Developing a System for Pictographic Language

Alternately, Typography

Assignment

• Develop your own system of hieroglyphics/pictographs

• If you had to represent words with pictures instead of letters (which is actually what letters are), what words do you think would be important to include in your system?

Assignment

• What rules could you develop to make your system more efficient?– Egyptians established a canon that made their

hieroglyphics very efficient• Men and women were painted in different colors to

distinguish between the two genders without having to have a different image for each• Size often portrayed importance or social status (larger

people were more important than the smaller people within the same panel)

Assignment

• How will your images be read? From left to right? Right to left? Up then down? Down, then up? Diagonally? Include this information in your work

• When designing your system of pictographs, draw the symbols in detail, and include what they symbolize. Also include the simplified versions of each image that would be used in vast amounts of writing– In most pictographic languages, there were very detailed

versions of each symbol that served as the foundation of the language, but less detailed symbols were used in expansive writing found in texts or on monuments

Chinese Characters

Cuneiform

Rosetta Stone

Hieroglyphics

Demotic (Egyptian Script)

Greek

Hieroglyphics

Assignment

• As an alternative assignment, you can also take a more typographical approach

• Since letters are technically symbols for sounds that we make to form words, you can also design your own version of our alphabet using symbols– Each letter must be very detailed and should make

sense thematically throughout your alphabet

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