Josh Leach's Research Journal: Designing a Font Project: Phoenician Alphabet

I'm pushing forward with my first project: designing a Phoenician font. Why Phoenician? For me, Phoenician is one of the last links between the graphic/symbolic embodiment of a letter/character and it's meaning, as found in Heiroglyphics, and the innocuous, meaningless symbols found in modern alphabets. As a graphic designer, I feel a responsibility to design something with meaning, beyond just simply stylizing the pre-existing. I want to utilize calligraphy, or beautiful writing, to craft the characters/symbols into a more pictographically representative state.

Here are some links to some standardized Phoenician Alphabet samples:

Here are some links to some original Phoenician Text samples:

My challenge for this project is two-fold: I must create a beautifully crafted font, yes, but I also need to find a meaningful way to utilize this font. I need to find a way in which to use this font in an expressive text of some sort or in some meaningful way that captures the beauty of their crafting. I have a feeling that the way in which I will accomplish this will present itself during the creation of the font, but am in no way depending on some sort of "enlightenment" during the process to solely guide my decisions.

Here are some links to text and discussion on the Phoenician Alphabet:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/phoenician.htm

http://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

http://www.ancientscripts.com/phoenician.html

Here are a few of my crafting resource texts: