Ancient Writing Influence

Assignment: Write an essay about why it is important for you as a designer to know and understand the stages and development of written language from a variety of cultures and how it potentially affects your work.

As a designer it is important to be able to study and understand the writing systems of the past. These systems can only be formed by the repetition and consistence of shapes and symbols to represent their language. Pictographs are a form of writing, which includes simple drawings of objects and can depict simple meaning without using oral language. These are important to note that they cannot convey complex ideas such as religion or government but can be used to tell a story. These pictographs are beneficial to graphic designers because they show how simple shapes can convey a message and can be used as inspiration for minimalistic posters or to simplify a design without using type.

         The next stage of ancient writing to note is ideographs. These were able to show more abstract ideas and were a combination of two or more pictograph. This was the true beginning of written language and referred to an action rather than something one-dimensional. Sumerian cuneiform adapted language even further where they had characters to refer to each word as well as phonograms, which represented sounds and symbols. They even created rebus, which combined pictographs to create sounds such as combining the symbol for sea and sun to create the word season. This is very influential in the way that we view language today, as a combination of letters that evoke words we are familiar with. These letters remain constant however when combined in a different order creates a new meaning.

Ancient societies writing systems are extremely influential to those that we have today. In Ancient Egyptian culture, they used writing as a way to communicate information about government and religion and began using scripts to convey their writings. The most famous scripts that they had were hieroglyphics and often used depictions and pictographic icons to represent words. This is also seen in many other ancient societies. The Mayan writing system could be seen on their temples and statues but its meaning and spoken language had been erased when their people were forced to speak Spanish. Their writing system uses a combination of phonetic symbols and logographic. These glyphs often were depictions of people’s names or words and featured elaborate drawing, which are very well designed and executed. There were often multiple pictographs, which could represent the same thing. It is up to the individual artist or writer to alter and interpret how they choose to draw the symbol. The Mayan language has more than a thousand different types of glyphs to depict their phonetic and symbolic meanings. These are important elements of design. They are created with high amounts of detail and artistic freedom. These symbols help to influence design today in the way that they combine pictures and icons to convey a message, much like the challenges we are faced with in graphic design.