According to this news release, researchers have found an even older alphabetic writing in a tomb from Syria: The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations. “Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.” “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt sometime after 1900 BCE,” Schwartz said. “But our artifacts are older and from a different area on the map, suggesting the alphabet may have an entirely different origin story than we thought.”

Hello! If you're new here, I'd like you to comment below with • your name • your location • your favourite typeface • anything else you'd like to share

You're facing a terrible choice. The world is devoid of typefaces, fonts have been dissolved into faint memories. Those glorious font selection menus cut down to a binary. Written communication persists, though; even though the selection is slim, you have options: Times New Roman or Helvetica. For all time. Which font will you use in all applications, forever? Why?

Hello type enthusiasts. I started this Skool group as an extension of my Instagram and later my newsletter. None of these outlets have been particularly active, and I'm now in the process of rethinking Typographic North as a whole. As a part of this process, I would love to hear your ideas about what this Skool group could become. Here's a few ideas that have been brewing: • Offer introductory courses in book and publication design • Offer Indesign and Affinity Publisher tutorials • Have recurring informal calls for members. Coffee hours, virtual co-working sessions, hangouts. • Arrange a book club • Create and share templates of various sorts Do you have any wishes or ideas for this group? Let's hear them! Together, we can shape this community's future. – Kris

By Gerrit Noordzij. I’m about to read this small book and try to understand more deeply the relationship between culture, technology and the forms of the letters. Is anyone here familiar with this book and Noordzij’s ideas? Synopsis: “Published in Dutch in 1985, The stroke now appears for the first time in an English-language edition. The book puts forward a genuine theory of all writing, with any kind of implement: thus it covers both western and what we call ‘non-western’ writing. Noordzij starts from basic principles, and gives his attention first to the space around the letters: the white space that serves to define and distinguish what any letter is. He describes in minute detail how the strokes of writing can be formed. Here he uses simple geometrical concepts to underpin his descriptions. So the book is far from a work about art calligraphy and beautiful forms. Rather it is a sustained description of the phenomenon of letters and how they are made in writing. Noordzij’s theory serves to repair the split that grew up, with the invention of printing, between written and typographic letters. He shows us the underlying ‘written’ quality of all letters, with whatever technology they have been formed. With these ideas Noordzij can be seen as a prophet of digital typography, in which typefaces have been freed from the constraints of their embodiment in metal.”