Illuminated Manuscripts

Manuscript production was costly and time-consuming. Parchment or vellum took hours to prepare and a large book might require the skins of three hundred sheep. Black ink for lettering was prepared from fine soot or lampblack. Gum and water were mixed with sanguine or red chalk to produce a red ink for headings and paragraph marks. Colors were created from a variety of mineral, animal and vegetable matter. A vibrant, deep blue was made from lapis lazuli. It is a precious mineral mined only in Afghanistan that found its way to monasteries as far away as Ireland. Gold was either ground into a powder and mixed into a gold paint but it left a slightly grainy surface so the preferred application method was hammering the gold into a fine sheet of gold leaf and applying it over and adhesive ground.

The classical style

The layout approach features numerous small illustrations drawn with a crisp, simple technique and inserted throughout the text. Their frequency creates a cinematic graphic sequence somewhat like the contemporary comic book. The text is lettered in crisp rustic capitals with one wide column on each page. Illustrations, framed in bright bands of color are the sane width as the text column. There are six full-page illustrations and the illustrator neatly lettered the names of the major figures upon their pictures in the manner of present-day political cartoonists. The evolution of letter styles was based on a continuing search for simpler and faster letterform construction and writing ease. Uncials are rounded, freely drawn majuscule letters more suited to rapid writing than either square capitals or rustic capitals. The curves reduced the number of strokes required to make many letterforms, and the number of angular joints which have a tendency to clog up with ink. 

A step toward the development of minuscules was the semiuncial or half-uncial. The strokes were allowed to soar above and sink below the two principle lines, creating true ascenders and descenders. Half-uncials were easy to write and had increased legibility because the visual differentiation between letters was improved. 

Celtic book design

Celtic design is abstract and extremely complex. This means that geometric linear patterns weave, twist and fill a space with thick visual textures, and bright, pure colors are used in close juxtaposition. Highly abstract decorative patterns was applied to book design in the monastic scriptoria and a new concept and image of the book emerged. The manuscript developed because the densely packed design had the intricate patterning associated with oriental carpets. The interlace was a two-dimensional decoration formed by a number of ribbons or straps woven into a complex, usually symmetrical design. Large initials on the opening pages grew bigger in newer books as the decades passed. Diminuendo is a decreasing scale of graphic information. The large double initial is followed in decreasing size by a smaller initial, the last four letters of the first word, the next two words and the text. 

A radical design innovation in Celtic manuscripts was leaving a space between words to enable the reader to separate the string of letters into words more quickly. These half-uncials became the national letterform style in Ireland and are still used for special writings and as a type style. Written with a slightly angled pen, rounded characters have a strong bow, with ascenders bending to the right. A heavy triangle perches at the top of ascenders, and the horizontal stroke of the last letter of the word zips out into the space between words. 

Celtic book design

The Caroline graphic renewal

The ordinary writing script of the late antique period was selected, combined with Celtic innovations, including the use of four guidelines, ascenders, and descenders, and molded into an ordered uniform script. The Caroline minuscule is the forerunner of our contemporary lowercase alphabet. This became the standard throughout Europe for a time, writing in may areas veered toward regional characteristics. The two-dimensional style suddenly seemed passe in the face of this picture-window style. Where space moved back into the page from a decorative frame and clothes seemed to wrap the forms of living human figures. 

Caroline graphic renewal

Romanesque and Gothic manuscripts

Visual ideas traveled back and forth on the pilgrimage routes. The illusionistic revival of the Carolingian era yielded to a new emphasis on linear drawing and a willingness to distort figures to meld with the overall design of the page. The representation of deep space became even less important and figures were placed against backgrounds of gold leaf or textured patterns. Each of the hundred illustrated pages has an illustration above two columns of beautifully lettered text. Textura was quite functional for all the vertical strokes in a word were drawn first, then serifs and the other strokes needed to transform the group of verticals into a word were added. Letters and the spaces between them were condensed in an effort to save space on the precious parchment. The text area is surrounded by an intricate frame filled with decorative pattern capital initials and rich marginalia.

Romanesque and Gothic manuscripts

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

Inventions of Writing

Prehistoric visual communications

Black was made from charcoal and a range of warm tones, from light yellows through red-browns, were made from red and yellow iron oxides. This palette of pigments was mixed with fat as a medium. Images of animals were drawn and painted upon the walls of these former subterranean water channels occupied as a refuge by prehistoric men and women. The pigment is smeared onto the walls with a finger, or a brush was fabricated from bristles or reeds. It was the dawning of visual communications as these early pictures were made for survival and for utilitarian and ritualistic purposes.

Abstract geometric signs such as dots, squares and other configurations, are intermingled with the animals in many cave paintings. The animals painted in the caves are pictographs. These are elementary pictures or sketches that represent the things depicted.

Petroglyphs are carved or scratched signs or simple figures on rock. Many of them are pictographs and some may be ideographs, or ideographs, or symbols to represent ideas or concepts. In creating prehistoric drawings, a high level of observation and memory is evidenced. The early pictographs evolved in two ways, first they were the beginning of pictorial art, meaning that the objects and events of the world were recorded with increasing fidelity and exactitude as the centuries passed. Secondly, they formed the basis of writing. The images ultimately became symbols for spoken-language sounds.

The Paleolithic artist developed a tendency toward simplification and stylization. Figures became increasingly abbreviated and were expressed with a minimum number of lines. Some petroglyphs and pictographs had been reduced to the point of almost resembling letters.

Prehistoric visual communications

The earliest writing

Small clay tags were made that identified the contents with a pictograph and the amount with an elementary decimal numbering system based on ten human fingers.

The earliest written records are tablets that apparently list commodities by pictographic drawings of objects accompanied by numerals and personal names inscribed in orderly columns. An abundance of clay in Sumer made it the logical material for record keeping, and a reed stylus sharpened to a point was used to draw the fine, curved lines of the early pictographs. The clay mud table was held in the left hand and the pictographs were scratched in the surface with the wooden stylus. Beginning of the top right corner of the tablet, the lines were written in careful vertical columns.

Writing was structured on a grid of horizontal and vertical spatial divisions. Sometimes the scribe would smear the writing as his hand moved across the tablet.Around 2800 BC scribes turned the pictographs on their sides and began to write in horizontal rows, from left to right and top to bottom. This made writing easier and it made the pictographs less literal. 300 years later, writing speed was increased by replacing the sharp-pointed stylus with a triangular-tipped one. This stylus was pushed into the clay instead of being dragged through it.

When picture-symbols represented animate and inanimate objects, signs became ideographs and began to represent abstract ideas. The symbol for sun began to represent ideas such as day and light. Picture symbols began to represent the sounds of the objects depicted instead of the objects themselves.

Writing also fostered a sense of history as tablets chronicled with meticulous exactitude the events that occurred during the reign of each monarch. Writing enabled society to stabilize itself under the rule of law. Written in a precise style, harsh penalties were expressed with clarity and brevity.

Earliest Writing

Mesopotamian visual identification

The image carved into the round stone appeared on the tablet as a raised flat design and it was virtually impossible to duplicate or counterfeit. The Egyptians evolved a complex writing based on pictographs and the Phoenicians replaced the formidable complexity of cuneiform with simple phonetic signs.

Mesopotamian visual communication

Egyptian hieroglyphs

The Egyptians retained their picture-writing system, known as the hieroglyphics. The last people to use this language system were Egyptian temple priests.Hieroglyphics consisted of pictograms that depicted objects or beings. They were combined to designate actual ideas, phonograms denoting sounds and determinatives identifying categories. The Egyptian language contained so many homonyms determinatives were used after these words to ensure that the reader correctly interpreted them.

Ancient Egypt clearly represents the early stages of Western civilization as we know it today. The ancient Egyptians had an extraordinary sense of design and were sensitive to the decorative and textural qualities of their hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were carved into stone as raised images or incised relief and color was often applied. The design flexibility of hieroglyphics was greatly increased by the choice of writing direction. The lines could be written horizontally or vertically so the designer of an artifact or manuscript had four choices. These are left to right horizontally, left to right vertically, right to left horizontally and right to left vertically.

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Papyrus and writing

It is a paperlike substrate for manuscripts and was a major step forward in Egyptian visual communications.  The wooden palette used by the scribe was a trademark identifying the carrier as being able to read and write. With a gum solution as a binder, carbon was used to make black ink and ground red ocher to make red ink. The earliest hieratic script differed from the hieroglyphs only in that the use of a rush pen, instead of a pointed brush, produced more abstract characters with a terse, angular quality. Hieratic and demotic scripts supplemented rather than supplanted hieroglyphs which continued in use for religious and inscriptional purposes.

Papyrus and writing

The first illustrated manuscripts

A consistent design format evolved for the illustrated Egyptian papyri. One or two horizontal bands, usually colored, ran across the top and bottom of the manuscript. Vertical columns of writing separated by ruled lines were written from right to left. Images were inserted adjacent to the text they illustrated. They often stood on the lower horizontal band, the columns of text hanging down from the top horizontal band. A sheet was sometimes divided into rectangular zones to separate text and images. The integration of text and image was aesthetically pleasing for the dense texture of the brush-drawn hieroglyphs contrasted splendidly with the illustration's open spaces and flat planes of color. 

Egyptian papyri

Egyptian visual identification

They used cylinder seals and proprietary marks on such items as pottery very early in their history. The flat underside, engraved with a hieroglyphic inscription was used as a seal. Ancient Egyptian culture survived for over three thousand years. Hieroglyphs, papyri and illustrated manuscripts are its visual communications legacy. These innovations triggered the development of the alphabet and graphic communications in Phoenicia and the Greco-Roman world. 

Egyptian visual identification

Bibliography

Anon, (2017). [online] Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/user/Desktop/Interactive%20Media/Contextual%20Studies/Meggs-History-of-Graphic-Design.pdf [Accessed 24 Jan. 2017].

History of Alphabet

The history of Alphabet started in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets map single symbols to single phonemes but not each phoneme to a symbol. They emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but then the alphabetic principles had already been invested into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium, which were a representation of language developed by Semetic workers in Egypt. Other alphabets around the world nowadays either descended from this one discovery or were inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

Egyptian Alphabet

The Proto-Canaanite alphabet, known as the Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants. These were called abjad. This can be traced nearly all the alphabets ever used. Most of them were descended from the Phoenician version of the script. The Aramaic alphabet evolved from the Phoenician version of the script. The Aramaic alphabet evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC as the official script of the Persian Empire. It appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia.

Proto-Canaanite Alphabet

The Phaistos Disk

It is a curious archaeological find, likely going back to the late Minoan Bronze Age. The purpose, meaning and its original geographical place of manufacture making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. There is a small number of comparable symbols known from other Cretan inscriptions, known as Cretan hieroglyphs. There are a total of 241 tokens on the disc and 45 unique signs. These signs represent easily identifiable every-day things. The Phaistos Disk captured the imagination of amateur archaeologists. Almost everything has been proposed, including prayers, narrative or an adventure story, a call to arms, a board game and a geometric theorem.

Phaistos Disk

The Phoenician Alphabet continues with the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention called Phoenician from the mid 11th century. The Phoenician are descendants of the Bronze Age Canaanites who were presented by the Lebanon mountains by the sea and did not succumb to the Israelites or the 'sea people'. When they first appeared in western historiography, the Phoenicians already possess scores of colonies all around the Mediterranean and have extensive trade networks, extending as far as the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Black Sea, from which they challenged the Greeks and later the Romans for supremacy of the seas. Their artisans and artists were unparalleled, they were sponsoring together with King Solomon, ambitious naval undertakings. It was based on the principle that one sign represents one spoken sound.

Phoenician Alphabet

Besides Aramaic, the Phoenician Alphabet gave rise to the Greek and Berber alphabets. Separate letters for vowels would have actually blocked the legibility of Egyptian, Berber or Semitic, their absence was problematic for Greek, which had a very different morphological structure. All names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants and these consonants were what the letters represented. Some of them were unpronounceable by the Greeks thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. The Phoenician letter 'alep' became the Greek 'alpha'. This development only provided for six of the twelve Greek vowels. Greeks created digraphs and other modifications such as ei, ou and o (omega).

Aramaic Alphabet

The Greeks

Greek Alphabet is the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. History of the Greek starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. Consequently, the Greek alphabet can be considered to be the world's first true alphabet. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, "eta" stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagotitics, Cyrilic, Armenian, Gothic (Roman and Greek letters) and Georgian.

Greek Alphabet

The Romans

Hundreds of years later, the Romans used the Greek alphabet as the basis for the uppercase alphabet that we know today. They refined the art of handwriting, fashioning several distinctive styles of lettering which they used for different purposes. They ascribed a rigid, formal script for important manuscripts and official documents and a quicker, more informal style for letters and routine types of writing. Serif's originated with the carving of words into stone in ancient Italy. Roman stonemasons started adding little hooks to the tips of letters to prevent the chisel from slipping, which turned out to be the very aesthetic as well as legibility increasing addition to type that we use to this day.

Roman Alphabet

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