A culmination of thoughts on the Alphabet project after the snow days...

I assure you that this isn't the first I've given this project any thought. I'd be in for it if this was. I've let the idea wash around in my mouth for a while and allowed it to grow before formally posting a blog entry... perhaps I'm just not used to the blog format enough to comfortably post thoughts as they occurred.


The idea was to concern the procession of an English-language letter back to Greek, Roman, even Phoenician or Semitic roots in history. Our alphabet is far from static, having evolved from pictorial symbol through a series of abstractions to produce the letter we have today with a relatively rich genealogy behind it. The idea, to be frank and subjective, is relatively interesting but rather finite and unapplicable. Sure, the letter "A" may have "evolved" from a previous form. That form may once have meant this or that and has become refined and restructured to symbolize the sound made at the beginnings of "apple," "avery" and "awning" combined. I guess one might be interested to know the history and the implications of its pictorial state, and one might be gently reminded of it whenever reading or writing letters. It's viable. But for a poster? Let's think more about this.

The proposed outlet for exploring this idea was to create three posters for three different letters of the alphabet, of our choice or based on the letters of out names. Now, for me, posters are very specific artistic outlets. A poster is made to hang on a wall, often temporarily; it might be framed, I suppose, if it was signed or particularly special, but in general a poster is a low and very disposable object typically not thought of as art. Art has a weighty connotation of self-sufficiency in idea, and posters, on the other hand, are typically not created for their own sake. They attempt to convey a persuasive message as they hang temporarily: the most common posters that come to my mind are...

--advertising posters. These give information and attempt to present subjects (being a music venue, a show, a product, even an idea like a public service announcement) in an appealing way.

--bedroom posters. These make more apparent something the owner likes or identifies with. These might feature rock bands, motivational images/text, souvenirs from places like Yellowstone or Oxford, movie posters, reproductions of art, humorous displays of text and image (like the Ten Commandments of College which mostly involve beer pong).

--classroom posters. These give information as reference; the wall is a convenient place to see them and use what's on them. (ie the periodic table, a diagram of a biological system or process, lists of literary devices, the color wheel)

Any poster I made for this project, I reasoned, would have to do something like one of these, and more specifically, be read as one.


At first, this combination of idea and outlet baffled me. Honestly, it even annoyed me. A poster, one that advertises or displays interest or information, does not seem like the first media of choice for exploring the subject matter. How utilitarian the poster is--- and how unexpected is the rather obscure idea of alphabet genealogy! It is easy to imagine placing the entire alphabet and the entirety of its 4 or 5 predecessors on a poster in a diagram form for a linguistics class, but that takes care of only one poster and is insufferably boring... and unfortunately, we must focus only on one letter per poster, and I feel that an informative poster of any one letter would be rather trite if not surrounded by its 25 brothers. I suppose personalizing posters with someone's first initial could make it a poster of interest that one might hang in their room, but realistically, the market for nerdy, female linguistics students seems too small to make a poster and expect it to be convincing. And the idea of making an advertisement poster out of any of these letters is, well, absurd.

I knew I'd have to twist this idea and the make clever use of the poster medium to make this project convincing.


My first idea for my first letter, "T," is based on the persuasive/informational posters seen specifically in the Green Bean cafe in Goodpaster Hall. Sponsored by Equal Exchange, the coffee stand uses posters to nudge customers toward more environmentally- and socially-conscious choices in their coffee consumption. Going in the same vein of informertisement (to use my own linguistic liberties), I might make a poster advising users of the English language to be more conscious of what's in their letters and what the current-day results experienced before reaching the state in which we experience them. I could illustrate it with a tea bag in a mug of water, the leaves disseminating into a brew with mature flavors (in the form of "mature" symbols floating to the top).

Do you know what's in your "T"?

har, har, har.