Evidence » course: letters, signs and symbols

Seth,

Do you know the book entitled, "Letters signs and Symbols"? Supposedly a classic in graphic design... I can't remeber the author, but a famous type designer... made Univers, I think.

CT

I think this book is actually "Symbols, Signs and Letters" by Martin Andersch.

Charlotte's right, and the "handwriting" examples further down the blog are from that book.

By the way, Andersch didn't design Univers (Frutiger did), but he is the author of the Hamburg Thesis: "Typography is learned in handwriting." That is, you have to know how to make individual letterforms stroke by stroke, as a personal mark, before you understand how type design really works.

thanks for correcting me.

I find this to be exceedingly beautiful but i wonder if i knew what it said and this was writing i saw everyday if i would think it was so beautiful.

audrey has a good point. i think that if i knew what it said i would focus on it in a different light.

what does that say about how we read and decode images
speed, immediacy, etc.
is there a way to separate the signified

Of course, there's no particular reason for Arabic to be written in this particular way. Arabic writing lends itself to this kind of design, which might, if any of us actually read Arabic, turn out to be rather less legible than everyday writing.

Calligraphy is different than writing, but what is the difference? What different concerns does calligraphy have than plain writing, and why are they important?

The flip side of wolpa's question might be, why is the signified so tightly married to the signifier in Western-alphabet languages?