“incunabula period”

Printing started with Gutenberg in Germany. A new life began with this big invention and lots of books were printed. This term was called ‘İncunabula Period’  by English book collectors in the 17th century to define the 1st printed books of the 15th century. In this way, typographers came into prominence and many typographers emerged in this period. Some good typographers also came up with this Gutenberg’s invention. I wondered about them and I found some of these early and good typographers. There are good information about them too:

 

Grid system

A grid system is an essential part of graphic design such as ordering graphical elements of text and images. As the time went by, the grid sytem was started to use in typography and commercial design too. It orginazes page layout of magazines, books etc. The aim of using this grid system is to create a solid visuality and structural balance for designs. There is also a book which was called Grid Systems in Graphic Design and presented firstly by Josef Müller-Brockmann about the core of this grid system. The book is below and I put some examples for grid system:

Are there any differences between ideograms and pictograms?

If we want to understand the differences between ideograms and pictograms, we have to define both terms clearly. Pictograms are pictures or images which are created from an object in a consistent way. On the other hand, ideograms are symbols which are crated from geometric shapes and they also represent ideas. However, people can use both of them to communicate each other. Especially, in the history, Egyptians, Sumerians, Aztecs, American Indians and even cavemen used pictograms and ideograms to communicate and preserve their knowledge. Moreover, Pictograms are more “picture like” forms, but ideograms are more abstract derived forms. For instance, you can tell the ‘sun’ with a pictogram, but you can tell the ‘heat’ only with a ideogram. Because of that,  understanding ideograms sometimes might be more diffucult than understanding pictograms.

There are some common points for both of them. İdeograms and pictograms do not represent words or sounds in a particular language. When people starts to use pictograms like a word in a language, they are defined like word-writing, or ‘logograms’. There should be some essential requirements that you can use these two terms too such as using similar forms and meanings for words and conventional relationship between symbols and interpretations.

Finally, decide them which one is ideogram and which one is pictogram 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(ideogram)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(pictogram)

(ideogram)

(pictogram)

Logographic Writing System

Firstly, I want to start with morpheme. What is morpheme? Morpheme is thesmallest unit in languages which has some meanings. In logographic writing system, there are lots of signs and they are representing morphemes. Thus, every logograms or symbols in logographic system usually represent an idea or sometimes might represent words or part of words. The most common example for logographic system language is Chinese. There are also some other languages which are or were used this system such as Khitan, Mixtec, Jurchen and Tangut.

For example at this picture, there are some symbols that each of them represent one word:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to read more information about this writing system here is the link which includes its advantages and disadvantages: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writchin.htm