A to Z Critique Response

A lot of the posters were really impressive like the McDonalds spoof poster. The graphics looked really well done and the concept was also very ineresting.

For my posters, I tried to work with the symmetry of my initials GMG to find the image in the animals that represent the letters in the Egyptian heiroglyphic alphabet. In the owl poster, the owl is the heiroglyph for M and the owl's face reflects the symmery of the initials. I darkened the outline of the owl's eyes and made them more of a G shape to stand out from the face and I darkened the M shaped line that goes across the owl's face to make the M stand out. I also tried to make the shadowing and feathers on both sides of the face look more similar to each other to get more symmetry.

I don't think the snake poster turned out as well because the letter concept does not stand out as much. The waves of the water are supposed to represent the M which was sometimes represented in the heiroglyphic alphabet as a wavy line. I tried to emphasize this by making the waves more wavy and adding a wavy line between the snake heads. The snake represented a G in heiroglyphs, so I used the snake and the snake reflection to create symmetry on the poster. I wanted the shape of the snake head to look like a sideways G and I added a little G next to the reflection to emphasize it.

Letter Presentation Response

After the critique, I have decided to go with the symmetry idea and use GMG instead of E and I still want to do something with animals or nature. I like the idea of using the owl as a structure for the symmetry of my initials GMG, but I am still thinking about how to make it into a poster using the letters.

Letter Selection G M E

I chose the letters G and M because they are my initials and since my first and last names both start with G, I chose E because it is the last letter of my first name.

As I was researching, I looked up the history of alphabets and was particularly interested in the Egyptian heiroglyphic alphabet. The three letters I selected are all found as heiroglyphs, but since the Egyptian alphabet is phonetic the different sounds of the letters as we use them today are represented by different symbols. M was represented as an owl or a wavy line. Hard G was a pot stand and soft G was a swimming serpent. Short E was a vulture and long E was two reed leaves.

Some interesting stories about the letters:

G - The Phoenicians, and the other Semitic peoples of Syria, used a simple graphic form that looks like an upside down V. The symbol was named gimel, which was the Phoenician word for camel possibly because the upside down V looked like the hump of a camel.

E - The hieroglyph evolved into the Phoenician letter called “hé,” which roughly represented the sound of our H. The Greeks could not pronounce the first sound of the letter name so they dropped this part of the name and the Phoenician ‘hé’ became E.

Egyptian Heiroglyphics

http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/c2.htm

http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/Letterseries/LetterM.htm