a connection between typography and human gestures, but by gawd, I am a human being and not a machine and I’d like some type that looks man-made.

-=®=-

Michael, I wasn’t using the term ‘marginalised’ in terms of numbers of practitioners, but relative to e.g. the scribal culture of mediaeval Europe or the Ottoman empire, or of England in the 18th century. What I mean is that in our society, writing as either a profession or as an activity that is significant to our culture is marginalised. Much very fine work is being done by considerable numbers of very skilled and talented people: I completely agree with you about that. But for the most part this work is ignored in our society.

There are other societies in which, although the profession of scribe has been largely destroyed by technology, calligraphy remains culturally important as an art form. In our society, calligraphy is not a major culturally relevant art form.

Yes John I was speaking about numbers, and you are absolutely correct about the relevancy. It has always been ignored here in the US. I think the primary afficionados of calligraphy have been family members of calligraphers (who are dragged by the ear to shows) : ) My wife’s response to new work is almost Pavlovian... “Gee, that’s nice honey!” It is almost as if work is rendered banal because they can read it. I think this is one of the reasons so much “illegible” (abstract) work has caught on in the U.S.

Michael

@John
I think I might have caught your drift about mixing categories.

Perhaps I should have clarified that I meant the STYLISTIC evolution of the Latin Typographic Alphabet

Sorry, it wasn’t my intention to “flame and run” (in case anyone was wondering).

John, thanks for your interesting elaboration. I’m not sure about evolution on the level of the alphabet; when you say “the development of writing systems is not an evolutionary process”, how does, say, the “invention” of the Latin lowercase factor in that? That seems very much like an “evolutive” process to me, in terms of actual structural changes that were probably first spontaneously made for different reasons (like economy), but then caught on and slowly became a new standard of sorts. Frankly I originally thought this sort of process was what we were talking about, in which case it is interesting to think about if/how our new medial environment could bring about similar changes (and maybe the emoticon debate isn’t really very far off topic in that regard).

“We are only now at 578,931 variations of Helvetica. There is at least a quarter million more tedious minor variations left to go before the trend is over and we get back to beautiful, innovative and less sterile letter forms :>)”
Michael, funny how perceptions diverge. :-) To my eyes we’re caught in the middle of 578,931 variants of soft, humanist designs mostly looking like they’re from a certain North-West European country, and quite strongly tied to the movement of the hand.
On this level, I guess what I’m looking forward to mostly is more experimentation (that doesn’t have to result in “experimental” fonts though), more curiosity in how the new media can be used except for mimicking the old, and still be useful, and even still be beautiful – but maybe a new kind of beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong Nina. I agree with you. I think this is more about laziness than anything. People getting their feet wet by rehashing that which has preceded them. True of both Sans and Serif. But there again I do not enter into the fray of text faces. I “cut my teeth” on titling faces, and as a calligrapher that is where my heart lies.

John and some others are more eloquent than I, but I tend to follow my gut. So I am probably more a reactionary. Give me something with some tooth, and to be quite honest most of the “new” stuff is just blah! Like you said a “new kind!”

Michael
www.typerror.com

Nina, as I suggested, I think the evolutionary metaphor only works if one takes scribal invention of new forms to be something like genetic mutation. In that case, something like your analysis of the invention of lowercase looks kinda evolutionary, especially if one has some sense of the mutations that ‘didn’t make it’ (which most people do not). The metaphor is tenuous, though, because I’m not convinced that the deciding factor in which mutations/styles survive and which don’t is anything like a Darwinian ‘fitness’.

I wrote an article for Communication Arts a couple of years ago that discussed the way in which technological and media changes function as filters, limiting both the content and form of what gets reproduced in new media. I was prompted by research that Colette Sirat had done regarding the transition from scribal to print media, recorded in Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, noting that only some books that had been popular in the Middle Ages were reproduced in print editions. I realised that something similar happened with forms of writing, that typography ‘selected’ certain forms—to use another evolutionary metaphor—and ignored others (e.g. the Beneventan script). It is tempting to look at this kind of selection as something like fitness to environment or purpose, but I think this is fundamentally mistaken, because, as your own example suggests, the ‘mutations’ are themselves intentional developments, not occurring by chance but through human ingenuity and creativity, and their selection or non-selection at critical technological junctures is determined by things like fashion, locale, political influence and personal ambition. Unless one is the sort of person who believes an evolutionary model can be applied to explain everything from how we crawled out of the oceans to what I had for breakfast this morning, I think at best evolution provides a partially apt but potentially misleading metaphor for the development of writing systems and styles.

I don’t know if the tools used to create typefaces or the methods of reproduction will have much influence on type in the foreseeable future. With something like digital type, resolution on handheld devices is becoming much less coarse rapidly, and there’s been all the webfont proposals lately. If you look back at the early Emigre days compared to where we are now, it seems that technology is steering the type-ship less and less.

The evolution of the Latin alphabet is probably going to slow down, rather than speed up. I say this mainly because the Latin alphabet has spread across the planet over the last few hundred years, now representing languages from Indonesia to Africa. More importantly, in the last few decades we’ve become so interconnected, not just amongst Latin-character-using societies but in just about every last corner of the planet, that the trend seems like it has to be towards standardization, rather than diversity that grows out of regional isolation. We’ve seen this in the type world, with the proliferation of extended Latin fonts and families like Fedra, with its recent Devanagari addition. The need for type that works globally is at the heart of Ikea’s switch to Verdana, as John Berry pointed out on his blog — http://www.johndberry.com/blog/ . Of course, we still see a huge output of type that tries to push the boundaries of legibility, but this seems to be born more from the personal expression of designers than a need born out of the market.

FeeltheKern — I don’t know if the tools used to create typefaces or the methods of reproduction will have much influence on type in the foreseeable future. [...] it seems that technology is steering the type-ship less and less.

The term “technology” not only refers to tools but first of all to font formats and layout methods. Tools are designed around font formats which they are supposed to create. And font formats in turn embody what “type” is conceived to be.
And type designers design type within the boundaries of technology, for the simple reason that they design with help of given tools (which they have not made) for given font formats (which they have not defined). Tools in turn determine type designers’ conception of what “type” is ...
So of course technology does and will continue to steer the type-ship, if type-ship refers to type designers like you and me.
The real “limitation” is in what we conceive “type” to be.

The standardization which you are speaking about (“in just about every last corner of the planet”) actually means this: Technology, i.e. font formats and layout methods, which was created out of a Latin-script based understanding of “type” is now supposed to serve, with some add-ons, the rest of the world too — including scripts that are of quite different nature than the Latin script.
I am less happy about a vision of interconnectedness and standardization (vs “diversity that grows out of regional isolation”) when in fact what is standardized is very Latin-script centric and means to squeeze everything else into the Latin-script based conception of “type”.
Again, the real “limitation” is in what we conceive “type” to be. Since we grew up with the Latin script, we regard the Latin script as the model for “type”. This is our blind spot.

(Not sure what all this has to to with webfont proposals, Ikea or Verdana. You mention “type that tries to push the boundaries of legibility”. There are signs that this effectively means that — again — a Latin-script based conception of “legibility” is applied to other scripts too, though different scripts may require that “legibility” is defined by different sets of categories and thus is something different for different scripts.)

P.S. Now I notice some irony of writing this in context of a thread of the given title.

@k.l.: I think we might be talking about different things, or at least from a different angle, because I’m thinking more along the lines of the fundamental forms of letters, and if they’re going to change more rapidly or more slowly in the future, like how Phoenician characters are drawn differently than Latin characters or Greek characters. No doubt new advances in layout tables like Opentype have a major bearing on what’s possible in type design, but I don’t know how much influence that will have on the fundamental shapes of the Latin alphabet. These advances just take away limitations, such as type where the bitmap/pixel quality is extremely evident in older technology.

So (attempting) to avoid rambling, I’d say the winning forms for the Latin alphabet are the Italic and Roman construction. Writing/typefaces with a different underlying logic like blackletter are novelty or display type now, almost never used for extended reading. Forms like cursive, that I and most Americans learned in elementary school, are on their way out in education, replaced by simple Italics. And when you look at type across the world, from Japanese to Korean to Indic scripts to Latin, the trend in the latter half of the 20th century was towards low-contrast, unadorned letterforms — what you might call the “Helvetica-ization” of the world. I think a large part of this is not just the homogenization that globalization and efficient corporate communication (like the Ikea catalog, for example) brings, but the trend of the developing world to emulate the aesthetics of the western world. So I think in the next 25-50 years, we’ll see the Latin-character-using world change very little — the diversity of stylization will change, and probably expand even more, but the underlying architecture will stay the same. I think non-Latin scripts will try to fit into the Helvetica/clean-corporate mold more and more, possibly changing their fundamental construction in the process.

Also, type will probably become useless once we all have brain implants that allow us to communicate words, images, or any idea psychically.

I think non-Latin scripts will try to fit into the Helvetica/clean-corporate mold more and more, possibly changing their fundamental construction in the process.

This is the Latin-script centric point of view I was talking about in my previous comment, you exhibited it already in your previous comment.
I doubt that this “will try” is an adequate description of what non-Latin-script worlds (in plural) want. Right now I tend to think that this “will try” is wishful thinking of the Latin-script world.  ;-)
An example: Some parts of the Latin-script world try to “simplify” the Arabic script to squeeze it into a technology which originally was made for the Latin script and extended to cover scripts of different nature too. Other parts of the Latin-script world managed to digitally represent the Arabic-script-as-it-is, which efforts the former parts like to marginalize by calling them a “nostalgic hobby”. Yet what people in Arabic countries are ambitious to produce right now is, well, exactly said “nostalgic hobby” stuff that troubles Latin-script centric technology (and makes Latin-script type designers hope they can get away with less “complex” Arabic type). So “nostalgic hobby” but todays needs of todays people.

Also, type will probably become useless once we all have brain implants that allow us to communicate words, images, or any idea psychically.

Too speculative for my taste ...

“type will probably become useless once we all have brain implants that allow us to communicate words, images, or any idea psychically.”

As bug ridden as digital technology has always been plus the number of lawyers and litigation there is in the world plus the bean counters, overseers and oversight committees that exist, nobody is going to trust implanted memory with the on-goings of business, contracts, accounting and government. They will all safely back everything on to print.

ChrisL

As bug ridden as digital technology has always been plus [...] nobody is going to trust implanted memory [...]

Hm. I wouldn’t be surprised if you or I have chips implanted earlier than OpenType is fully supported.  :D

By the time OpenType is fully supported David Berlow and that kitty litter guy will be the best of friends and intellectual equals :-)

ChrisL

The digitaly implanted memory company will go belly-up one day, then where will we be?

We won’t know, because the the memory banks will have been seized by the bankruptcy courts, wiped clean and sold at auction. (At least - we hope they will be wiped clean before they are sold)

Chris: One out of two, maybe.

-=®=-

@k.l.: While I think most of us liberal-minded people in the west like to think of non-Latin scripts being forced into a Latin-script box as being kind of icky, my experience with designers from other countries, particularly those that don’t use Latin scripts, could be generalized into two groups: those we might consider to be more sophisticated, who see their culture’s design heritage disappearing and want to preserve it in modern design practice, and at the other extreme, those who fetishize the sleek and clean corporate look. My guess is that design culture is so new in places like the Arabic and Indic worlds that those who are buying and developing type now are probably the first type, the more “sophisticated” members of their design culture — not the guys outside Mumbai pumping out Flash banners, in other words. Using India as an example, I think as the middle class grows, we’ll see more Indic scripts that are Helvetica-ized, a sort of cargo cult approach to typefaces — using the style of wealth and power to manifest itself. Once that has become over-saturated, there will probably be a backlash. I’ve recently been reading David Brooks’ book “Bobos in Paradise” (which is almost 10 years old now), and he talks about how American high-class in the 50s was Greek pillars and lion-head armrests — they looked to the wealth of Europe as their symbols of sophistication. The modern day elite, though, look to European peasants as symbols of sophistication — stores like Anthropologie use ethnic motifs and heavy distressing to connect to something we sense as authentic. I imagine this same process will happen in developing countries.

“cargo cult approach to typefaces”

This is the best characterization by far :-)

Thomas Milo
DecoType
www.decotype.com

My own take on the future of Latin type is that (following the mysterious disappearance of Nick Cooke and his army of trademark lawyers) OpenType will be supplanted by Google’s new format, gType. As miscellaneous internet abbreviations and 1eet expressions are incorporated into everyday usage, designing good keming will become increasingly difficult, so gType will encourage the adoption of the new gAlphabet in which individual glyphs are presented the reader sequentially through our brain implants using bad flash animation so that they never need appear side by side.

Once this happens, there will be peace on earth and Fred Phelps will host gay-pride parades in downtown Riyadh.

LOL!!!

ChrisL

Hear hear! A new profit :-)

Thomas Milo
DecoType
www.decotype.com

I think it’s interesting that some in the Latin world are keen to keep to more simple, more geometric designs as somehow morally superior—a la Bauhaus—while some (outsiders?) see this same direction for other scripts as evil colonialism.

Me, I’m agnostic on this: try what you want, and see how well it works—to native readers. Personally, I prefer to have a touch of humanity in the type I read, whether it’s more or less simple.

>What will be the next step in the evolution of the Latin alphabet?

I believe, on the current course there will be one type designer by 2112 and all letters will be square, the same height and weight, have exactly the same spaces between any two letters, the only difference between letters will be the Unicode value, and one big detail per letter sticking out so that the one reader does not become confused by the one type designer. :-)

Cheers!

...that or IKEA will make bunches of obtuse diagrams for the world to use as communications. They will draw them on tomb walls in gradient colors. A thousand years later, the Egyptians will discover them and hire Berthold’s lawyers to file suit against IKEA.

ChrisL

Maybe the one reader and the one type deasigner will meet one day and decide to just have a chat...

-=®=-

>... the one type deasigner will meet one day and decide to just have a chat...

:-) perhaps, but I fear by then all readers will be dumb and all type designers will be deaf.

Cheers!