Visual Literacy states that all that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement among a group of people that one thing will stand for another.
Type can be defined as what language looks like. It is the visualisation of language.
There are three historical definitions of type:
1. The art and technique of printing with movable type.
2. Composition of printed material from movable type.
3. Arrangement and appearance of printed matter.
These definitions now are seen to be extremely dated. The most modern definition of typography is that type is the craft of endowing human language in a visual form. A quote by Neil Postman describes type as "The written word endures... ...the spoken word disappears."
7000BC is when language became physically represented by people, an example of this is Egyptian hieroglyphics. Another example is the Ancient Hebrew alphabet demonstrating that type is speech made visible.
Mesopotamia was were it all started in 3200BC. The Occidental view point changed after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (196BC - 1799). This is the point at which language could be translated across different countries. There was finally an agreement across different cultures that one thing stood for another.
Type developed from hieroglyphics into the alphabet, the first true alphabet being Greek which was adapted from Phoenician. The greek alphabet was the last step before latin.
A letterform can be interpreted by anyone as long as it posses the basic shape. The production process makes changes to the way it looks. In 1450 the first type press was made on mass production. Joannes Gutenberg's work on the printing press began and type could then be classified.
In 1870 on the 17th of February, William Foster introduced Elementary education to the UK for children between the ages of 5 and 12. Everyone was to learn the ability to read so therefore production methods changed and mass production surfaced.
In 1919 - 1933 Walter Gropius introduced The Bauhaus. The Bauhaus is how we rebuilt after World War One. Industrial technologies were brought together for the first time for the Industrialisation of design. This is when typography was born.
"Since typography is a communication method that utilises a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that included sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics, and so much more...", Shelley Gruendler.
