On Letters

In the previous post, I discussed LetterPlayground, which gave people a place to express their creativity about letters - the symbols they are surrounded with.

And it got me thinking.

That's all that letters are; they are just symbols, used to create meaning. And that's how letters began in the first place. Letters became symbols because they represented sounds of particular objects. For instance, the letter T and its design originated from the word Tree. This occurred because people wanted to communicate the word Tree and needed a way to visualize it.

Photo from Flickr

Then the idea of letters became more solidified, and they became fairly concrete conceptions. At LetterPlayground, designers create visual representations of the letters. In this way, letters have come full circle - from pictures to symbols, and back to pictures again. But this time, the pictures are different. They are being created for fun rather than for the purposes of developing a way of communicating. To quote Alanis Morissette, isn't it ironic?