writing systems Archives

Rosemary Sassoon is a distinguished expert on handwriting, and a typographist celebrated for her font set ‘Sassoon Prima’, which helps young school pupils learn to read and write. Digital versions of her work are illustrated in Computers and Typography 2, her latest book. It’s a collection of essays on the role of digital type in graphic design and education. The emphasis in the first part is on page design. There’s advice on laying out web pages and a chapter on the typographical limitations of HTML.

The subject is then broadened out into multicultural aspects of typography. It looks at the way in which computerised type has affected other writing systems, and there are chapters on setting non-Latin languages and the differences between English (which has 26 letters) and Japanese (which has 10,000). The next section looks at how the introduction of computers has changed working practices, including the education of typography students. This is followed by a detailed account of the creation of a new font set for US telephone directories.

A chapter by Rosemary Sassoon on marketing her own digital typefaces will be of interest to professional designers. Of greater importance for most readers however is the excellent checklist of tips on making text readable on screen.

The next section deals with the making and shaping of letters, and the design of educational software completes the picture.

But for me, the most interesting contribution was the last, in which Roger Dickinson explores the interface between computers and learners – listing the devices and the technological strategies which can make learning more effective.

This is a good follow-up to Rosemary Sassoon’s first volume of Computers and Typography on topics related to digital type, and it will be of interest to web designers, information architects, and typographers – as well as ‘fotaholics’ .

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Rosemary Sassoon (ed), Computers and Typography 2, Bristol: Intellect, 2002, pp.158, ISBN: 1841500496

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deciphering the earliest written languages

The Story of Writing will be of interest to anybody interested in the graphical presentation of language. It’s very much a coffee table volume – profusely illustrated and printed on glossy art paper, though Andrew Robinson does spend much of his time wading in archaeological detail. He doesn’t claim to be a specialist, and one suspects from time to time that he is offering a digest of other people’s work for which he has an amateur enthusiasm.

In fact his title is somewhat misleading, because his book doesn’t really trace the development of writing. Instead, after making a few observations on pictographs, logograms, rebuses and various other forms of what he calls ‘proto-writing’, the centre of the book deals with four famous cases of decipherment. These are the historical struggles to decode Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, and Mayan Glyphs.

And very interesting the accounts are too – each one a case of scholarly sleuths working against the odds, and each one cracked surprisingly recently (though there are others which still elude interpretation). Some of his exposition is extremely technical, and rather at odds with the populist presentation in which each topic is delivered in double- page spreads. The book also ends rather arbitrarily with a discussion of Chinese and Japanese writing (“the most complicated writing in the world”) and the political dilemmas surrounding computerisation and the temptations of the Roman alphabet.

It’s the sort of publication which would probably be most used in a departmental or college library, but if somebody gave you a copy as a birthday present you wouldn’t exactly be disappointed.

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Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing, London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp.224, ISBN 0500281564

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deciphering the earliest written languages

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