My good friend and colleague Christina Wodtke has recently suggested:
“ There is no visual alphabet.”
Like any parent, I feel I must defend my child, or at the very least, assure that it gets a fair trial.
For I am a parent of the visual alphabet. One of them, anyway. So let me begin by introducing you to my baby, in case you haven’t seen it. The visual alphabet:
So why the heck should you care about a few simple squiggles? That’s a great question.
In her post, Alphabets and Ideographs, Christina wrote that she likes to imagine that the visual alphabet was drawn in a bar on a cocktail napkin. I’m glad that it seems that simple, because it was designed to be simple. But just because something is simple does not mean it was easy.
The visual alphabet was not created in a bar on a cocktail napkin. It was something I thought long and hard about, and it has a reason for being.
It first entered my imagination because I was frustrated that visual thinking had gotten short shrift in the education system. There was no standard curriculum for visual thinking in grade-school education. “Reading, writing and arithmetic” was the core curriculum, and still is, in most places. “Art” is an afterthought, not taken seriously by most teachers and…
