Materialities of Writing: Response to Question 4

In my free time, I enjoy photography, film, and graphic design—especially when it concerns typography. I’ve always been fascinated with typography in fine printed work.

I think this interest could be translated into handwriting and penmanship when it concerns the materiality of writing. An investigation of early written language, its impact on modern languages, and the morphology of their form in pertinence to penmanship and handwriting would be exciting to explore. Perhaps an analysis of early symbols, numbers, and pictographs and their impact on contemporary written languages and visual communication in signage could be viable.

I recently returned from a trip to Germany, and the signs on the Autobahn were particularly interesting because they were designed to be language-independent. I would be interested in examining the similarities between these signs and early pictographs. I hypothesize that their respective visual grammars would be similar, despite the fact that early illustration and visual communication was done in the absence of standard written language, and the modern signs on the Autobahn were designed in order to transcend a multitude of languages.