Alphabet 26
The alphabet 26 is an alphabet design by the American graphic designer Bradbury Thompson (1911-1995). The design was first featured in Thompson's 1950 magazine Inspirations for Printers (No. 180), a proprietary advertising magazine of Westvaco (West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company).
Description of the alphabet 26
Thompson sees difficulties with newcomers to school who have failed to see logic in the different shapes of the same letter. In order to make writing and reading easier to learn, Thompson uses only one single character form in his Reformed alphabet for each of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (exception j, with descender). Westvaco argued that it would be too confusing for a letter to have two different forms of representation.
The 19 characters that different forms in capital letters (uppercase) and lowercase letters (lowercase) have (z. B. "A" and "a"), there is only one character form. With 4 characters (a, e, m, n) lower case letters are used in the same height as the upper case letters. 15 characters are represented by the capital letters. The seven letters, which in the Latin alphabet have the same character forms for the upper and lower case letters and are only differentiated by the height (C, O, S, V, W, X, Z), are retained; the capital letter is used for these characters.
The Baskerville font was used for the representation in the 1950s publication ; however, it has been suggested that any other font can replace Baskerville.
Previous experimental alphabets
In 1945 Thompson published at Westvaco on the principle that only a single letter should be used for each letter of the 26-character Latin alphabet, the monalphabet , for easier readability . Seven different experimental alphabets were gradually developed which Westvaco used in many of their projects.
Experiment 1: Use only lowercase letters (also for proper names); Example: the application of the monalphabet.
Experiment 2: Use only capital letters; Example: THE APPLICATION OF THE MONALPHABET.
Experiment 3: Conventional use of uppercase (at the beginning of sentences and proper names) and lowercase: The application of the monalphabet.
Experiment 4: Use only lowercase letters (also for proper names and at the beginning of a sentence), marking the beginning of the sentence with a preceding midpoint ; Example: • the application of the monalphabet.
Experiment 5: Use only lower case letters, mark the beginning of the sentence and proper names with an underscore under the first letter
Experiment 6: Use only lowercase letters; The beginning of the sentence and proper names are identified by the first letter in bold; Example: t he application of the m onalphabet.
Experiment 7: Use only lower case letters, the lower case letters at the beginning of sentences and proper names
literature
- Bradbury Thompson: The Art of Graphic Design . Yale University Press, New Haven 1988, ISBN 0300043015 .
- Bradbury Thompson, undated, undated
Web links
- Detailed presentation of the system
- Bradbury Thomson - biography
- Bradbury Thomson - Dates of his life
- Bradbury Thompson's West Vaco