Design of an Activity Image/Writing System
The traditional evolution of writing systems have been from pictographs, to phonetic rebus depictions of those pictographs, to abstracted reductions of the forms while retaining the phonetic attributes, then final alphabet letters. The end result is a letterform that has the sound of the original pictograph's subject, but is no longer representationally recognizable. The letters then become arbitrary and their sounds and meanings need to be learned.
A visual writing system can however be comprised of almost any collection of images and/or graphic marks, as long as there is agreement of meaning by a particular group of people. The marks most often start our recognizable, then become abstract, and may be graphic, photographic, and/or illustrative.
Your first class project is the design of a visual writing system for a cultural activity of your choosing. The final characters should be simple and formally consistent, but may be comprised of and/or have their roots as pictographs, entoptics, letters, and/or abstracted signs.
Begin by choosing a particular cultural activity that you are interested in and very familiar with. Create an extensive visual research board of images–signs, graphics and photographs–related to all aspects of the activity, such as participants, equipment, tools, physical context, actions, expression and communication, etc. You might want to use the Adobe App SPARK to create your board.
Using the research, commence the project by sketching out at least 60 rough simple thumbnail pictographs, signs and/or visual marks that relate to any object, or action, or place where your activity occurs. For example, if you choose soccer as your activity, one image could be a pictograph of a soccer ball, another of a foot kicking, a hand and arm blocking, a goal net, a scoreboard number, even a word associated with the activity.
Narrow the image possibilities down to the 30 most communicative images then refine their final designs, making them simple, mildly abstract and visually consistent with one another.
The images are all due posted on your blog Tuesday, Sept 10th at the beginning of class.
REVISED PROJECT SCHEDULE
The next step is to refine your 30 images and convert them into digital glyphs.
The digital glyphs are due posted on your blog Thursday, Sept 12th.
The third step in this Image/Writing System project is to visually express a coherent message with your digital glyphs.
You may need to integrate your glyphs into a couple of words, or parts of words to help your message make sense. Also, you may discover that you will need to add some more images related to the function and/or benefit of your activity in order to communicate as well. You can do this with additional glyphs and or the incorporation of some photography.
Most likely, you will realize that how you order, size, and compose your glyphs will have the biggest impact on how they communicate. Remember, that we create written and verbal meaning through syntax—the ordering of words and images, as well as their relationships to one another (OGD, DOG, GOD).
Do your best to try and make a visually coherent message.
It will require some creativity, innovation and effort. At this stage, this project is more an exploration and a journey than a the creation of a final design. Do not try to preconceive how you might be able to express your message… let it visually reveal itself through investigation and experimentation.
Your FINAL activity related visual message is due posted on your blog Tuesday, Sept 24th.
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Here are some examples of student work for a similar, but different, visual writing system project.
They are for reference purposes only and not indicative of your final design project. Your writing characters will morph and evolve into to an alphabet and typeface, which we will then use to create an eventual identity and branding system for the activity .
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