it always starts at the beginning.

On Radiolab, the joked once that "it always comes back to our days on the savannah." It really does. It seems like whenever you study something is goes back to those days, and especially when studying visual communication. It all started when we decided to form a spoken language. The spoken language led to a coding system that allowed us to write the language down and preserve it.

Meggs talks about limitations of speech being the fallibility human memory. Although written records aren't perfect, they are a much better way of preserving information and the earliest human attempts are date back to 200,000 years ago. The very famous Lascaux cave paintings are from 15,000-10,000 BC. These are thought to be visual communication rather than fine art with their presence thought to be "utilitarian or and ritualistic."

pictographs: elementary sketches to represent things
petroglyphs: carved of scratched simple pictures on rocks
ideographs: symbols to represent ideas or concepts

These pictographs are images that evolved into writing.

ziggurat: temple that dominated life in the Mesopotamian city-state

Uruk: city where the earliest written records were found - written on clay tablets.

Interesting development: we write left to right, top to bottom to avoid smearing the writing. This would have been a bigger deal with written on clay than even years later when we wrote with ink.

Another development that most likely influenced speed and even letterforms would have been moving from a sharp stylus to a triangular one. Pushing to clay rather than dragging through it. This increased speed of writing. This speed led to the evolution of pictographs to abstract signs of cuneiform.

cuneiform developed into rebus writing. picture symbols started to represent sounds which instead of the objects themselves. They became phonograms — graphic symbols for sounds.