Going Mayan

Me trying out different inks with the sketches.

Will and I are in the same group for the Rosetta Project so he made a wonderful post about the process of creating our rosetta thing.  He pretty much summed up that whole process so I won't add much to what he said.  I instead wanted to blog a little about the process of coming up with the writing that we were going to use.

Because this project is pretty time consuming, our group mostly split up into smaller specialty groups to get it done and so that we wouldn't be spending way too much time to finish the project.  So I pretty much ended up as the Mayan language expert.  The mayan language can be pretty daunting.  Various dialects of Mayan are spoken today, but none quite like the ancient language.  Modern Mayan is also written in regular Roman lettering like English, so trying to crack the code of Mayan glyphs was a pretty daunting task.

MAYA GLYPHS: the de facto source of written aesthetisicm

Vada Creative Studio © 2011

I am currently working as an intern at the graphic design firm called, Vada Creative Studio (check out their Facebook blog too) where I was talking on Friday to the other graphic designers about typesetting and font design. There are so many different intricate details that going into making a font. A team of many people spend hours upon hours designing a single font. They pay attention to the minute details because they know how important aestheticism is crucial. As I have said before, most recently in my latest comment, that I have a sore spot for the visual appeal of things. The Mayan's knew, just like font creators, graphic desingers and the "not so visually or creatively gifted people" alike consciously or subconsciously know that the aesthetic nature of a writing system is important. It affects how the message you have is delivered and subsequently understood. For this reason I am excited to study the Mayan Language because it is one of the most visually appealing languages that the earth has ever seen.