Field Journal

The history of design always starts from the old world, which are the earliest civilization in the world. Reading the book, we would know that the earliest graphic designs are a lot of pieces of writing or drawing inscribed on the stones. In the very beginning, people drew down what the have seen. The inscriptions then became the words and languages. I watched different kind of words of different earliest countries. They are so beautiful and amazing. People used the simplest lines to show others the things or even emotions we meant.

We have to connect the past with the current, right? Let’s compare both the past and the current.

Civilizations, including graphic designs, are evolving from the so-called “Cradle of Civilization”. As we know, the four earliest civilizations in the world are Egypt, Mesopotamia (Babylon), India and China. Within all of the “Cradles”, China is the only one that citizens there are still using the old graphic characters, including read, write and speak.

Yes, those are the words of Egypt. However, we all know that only anthropologists know what those graphic characters are meaning. Even the Egyptians nowadays don’t know what those graphic words mean currently. The case is the same of Babylon, only a handful of people are able to read or even speak the words of Egypt or Babylon in the whole world. Because no one uses those words for communication currently, the earliest graphic designs are not passing from generation to generation.

The words you see here is Hindi of Indian. The official language of the India is “Hindi”, but Hindi is not common in India at all. There are only about 40% of people speak in Hindi. English is the secondary official language in India. Sometime, when we appreciate a type of beautiful graphic characters, saying how beautiful it is, we would also say that the language is already dead. A language would not be officially dead, but we call it “dead” while no body in the world is using it.

Here come the Chinese characters. Hey! Can you believe that? We are still using those characters. Chinese are the only “Cradle of Civilization” who is able to read, write and speak the graphic characters in the whole world currently. Even a Chinese kid could read the above graphic characters. Being a Chinese boy, I was really excited while seeing our own characters shown in the foreign. This is my responsibility to pass these wonderful characters to my next generation.

Fine, I am proud of being Chinese. What else could I say?

Work Cited

Megg, Philip B., Purvis, Alston W., Meggs History of Graphic Design: Fifth Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print.