After Class 2/11

1. Name of graphic style (or topic) studied this session:
We briefly talked about the Asian influence of language and typography.

2. Describe specific qualities of this style (or if it’s a topic-highlights of that topic) that will help you identify it in the future.
Chinese started out with bone-and-shell script, reading the cracks in bones formed from a hot poker. It then moved to writing on bronze, often in vessels like pots, etc. Regular style calligraphy then came into use and has been ever since; the strokes of the calligrapher can represent spiritual and emotional states of the writers.

3. What is the most useful or meaningful thing you learned today?
I thought it was very interesting that the calligraphic strokes can represent emotional and spiritual feelings of a writer; in simplistic designs, I think it would be very useful to keep this in mind as it would perhaps give a deeper subconscious feeling to pieces of design I work on.

I also learned not to try to learn Chinese—over 40,000 letterforms…yikes.

4. Question:
What made diviners shift from only disentangling prophecies out of cracks in bone to turning those cracks into their own forms of thought in written form?