“There’s something comforting in it: a harmony of meaning and vision.”
A is for Alphabet. B is for Body and laying Bare.
Letters are not pictures or representations, but they started out that way. Nearly all alphabet scripts used throughout the world today can be traced to the Semitic proto-alphabet, which in turn can be traced to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt that drew from the shapes of pictograms, of hieroglyphs, in order to represent the sounds of language.
A fish, an ox, a house, a door, a hand, a head, an eye – illustrations of the everyday first shaped script; human bodies and the objects relating to everyday human experience forming what would become an abstract set of symbols that we now know as the alphabet, and in turn, use to describe and give shape to human experience.
This picto-origin is so ancient that it’s now invisible in the Latin A-Z, but the relationship of letters to what they represent is still crucial to how the alphabet is taught and learnt. It’s no coincidence that children learn their ABC with charts and picture books that illustrate letters into something recognizable: an S doesn’t become an S without a snake to shape it first, only later does the S become the abstract building block that it is. Like the origins of letters themselves, abstraction comes after representation.
Figurative, illustrated type, quite simply, communicates a message faster and with ease because it links a signifier with what’s being signified. There’s something comforting in it: a harmony of meaning and vision that the picture books of childhood, which first became popular in the 16th Century, understand well.
Figurative letters lull beyond the nursery too though. The type adorning today's advertising campaigns and magazine spreads is effective because of the simple link of message and vision. Illustrated type can also subvert – revealing the things in language that are kept silent or aren’t represented.
C is for Communicate and Comprehend, and also for Capital, Commercial, Calculate. D is for Design and E is for Educate. F is for Familiar. G for Growth (in mind and profit).